This year has seen some impressive analogue delay pedals, most notably Universal Audio's Starlight Echo Station, but has Suhr raised the bar with its newly unveiled Discovery Analog Delay?
Briefed with a mission to offer studio-quality classic analog delay from a compact, super-versatile and fully-featured platform, the Discovery is powered by a quartet of reissued MN3005 bucket-brigade analog-delay chips, is fully MIDI-compatible, and makes space for 127 user presets.
It has delay times from 40ms to 1100ms that are expandable to 17ms to 2000ms, onboard modulation, with selectable triangle, sine and square waveform shapes, a comprehensive range of subdivisions, and each knob can be set to an expression pedal.
The enclosure has an over-sized dial for setting the delay time and/or BPM (55-250BPM), plus knob controls for Mix, Regen, Lo Cut, Hi Cut, Speed and Depth, and is dominated by bright seven-segment display for delay times, BPM, presets and global menu information.
There are three small buttons arranged to the left of the display for setting and selecting presets, while on the right you have a Division button for choosing subdivisions for your repeats, or, if you hold it down, you can set the BPM for them. Of course, there is a tap tempo footswitch but you can hook up an external tap tempo, too.
When using MIDI, you can send Program Changes to other MIDI-compatible pedals, and take a comprehensive control over preset design and recall. Presets can be saved in SysEx file formats for easy sharing or storing.
Other features include a soft clipping limiter allowing for infinite feedback and sending the unit into oscillations, and you can run the Discovery with buffered or true bypass. The Suhr Discovery Analog Delay ships with an 18V DC power supply and is available now, priced $549.
That's not cheap, but then this is not your common or garden analogue delay, and as we've come to expect from Suhr's immaculate lineup of boutique-built electric guitars, what you are paying for is quality design and sounds. And for the adventurous player, there are few things more enjoyable than falling through the analogue delay wormhole.
