Eventide's 50th Anniversary Flashback: A Brief History of Time Delay

[Orville71]

Please check out a piece of musical history as we talk about the world's first digital delay unit, the DDL 1745.


Read the whole story here: https://www.eventideaudio.com/blog/aagn ... 1745-delay

Hear from legendary engineers as they talk about this mysterious box!




To celebrate our 50th Anniversary, we also have a limited time sale on our 21st century digital delays, the Rose and EuroDDL.


More info on the sale here: https://store.eventideaudio.com/pages/ddl-sale

[Radiance2021]

Cool, thanks for sharing!

[Michael O.]

This looks cool, and I’m excited to check it out! I still use and enjoy a 1745m; pretty magical unit, though mine needs a tuneup (those darned dbx compander cards, of course).

[Orville71]

The original DDL 1745 had one major shortcoming. Using the big switches to set delay would usually result in a dangerously loud pop/crackle/bzzzztttt. Engineers quickly learned to pull down the appropriate fader before changing delay. Richard took advantage of two new innovations—the shaft encoder and the Light Emitting Diode—to create the model DDL 1745A. Today, an encoder would be the logical choice but encoders were not yet commercially available (or, if they were, they were prohibitively expensive). Eventide designed its own encoder and the “Big Knob” was born. Turn it slowly for fine control or spin it quickly for large changes. The Big Knob has become a key control feature for many of Eventide’s products since that day in 1973.

The 1745A also featured an LED numerical display of the delay setting—likely the first display of its kind to find its way into a studio.

READ MORE ABOUT THE DDL 1745A:
https://www.eventideaudio.com/blog/aagn ... 745a-delay

[Orville71]

The DDL 1745M (1975)
By 1975, integrated circuit technology had advanced to the point that Random Access Memory (RAM) chips became commercially available. For audio delay this was a game changer. Instead of being limited to shifting bits into one end of a delay line and waiting for the bits to emerge from the end of the line, audio could be ‘stored’ in memory and recalled at will. The 1745M was unlike anything that existed and for many, DDLs were still a mystery. Here’s how the Instruction Manual introduced it to audio pros and studio maintenance engineers: “...this is an unusual instruction manual”.


Read the full blog about the 1745M here: https://www.eventideaudio.com/blog/aagn ... 745m-delay

[mandarinpile]

Thank you for sharing this history. Eventide really is the master of delays. The Time Factor has been a central piece of my rig for a very long time. The best big delay out there. The looper in it is a hidden gem. Nice to learn about its background.