Gear In-depth & Longer Blogs — Pink Floyd

Some information on the how, and the why, of modifying vintage Echorecs with varispeed control. Binson Echorecs were all manufactured with a fixed speed motor and Binson founder, Dr Bonfiglio Bini, together with his principal engineer, Scarano Gaetano, created something very special with their considerations for the fixed head spacings of the Binson Echorec. The four playback heads on an Echorec 2 offer delay times of approximately 75ms, 150ms, 225ms, and 300ms. Dr Bini chose these spacings to create musically-related delay times: if the longest delay tap is a quarter note, then head three is a dotted eighth note, head...

The EMS Synthi HiFli by Tony Miln If you’re a guitar pedal nerd, then the EMS Synthi HiFli is the pinnacle of desirability: it is the stuff of legend; a rare and much-mythologised beast that is seldom-sighted - sporting many sliders with alluring names. In his book, ‘Analog Man’s Guide To Vintage Effects’, Tom Hughes officially anointed the HiFli king of kings - rarest of the rare - big chief amongst the hen’s teeth. In short, the EMS Synthi HiFli is the ultimate vintage guitar ‘pedal’; good examples are very few and far between. I set out many years ago now...

This blog is not a another guide to Synthi AKS, but rather it's about my experience encountering and using one of these remarkable instruments while "testing" the one shown above following a full restoration. This process gave me pause to consider what it is that makes some pieces of gear so completely captivating and endlessly inspiring. A longer video demo of my AKS experience features at the bottom of this post... (And just before we get into it, special mention to our remarkable in-house techs Doctor Huw and Chris for their tireless work to bring this beauty back to life, and also to Keith...

"Listen, we ALL love gear. Every person involved in this project can't get it out of their minds because of the nature of the unit. For gear heads and techs, this is just like going to Disneyland." - T-Rex Effects December 2017 Tony Miln's blog post today was going to be the first part in our forthcoming series on the Binson Echorec: buying, owning, using, maintaining - and tips, tricks and insights gained from a couple of decades spent wrangling these exotic Italian beasts. Here at Soundgas we receive almost daily requests for information/advice/parts for Binsons, so I intend to build...

When we first got involved with Dawner Prince about selling their (then) new Binson pedal, the Boonar, I was impressed by the features that they'd managed to fit in such a small pedal, but felt the Boonar was too bright/clean and not quite right at higher feedback settings. Zoran from Dawner Prince was swift to react to our comments and an upgraded version of the Boonar swiftly followed. I soon became very attached indeed to my Boonar (which has now journeyed back to Croatia a couple of times for tweaks). I now use it all the time together with the Echosex 2º Ltd. The Echosex...