Does the Echo Verb have the convenience and vintage sound to pull the plug on the plug-ins? Huw Price listens closely.

The Americans had their Echoplexes, the Germans had their Klempts and the Brits had their WEM Copycats. These old tape echo units were noisy, the pitch was unstable and their unbalanced Hi-Z inputs and outputs were really designed for use with guitars and amplifi ers. But despite all these technical shortcomings, they made such a distinctive sound that many are still prepared to tolerate the hassles involved with using them in the studio.

So it’s interesting that Unity Audio, in conjunction with Blue Coconut, has introduced a brand-new tape echo machine for the 21st century – the Echo Verb. The company commissioned Terry MacDonald, a former WEM consultant, to design the Echo Verb from the ground up. Blue Coconut’s aim was ‘to eliminate all the problems associated with early tape echo machines, improving the performance, while retaining the unique analogue tape echo sound which has never been achieved through digital devices’.

The Echo Verb’s electronics have been tweaked to achieve low noise levels and you can select any combination of six playback heads. Particular attention has been given to eliminating wow and fl utter, the pitch modulations commonly associated with tape machines. This has involved redesigning the tape transport mechanism and the fl ywheel.

Head count

Tape echoes typically have three or four replay heads and one record head. The record head prints the signal onto the tape and you select one or more heads to replay it. The delay time is determined by the speed of the tape and the physical distance between the record head and the playback heads. The Echo Verb has six playback heads plus a speed control, making delay times up to 746ms possible. Additionally, when heads are de-selected they are also muted to minimise noise.

The front panel has a jack input for instruments along with a separate jack insert and return for guitar pedals and an echo on/off jack footswitch. On the rear of the unit, line-level transformerbalanced XLRs are provided for professional studio applications. The front panel controls include input gain, echo level, variable speed, sustain and output levels, along with tone/EQ and echo bypass.

Wow and flatter

If you set things up correctly and carefully, the noise fl oor is extremely low and there’s no ‘bump’ as the splice joint of the tape passes over the selected heads. The trick is to use the front panel VU meter and your ears to set the highest possible input level. The display fl ashes red to indicate overload and the Hi/Lo input level switch accommodates a wide range of signals, from line-level to instrument-level.

Sending a signal through the unit with Echo Level turned right down, we couldn’t hear any difference whether the Echo Verb was bypassed or not – so it doesn’t corrupt the source sound, unlike most tape echoes we have used before.

We’ve enjoyed the convenience of digital delays for well over 20 years, but in the days before programmable delay times and echo/tempo charts, engineers would routinely dial in a tape-based echo device by ear. It was never an exact science but it’s actually very easy to accomplish and the slightly too fast or slow results often give the groove a better feel because we rely on our musical ears rather than our calculators.

We sent the Logic metronome into the Echo Verb, selected the last replay head (No6) turned Sustain up about half way then adjusted Speed to get a quarter beat. You can hear when it’s as near as damn it because the dry signal and the echoes start flanging.

Remarkably, all the other heads sounded more or less in-the-pocket too, so once Speed is set, you can use the heads individually or in combination to achieve the desired effect. This is best done while listening to what the Echo Verb is doing in the context of the mix.

The Tone switch is crucial to the way the Echo Verb works. It’s a preset treble rolloff that, to put it crudely, toggles between ‘modern’ and ‘vintage’ modes. Without the treble rolloff, the Echo Verb produces an impressively clear and clean delay signal, although it’s not exactly hi-fi. Like all good tape echo units, the Echo Verb starts to feed back if you turn up Sustain (the repeat control) high enough. Of course, plug-in tape echo simulators do the same, but real tape echo units are much more ‘playable’ and responsive.

Treble cut darkens the tone of the echoes quite a bit, but that enables you to turn up Sustain higher before the feedback kicks in. What’s more, the sonic difference between the echoes and the dry signal enable you to make the effect louder without interfering with the dry signal.

Room for all

Although it’s primarily an echo device, as its name suggests, the Echo Verb can also be used for reverb. After all, reverb is simply multiple echoes that are so close together that they sound continuous. To switch to reverb mode, press and hold button No1 for three seconds. Five reverb presets can then be selected using the other numbered buttons. It’s not a long lush reverb, but it is interesting in a short, lo-fi and tinny sort of way. We found it particularly wellsuited to electric guitar.

Although it’s capable of surprisingly clean tones, the Echo Verb can be pushed into a very pleasing overdrive. When you use the jack input and output, the input level control does not affect the dry signal, so you can crank it up until the red light flashes and distort the echo side while controlling it with Echo Level and keeping the dry signal pure. For guitarists, the downside might be the Echo Verb’s inability to push the front end of their amps into distortion– common practice with Space Echos, Copycats and the like.

Old meets new

Anybody might reasonably consider £1,880 a lot of money to pay for a tape echo. If you intend to use a tape echo only occasionally to add something special or different to a mix, then this probably isn’t the product for you. Rather, it’s a niche product for those who appreciate and understand both the sonic charms and the limitations of tape echoes, and would like to have one as an integral part of their studio setup.

Blue Coconut has certainly overcome many of the technical shortcomings of traditional tape echo machines, while the clever controls ensure that the distortion and restricted bandwidth that so many of us love are still there should you need them. The result is that the Echo Verb is a convenient and superbly spec’ed tape echo for the modern recording and mixing environment.

SUMMARY

WHY BUY

Low noise
Silent switching
Phase Invert switch
Easily controlled gain structure
Flexible connectivity
Easy to use
Gorgeous 3D sound

WALK ON BY

Slight mechanical noise
No clean boost for guitarists

VERDICT

A successful adaptation of the traditional tape echo for modern studio use, with a pro price tag to match.