DOD FX45 analog stereo reverb demo

[Krinor]

Hi.

I have just uploaded a little demonstration of the rare DOD FX45 analog stereo reverb. I'm usig a Moog synthesizer for the demo (sorry no guitar at the moment - sold the old one to save up for a nice Tele). I thought I'd share this here anyway since some of you has been asking for demos of this pedal on the forum in the past.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZRdW6FA2pI

Some people hype the crap out of this thing. I was curious enough to just go ahead and buy one. I think it stays. It's a nice alternative to playing in bathroom.  

[Mark Hammer]

Thanks for that.  It sounds about as problematic as I thought it might, but in some respects a little better than I thought it might, too.

It certainly sounds like reverb...just not a great reverb.  A little boxey, and as you say: a nice alternative to playing in bathroom.

The basic problem with it is that all taps are mixed in perfectly equal proportions such that there is no distinction made between early and later reflections.

With the two BBDs placed in series, you also tend to lose aperiodicity that the chip was originally designed to eliminate.  I think that instead of feeding the entire summed output from one chip to the other, they should have made the first tap on chip A feed the input on chip B and then summed the remaining taps with all 6 taps from chip B.  That way you'd have outputs after 396, 662, 1058, 1194, 1590, 1726, 2122, 2790, 3186, 3328 and 3724 stages.  Moreover, they could then have fed alternate outputs to each side for real stereo, rather than the hokey sum/difference they implemented.

[Krinor]

I agree with the above. This was among the first and only bbd reverbs. Imagine how much they might have improved these things had they not been discontinued because of the "onslaught" of digital reverb the year after their release...
The pedal seems to have some "sweet" spots where everything comes together and build up, boosting certain frequencies.
I think this pedal could be easily surpassed with a few analog delay's at different delay settings. But it is a fun pedal anyway and quite rare too. Not something I would take to the studio for anything but experimental electronic music, but good at what it does, namely sounding like something quite weird and not entirely unlike reverb.