Effect trends and gear popularity goes through strange cycles. The history of delay and echo units are an especially strange phenomenon on how value can change by peoples perspectives and how old technology can sometimes return to be in-style. Or sometimes it just takes a poor musician making cheap old gear sound amazing; sparking everyone else to run after that sound.
Echo units use to be tape based, like the Roland Space Echo. These units were a pain to keep maintenance up on over the years. You had to clean the tape heads, sometimes the units were fragile, and sometimes the calibration needed to be adjusted, but they had a specific sound which we love.
Then came along analog compact effect units like the one above. No more tapes to deal with and these little stomp boxes took a beating a little better. The DOD FX90 came out in 1984 and ended in 1993. It's a true analog delay that uses the same chip the Boss DM-2 analog delay uses. This pedal fell through the cracks until recent years. It came out when the digital delay units came out in the 80's. That trend was such a big one that most people sold their analog delays or tossed them. Fast forward about 10 years and everyone wanted the character of their old analog delays back. The prices of analog delays then after, skyrocketed. This DOD pedal however stayed cheap. For the simple fact, that for whatever reason, DOD never labeled the pedal as analog, and only a few people who took the thing apart or knew the history of the pedal, knew this pedal as all analog. So, to this day, you can get a cheap analog delay because people didn't realized what they actually owned.
No comments:
Post a Comment