Hot, expensive, pointless tape echo from Blue Coconut

"Let's put the tape and heads right on top of the machine! Nothing bad can happen to them there!"
 

Looks just like a (very goosed up) WEM Copicat tape delay.

(Which, IIRC, Bauhaus used to get that cool varispeed delay sound on "Bela Lugosi's Dead". Easing down on the drive spindle/capstan thingy with one's shoe heel causes the tape speed to bog down & letting up allows it to speed up again.)
 

Oh, okay--duh . . . :

[culled from the fancy echo's site]

"UK based Blue Coconut Ltd, manufacturers of the ECHOVERB commissioned Terry MacDonald to design the unit ... Terry was .. a former freelance consultant for the Watkins/WEM company which built tape echo units in the 6o’s"
 

old people are insane.
 

As I see it, maybe the cool thing about this is that you can make your own loops of tape and run them all the fuck around the room and back to the top. But for this price you could probably just get a 2-track and do the same thing.

- Bud
 

1800 quid? Buy the Augustus Loop tape delay emulation plugin (which is 30 dollars, I think) and use the leftover £1770 to buy a MacBook and Ableton (or something) to run it on.

Seriously, I use it all the time and it rocks. Plus you can't read Music Thing on a real a tape delay. :-)
 

yeah, i mean i sometimes seriously wonder if my re-501 is a step too far into sterility, although it is nice to have warble and tape degradation without the hiss of the lesser space-echoes.

having said that, the green fronted 201 and 301s may be noisier, but they do look more like space ship controls. very difficult call.
 

oooh i gotta get like two of these and a ping pong table
 

The HiWatt looks like a good deal actually. A Copicat costs about 150 from eBay, but then you have to send it to the one man in the country who can fix them for another hundred or so.

On the other hand you can't use the Blue Coconut as the bestest valve preamp on the planet, can you?

And the point of putting the loop on the top, my digital friend is that: one, if you overuse the stop-motor/start-motor woosh noise, you can change the broken tape during a gig and two: you can apply a little finger pressure to the capstans to make chorus-y things happen.

(and is that really Dr Ben 'Bad Science' Goldacre discussing the merits of Space Echos? Hats off to man!)
 

I think for most of us tape echos are all about the wow & flutter, tape hiss and general unpredictability. But there are others for whom tape echo is just the warmest, nicest sounding kind of delay around and a high-end version could be used when they're after a warm but technically pristine sound, rather than whacky lo-fi effects.

It'll probably appeal to the same people who spend ridiculous money on boutique valve mic amps and compressors.