Before the Echoplex

I've not heard of either Echoplex or have a name for whatever machine you are looking for. Certainly a name for it would help locate it.

It sounds intriguing as I read some years ago that computing power would hit a ceiling using solids, and that replication of blood brain operated hardware systems would facilitate the next big leap.

I shot some cheap industrial video for a company called ARTS many years ago. One box they made was really cool, for it was intended to give the musicians in a live band the ability to standardize their sound for their preferred room.

In otherwords small wooden room, or auditorium, or coliseum, could be selected and and all pushed through this box would sound as if it was live in whatever room the work was done. If I had a touring band playing in many different rooms I sure would have wanted to use this sort of device so my shows were of some reliability.

ARTS existed in Rochester New York, in the 80s and I haven't thought about them in years.

If I was to from remote, or in person do detective work on this particular machine, I'd look in either NYC, or LA. NYC is more of a commercial making town, whereas LA makes across the entire spectrum, and if anybody ever used these machines it would have been recordist doing high level work.

You might even call a Sound Department IATSE recordist in LA. I think the local there is 47, but it could be another number. 52 is NYC IATSE movie and tv, and 1 is for stage.

Working backward without names I would have to work backwards looking for people who would have had cause to work with this machine.

Some machines are truly rare. There may well be millions and millions of some machines, like a telephone, but then there are machines that are 1, or 5, and maybe a thousand.

At any rate if you don't know the name of the machine, or who made it, suggest you reach out to those who might have used it. To narrow that down determine what year anyone might have used this machine, then call the president or BA of the Union for the IATSE Local and ask who might give you the time of day.

P.S. I have a Pioneer Reverb SR-303 that I used with my Realistic Equalizer Frequency controller that I would push through the Realistic 4 track board into a Teac, using a NAD and JBLs, Silver Series Headphones from Radio Shack to make Ear movies. Of modern recording machines I think very highly of the Mini Disc for professional work. I'll be interested in the discovery of what this machine is, and what it produced.

in the early 70's i owned a Garnet Tape Echo made in winnipeg, canada by Garnet. this had 13 heads over which passed a single loop of tape - no fluids here. the pink floyd record - umma gumma - has sounds on it that i'm sure came from that machine. i sold mine about 1975 and really wish i still had one today.

You may be thinking of the Binson Echorec which used a drum although I don't know about the fluid. Tape based machines were more widely used such as the Echoplex and similar Copycat and Roland Space Echo. I believe the Copycat has been reissued recently.

I was glad to see the back of them. I spent a lot of time messing about with tape loops in my youth.

Funnily enough I was improvising a multi-tap delay based reverb last week. I was installing a second hand DSP system controller in a church the other day which did not have a reverb device in its library. As I had some spare DSP cycles and a spare input and output, I improvised a passable vocal reverb from some multi-tap delay lines.

Remember the MELLOTRON, made famous by the Moody Blues, who in my opinion could have renamed it the "Monotonousotron".

In the 70's Fender made an oil can device called the Dimension IV Sound Expander used as an echo effect for guitar. Not to be outdone, Gibson produced the GA-4RE Reverb-Echo device using a similar revolving oil can.

I have one of each and they work (the Fender has lost something; it's output is low) in their own cheesy fashon. Technology put these, along with the tape echo devices (I also have a Dynacord Echocord Mini Tape-Echo) out to pasture to a point where they are today mostly interesting collection fodder.

Thanks for all the replies!

The device did indeed have a "can" (like a small paint can) that housed the works. and might have been a Fender or Gibson product.

I know that it was old, rare and coveted by my guitarist friend, who claimed it had a unique sound.

He had an extra can of "memory oil" which restored the level loss (maybe the device lacked bias?).

As for tape loops, I found a reel to reel tape deck could be fitted with an extra head downstream from the stock head and the signal fed back.

I could change the distance between the heads and also move in and out of the track laterally. (strange effects).

I also found that a guitar string can interrupt a light beam, I always wondered how far you could go with this using a focused laser.

In the 80's I had a Morley echo pedal which used a rotating can filled with a viscous liquid that smelled like brake fluid. There was a fixed 'record' head which looked like a squeegee that layed down the signal on the inside of the can and a movable 'playback' head that could be be positioned at the correct physical distance to set the delay interval. It seemed to me that this system was mechanical and not magnetic: the record head (essentially a loudspeaker) vibrated and left a series of ripples in the fluid that were then detected by the playback head which vibrated as it passed over the ripples and converted them into an electrical signal (essentially a microphone). It appeared to me that the system worked much like a (temporary) phonograph.

"Morley" sounds failure, but now I am not sure about how it functioned. The "temporary record" description sounds wild. Would the temperature affect it?

Correction "failure" should be familiar.

Yes, the autocratic spell connection feather can often be annointing.

I'm not sure what you mean by ' "Morley" sound failure'. It worker great until it stopped working (several years/many hours per day). It was somewhat sensitive to temperature - it was unreliable in extreme cold and heat, but then again playing music is also tough under those conditions. The thing I really liked about it was that the pedal was an opto electronic potentiometer, so the farther you pushed the pedal the more the echo signal was mixed back in, giving the user the ability to extend the number of echoes. With the pedal 'to the metal' it could go on for several seconds before degenerating into a roar which was also a useful sound effect in some situations. Most of the current digital echo systems degenerate into noise after far fewer repeats.

Is it "Spring Reverberator" you're thinking of? (http://sound.westhost.com/ - website currently under construction)

Spring Reverb Unit For Guitar or Keyboards

The Fender Twin Reverb is considered a standard model for players seeking a clean sound, and it is especially known for the quality of its built-in spring ...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fender_Twin