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Early delays at a large concert (only 600,000 people)
John Roberts {JR}:
I was designing analog delay based studio effects back in the late 70s and early digital was not cheap and not that good, but quickly evolved to eclipse analog delays.
In the bad old days memory was the expensive part but digital word length was not very good, especially by modern standards. The 1 bit digital delta modulation was an exception where the sound quality could be quite good for short delays (high clock/sample) rates. Longer delays involving lower clock rates introduced users to a new (horrible) kind of digital distortion.
Lucky most of us have managed to forget about those old days.
JR
Ivan Beaver:
--- Quote from: Art Welter on February 20, 2020, 02:20:45 PM ---"The 1745s weren’t cheap, with a list price of over $5,000 (1973 dollars; approximately $26,000 today). Back then a fifth of a second of audio delay costs as much as a new car!"
I remember drooling over the Eventide Clockworks delays in the mid 1970s, but could not afford them.
Used a Revox A77 tape recorder as a delay, great sound, but got tired of lugging a 50 pound case with only two echo speeds, and rewinding tape every half hour.
Then around 1976, MXR came out with a rack mount digital delay that cost only a fraction of what the Eventide DDLs were going for, the MXR was around $1200 if I remember correctly. However, they also only had a fraction of the frequency response of the Eventide, only 2.5kHz at 100ms unless you loaded extra memory cards, each which cost about half as much as the unit!
I still remember the UFO band house mixer complaining "I can't hear the bloody digitals" when he went to longer delay settings, 10kHz, 5kHz, 2.5Khz...
For 20kHz bandwidth to 160ms (1240ms at 2.5kHz..) required three additional cards, near the Eventide cost, but on the "installment plan" ;^)
Art
--- End quote ---
I remember working on one of those MXRs in the mid 90s. Yeah, they didn't sound good (it was a power supply problem) and I wondered why people even bought them.
I don't remember the brand of my first digital delay. I used it to delay my mains to my Servodrive dubs. The adjustments were in 5ms increments and it was quite noisy. You had to hit it hard to keep the noise to a "kinda minimum".
Oh how the times have changed.
Art Welter:
--- Quote from: Ivan Beaver on February 20, 2020, 02:54:07 PM ---I remember working on one of those MXRs in the mid 90s. Yeah, they didn't sound good (it was a power supply problem) and I wondered why people even bought them.
--- End quote ---
Because David Gilmore, Frank Zappa and Jean Luc Ponty used them, and people were tired of replacing tapes and cleaning heads...
Keith Broughton:
--- Quote from: Ivan Beaver on February 20, 2020, 02:54:07 PM ---I remember working on one of those MXRs in the mid 90s. Yeah, they didn't sound good (it was a power supply problem) and I wondered why people even bought them.
I don't remember the brand of my first digital delay. I used it to delay my mains to my Servodrive dubs. The adjustments were in 5ms increments and it was quite noisy. You had to hit it hard to keep the noise to a "kinda minimum".
Oh how the times have changed.
--- End quote ---
My first delay was a Dynacord tape machine.(ouch)
The first digital was a DeltaLab DL4
Steve-White:
My first one was a DeltaLab ADM 1024 Effectron. Never had the money for a Eventide or Lexicon.
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