A Detailed History Of Echo (And Echoboy) - SoundToys echoboy User Manual

THE BASICS - A DETAILED HISTORY OF ECHO (AND ECHOBOY)
Delay and echo comprise the oldest and most commonly used effects in
the history of recorded audio. Think about that classic double tracked
effect on Elvis' voice, the slap echo in '60s surf music, those cheesy
'50s sci-fi movie sound tracks, Pink Floyd, The Beatles etc. They all used
delay and echo extensively, as has most of the music recorded in the
last 30 or 40 years. Delay and Echo remain essential to today's modern
music maker.
In the early days, all delay effects were based on some type of tape
delay. Studios would often have a number of top quality tape machines
attached to variable speed controls to be used as a delay device.
The signal was fed to the input of the machine and the output of the
tape was monitored off the playback head. The space between the
record head and the playback head along with the speed of the tape
determined the delay time.
The way it worked was like this: slow the tape down and the time it
took for the signal to get on to the tape and then be picked up by the
playback head increased and thus the delay time increased. Speed the
tape up and the opposite happened, the delay time got shorter. This
provided early engineers with the ability to create variable length, short
"slap back" delays. If you took the output of the playback head and fed
it back into the input of the tape machine via a mixer you were able to
create repeating delays and echoes. The speed of the tape machine
determined the delay time and the amount of the tape output fed back
into the input determined the number of repeats in the echo.
Now, when you shove a lot of signal onto analog tape the signal has
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a tendency to saturate and impart a very natural compression that is
fat, warm and crunchy. In addition to the compression, tape also adds
a very characteristic type of distortion that is pleasing to the ear. This
is especially true in the upper frequencies and bottom end. It's kind of
like the concept behind the "loudness" button you find on cheap stereos
that hypes the high and low end, except with tape it actually does sound
full, rich, punchy, crunchy, fat, and all around amazing.
With tape being a fully analog and non-linear medium, the sound of the
echo would change quite drastically depending on how hard you "hit"
the tape, how fast or slow the tape was moving, any EQ in the audio
path etc. In addition, the sound of the individual repeats would also
change drastically each time they were fed back from the playback
head with increasing amount of distortion, noise, wobble from the tape
machine and loss of high end. They weren't "accurate" to the original
sound, but they sure sounded GOOD! In fact one of the things engineers
still drool over is the sound of a high quality tape machine being hit hard
with gobs of signal and used as a delay. This is especially true for vocals
with that classic "vocal slap" being one of the most common tricks of
the trade.
As technology progressed self contained tape echo machines like the
original tube Echoplex (followed by the transistor Echoplex) appeared
along with other tape echo devices like the WEM Copycat, Roland RE-201
Space Echo and the like. There were also "platter" devices such as the
Binson Echorec that recorded signal to a magnetic spinning disc that
had a variable playback speed and head. All of these tape-based units
provided a warm, fully analog sound in a relatively compact unit with
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