page_title: Echo chamber
section_title: Electronic echo machines
hierarchical_section_title: Echo chamber / Electronic echo machines
caption_attribution_description: English: Roland RE-501 Chorus Echo
context_page_description: An echo chamber is a hollow enclosure used to produce reverberation, usually for recording purposes. For example, the producers of a television or radio program might wish to produce the aural illusion that a conversation is taking place in a large room or a cave; these effects can be accomplished by playing the recording of the conversation inside an echo chamber, with an accompanying microphone to catch the reverberation. Nowadays effects units are more widely used to create such effects, but echo chambers are still used today, such as the famous echo chambers at Capitol Studios.
  In music, the use of acoustic echo and reverberation effects has taken many forms and dates back many hundreds of years. Medieval and Renaissance sacred music relied heavily on the composers' extensive understanding and use of the complex natural reverberation and echoes inside churches and cathedrals. This early acoustical knowledge informed the design of opera houses and concert halls in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. Architects designed these to create internal reflections that would enhance and project sound from the stage in the days before electrical amplification.
context_section_description: In the 1950s and 1960s, the development of magnetic audio tape technology made it possible to duplicate physical echo and reverberation effects entirely electronically. The Watkins Copicat, designed and built by renowned British electronics engineer Charlie Watkins in the late 1950s, is typical of this kind of electronic delay device.
  Tape echo units use an endless loop of magnetic tape, which is drawn across a series of recording and playback heads.
  When a signal from a voice or instrument is fed into the machine, it records the signal onto the tape loop as it passed over the record head. As the tape advances, the newly recorded signal is then picked up by a series of playback heads mounted in line with the record head. These play the sound back as the signal passes over each head in turn, creating the classic rippling or cascading echoes that are typical of tape echo units.
  The number of playback heads determines the number of repeats, and the physical distance between each playback head determines the ratio of delay between each repeat of the sound (usually some fraction of a second). The actual length of the delay between each repeat can be varied by a pitch control that alters the speed of the tape loop across the heads.
  Typically, the playback heads of tape echo machines are also connected to controls that allow the user to determine the volume of each echo relative to the original signal. Another control (sometimes called  "regeneration") allows the signal from the playback heads to be fed back into and variably mixed with the original input signal, creating a distinctive "feedback" effect that adds more and more noise to the loop with each repeat.  If fully activated, this control ultimately produces a continuous feedback loop of pure noise. Roland manufactured various models of magnetic tape echo and reverb sound effect machines from 1973 until the introduction of digital sound effect machines.
  Tape echo that has few repeats and a very short delay between each repeat is often referred to as "slapback" echo.  This distinctive sound is one of the key sonic characteristics of 1950s rock and roll and rockabilly, and can be heard on the classic mid-50s Sun Records recordings by Elvis Presley and others. This effect was a result of the unintentional combination of the recording and monitoring tape heads (physically located a few inches apart) which, on playback, created a gap that inadvertently produced the iconic "slap-back" effect.
caption: The Roland RE-501 is an audio effects device capable of creating echo, chorus, reverb and sound on sound type effects
exif: {}