Another item where there’s very little info to be found on the internet. I’ve had this one for several years now, so I though a small review for the gear-heads visiting this place will hopefully be appreciated.

You can download the manual at the , so I’m not going to go too much into technical details. It’s the last instance of the famous Space Echo line of reverb/delays roland has produced, and it’s the only digital one in the series, which means not a tape in sight. I suppose this is the reason why it has been neglected by a large part of the people looking for that specific Spae Echo sound. Furthermore, it doesn’t look impressive either, solid black (although very deep for a 1 unit rack module) with only a handful controls.

so.. How does it keep up these days? Surprisingly good actually. It’s not as versatile as modern effect processors and plug-ins, but it has a very warm and lush sounds that fits a wide variety of applications and can be used for subtle effects to spacey reverbs. Controls are minimal, only one control for reverb (more or less ;) ), the delay is the usual repeat rate, size and level. There is also a warmth control, which is in fact a some sort of pitch modulation, … and that’s about it. Having only access to such basic settings makes the machine very easy and fast in use. A welcome change from the feature loaded plug-in world we know these days and it also makes it the ideal reverb for giving your vocalist a little reverb in the headphones while tracking as it’s quickly set.

From the 5 modes, only 3 are delay/reverb, the other 2 only have reverb. Midi implementation is very minimal for today’s standards and is basically limited to selecting saved user patches. You’ll find more details in the manual, but I never stored any patches in the machine as it’s interface is so simple it’s not a problem to dial up any sound you want. I only whished the midi could be used for some kind of sync.. but hey.. this isn’t a modern machine.

Aha, the sound. Well, there is just only one, albeit a nice one. It has very little variety sound wise, but what it does it does extremely well. I should go on trying to compare it with other reverb units but that’s a bit of a silly thing to do. I wonder if there is any other reverb on the market that is this minimal and of this high quality (signal to noise ratio is rather good for a unit that age for example..). Don’t get me wrong here, it does sound amazingly good and can be used on a wide variety of sound sources.

And now we’re on the subject of sound, the unit comes with 2 very decent quality preamps on the front. Ideal for guitars, and very usable in a home studio environment. They deliver a nice clean warm tone, and with a tad of the effect thrown in it is really hard to not make a comparison with that typical dire straits sound. I won’t be surprised if it’s the special sauce for quite a few guitarists clean tone. It can do the same magic to analogue synths as well, making them sound huge and rich, whist keeping the punch and not washing the sound out in a big blurb .. in fact, it does what a good reverb should be able to do.

Would I buy it again.. sure. even thinking of picking up a second one. They’re pretty cheap actually..