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Comment by mrob | Hacker News Reader

Is there such a thing as a fully analog reverb that's not electro-acoustic? Bucket-brigade devices are sometimes called "analog", and they were occasionally used for reverb (more commonly for the simpler delay effects they were better suited to), but they're discrete in the time domain so arguably they're partly digital. Maybe you could do reverb with a tape delay with really tiny heads, but I don't know of any such product.

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Here you go:

https://reverb-res.cloudinary.com/image/upload/s--Or_7-p6K--...

Elk Echo Machine v3 (EM-3) from 1970

Echo isn't the same as reverb. Reverb is a simulation of acoustic spaces small enough that you don't hear distinct echoes. You need multiple short delays to simulate the time taken for sound to travel between surfaces of the room, and feedback between them to simulate the reflections. AFAIK all tape delays are too slow to produce reverb sounds.

Recording studios have had access to tunnels to create echos.

https://www.acontinuouslean.com/2013/12/02/secret-capitol-st...

I originally responded pretty much in the same vein as everyone else responding here (inaccurately mentioning the Space Echo).

If the only "digital" part of the circuit is the clock then couldn't you replace that with a quartz oscillator that you can wire an analog modulator for in order to get the switch timing for the capacitors banking the sound? Am I oversimplifying this?

If I'm at all correct than I would also say I don't know of any product that does so since it sort of sounds like it would be going full analog for the sake of going full analog and wouldn't affect the tone AFAIU but sounds like there's no technical reason it couldn't be done.

"Maybe you could do reverb with a tape delay with really tiny heads, but I don't know of any such product."

Lots of heads and carefully tuned feedback (possibly also across different heads adding phase changes) could help in that direction. It would sound interesting, though the resulting contraption would also be big, clunky and expensive.

... or really fast tape with normal heads.

Echoplex tape reverb

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echoplex

For purposes of guitarists, BBDs are "analog". Some creative pedal makers have taken good advantage of that tie to a clock, and use it to alter fidelity. (I'm not a fan of the BBD sound myself; it gets too dark and wooly too quickly for my taste.)

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