Digital signal processing is allowing guitar effects pedal designers to dream a little bigger and expand what was previously possible, making electric guitar sounds we never thought possible, and Source Audio’s Encounter, an “Ambient” delay/reverb is case in point.
Think high-functioning delay and reverb twofers and Source Audio’s Collider might come to mind.
Launched in 2019, it squished the Woburn, Massachusetts brand’s Nemesis Delay and Ventris Dual Reverb pedal into one enclosure, giving us a dozen engines to play with, plus eight onboard presets, 128 via MIDI and a lot of mod cons.
Encounter builds upon that. Think of it as an evolutionary remodelling of the Collider, presenting us with six delay engines, six reverbs, each side of the pedal with its own multi-function footswitch, and there are some all-new algorithms that present us with sounds that are truly out there.
Casual users of reverb and delay could probably sit this one out; at £369/$399, it’s a considerable investment, and besides, this one is for all you pedalboard cosmonauts out there, a pedal “designed to explore swirling celestial tones and deeply immersive soundscapes”.
Your delay options comprise Noise Tape, Resonant, Drum Echo, Echoverb, Kaleidoscope and Helix. Choose from Hypersphere, Shimmers, TremVerb, Reverse, Lo-Fi and Swell reverbs. Some you might recognise. Others have been engineered from the ground up.
Source Audio describes the Hypersphere reverb engine as an “N-dimensional sphere… [its] richest, largest and most experimental reverb to date”. The Kaleidoscope delay engine, similarly, is not for dialling in everyday repeats; Source Audio’s tasting notes read “A twinkling, scattering hypnotic audio journey”.
The Drum Echo delay sounds like a particularly radical proposition while fans of the warped weirdness of mechanical echo machines have a lot to dig into with the Noise Type delay engine.
While the brain of the pedal is digital, the signal path is 100 per cent analogue. It might take a long weekend playing around with this to fathom all of the settings but Source Audio provided comprehensive control over these sounds.
As per the Collider, you have the same eight onboard user presets, 128 in total with MIDI. It is fully stereo. The Encounter’s universal bypass allows players to select true or soft bypass and a transparent buffered bypass.
The delay side's footswitch doubles as a tap tempo switch. There is a subdivisions switch for adding some rhythmic intrigue to the repeats.
Deeper edits can be made via USB, with Source Audio’s Neuro app allowing you to share your settings with others – and to download them. The Encounter runs on 9V DC from a pedalboard power supply, drawing a minimum of 280mA.
For more details, head over to Source Audio.
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