The Delightfully Twisted, Mostly-True History of Delay (with chips, tape, and just enough scandal)

Let’s time-travel. Delay didn’t begin as a pedal; it began as a problem: “my sound is great… but what if there were two of me, one slightly late and a little confused?” From echoey caves to oil-filled tuna cans to chips named like droids (hello, SAD-1024 and MN3205), delay is what happens when audio engineers turn physics homework into romance. Below is the long, loopy saga—heavy on audio, with a few wild detours.

 

Pre-pedal prehistory (aka “nature invented delay first”)

 

 

• Long before electricity, singers used cathedrals as giant pre-delay knobs. Engineers later bottled that idea with echo chambers and pre-delay chains—at Abbey Road they even built S.T.E.E.D. (“Send/Single Tape Echo Echo Delay”) to feed chambers with adjustable tape delay, because of course they did. 

• In 1966, Ken Townsend hacked together ADT (Automatic Double Tracking) so Lennon didn’t have to sing everything twice. It’s basically micro-delay with wobble, and it changed pop vocals forever. 

 

Tape goes portable: the rock ’n’ roll slapback arms race

 

 

• 1953: Ray Butts stuffs a tape echo into a guitar amp—the EchoSonic—and hands the second one to Chet Atkins (Scotty Moore soon follows). Live slapback becomes a thing, and every tape-machine repair tech starts sleeping with a degausser under the pillow. 

• Late ’50s/early ’60s: Tape loop boxes bloom—WEM Copicat in the UK, Echoplex in the US (Mike Battle’s baby—the EP-1 in ’59, then the solid-state EP-3 with that beloved preamp grit), and Binson Echorec in Italy with a magnetic drum instead of tape. Suddenly, echoes come with switches, meters, and swagger. 

• 1974: Roland’s RE-201 Space Echo makes repeats reliable(-ish) and tour-friendly. Its 3 heads + spring reverb + mode switch becomes a greatest-hits menu for dub mixers and guitar astronauts. 

 

Side-quest: the “oil-can” weirdos

 

In the ’60s, Tel-Ray cooked up an electrostatic delay that stored charge on a rotating element sloshing in conductive oil. Think “echo via electric gravy”—dark, warbly, and occasionally drippy. Fender and others licensed it; Morley carried the torch for years. It’s charming, a bit haunted, and probably why half the vintage units smell like a garage. 

 

Delay as composition: long loops and minimalism (the “stories within stories” chapter)

 

 

• Terry Riley’s time-lag accumulator (early ’60s) ran two tape decks in tandem to create evolving, self-duetting delays—“Music for The Gift” (1963) is basically proto-live-remix. Brian Eno picks up the idea; Robert Fripp brings guitars; Frippertronics is born. Two Revox machines, miles of patience, and a venue staff wondering why the lobby tape is now avant-garde. 

 

 

Chips take over: from Reticon to Matsushita (Panasonic), and why your analog delay hisses less than it should

 

The bucket-brigade breakthrough

 

In 1969, F. L. J. Sangster and K. Teer at Philips invent the Bucket-Brigade Device (BBD)—an analog delay line made of tiny capacitors clocked like a conga line. It let designers shrink delays from suitcases to stompboxes. (Yes, it’s analog; no, it’s not continuous-time—so you add filters to keep Nyquist gremlins out.) 

 

The Reticon era (SAD-1024 and friends)

 

US firm Reticon commercializes BBDs in the ’70s—SAD-1024 becomes the noir hero of early pedals. Electro-Harmonix Memory Man units shipped first with SAD-1024s: darker repeats, gorgeous chorus when you push the clock, and noise like a velvet thunderstorm. Then parts dried up and the design migrated. Bonus corporate subplot: Reticon gets acquired by EG&G (yes, the Manhattan-Project camera folks) in 1977, and later absorbed into Perkin-Elmer/Excelitas. Your slapback has defense-contractor relatives. 

 

Enter Matsushita/Panasonic: MN3005 → MN3205 (aka “the 5-volt pivot”)

 

Panasonic’s MN3005 (4096 stages) becomes the de facto premium BBD for late-’70s/early-’80s delays (EHX Deluxe Memory Man, Maxon/Ibanez, etc.). Later, the MN3205 (also 4096 stages) arrives as a low-voltage, lower-cost sibling—great for compact pedals without DC–DC boost, with a slightly grittier, shorter-time vibe. This “MN32xx” family shift kept analog delays affordable (and pedalboards less flammable). 

 

A tidy (and nerdy) example:

BOSS DM-2

(1981–84)

The DM-2 launched with MN3005, then quietly transitioned to MN3205 as supply and cost realities evolved. Players argue about the audible difference; Boss historians log the chip swap like a royal succession. Either way, the DM-2 defined “warm repeats, short attention span.” 

 

Why BBDs don’t sound like tape (and why that’s lovely)

Because BBDs are time-discrete, designers add pre- and post-LPFs to avoid aliasing and to reconstruct the signal, plus companders (hello, NE570/571) to crush and expand dynamics, nixing hiss. That’s the secret sauce behind classic analog delay feel—darkening repeats that recede like polite ghosts. 

 

Digital arrives, sets the clocks, and still likes to wear vintage clothes

 

 

• 1971: Eventide 1745 is among the first digital rack delays; studios stop splicing tape just to get a dotted-eighth. 

• 1983: BOSS DD-2 becomes the first digital delay in a stompbox; rumor (true) says it used the same loooong custom IC as Roland’s SDE-3000 rack—basically a studio in a small orange rectangle with a price tag to match. 

 

 

“Unknown-ish” tidbits & subplots to impress (or annoy) your bandmates

 

 

• Abbey Road’s STEED chain didn’t just pre-delay reverb; they fed repeats back into the chamber to multiply echoes—1960s feedback patching before feedback was cool. 

• Oil-can delays don’t store magnetism on tape; they store charge on a rotating medium bathed in conductive oil. The murk, the wobble, and the occasional “did something just leak?” vibe are features, not bugs. 

• Dub engineers—armed with Space Echoes—turned the mixer into an instrument, riding feedback like a surfboard. If you’ve ever played “how close to self-oscillation can I get,” you’re doing sound-system karaoke. 

• Reticon didn’t just make BBDs; they were also early CCD imaging pioneers. Somewhere out there, a spaceborne camera and your flanger share DNA. 

• Outside audio: mercury delay lines once stored bits in early computers (literal sound-in-a-tube memory), and bucket-brigade concepts found TV/video uses as analog delay lines. Delay is a general lifestyle choice, not just a guitar obsession. 

• Radio “profanity delay” (hit the dump button!) grew from tape-based tricks to digital buffers. Same principle: hold time, save jobs. 

 

 

A (mostly) firsts timeline — the “who blinked late, first” list

 

 

• 1948–49: Les Paul gets an Ampex, pioneers sound-on-sound and tape-based delay experiments on the way to multi-tracking. 

• 1953: EchoSonic—first portable amp with built-in tape echo—hits the stage. 

• 1958–60: WEM Copicat popularizes compact tape echo units in Europe. 

• 1959: Echoplex EP-1 arrives; the EP-3’s preamp later becomes a tone talisman. 

• Early ’60s: Binson Echorec brings magnetic-drum delay (hello, multi-head patterns). 

• Mid ’60s: Oil-can delays (Tel-Ray et al.) slosh into the party. 

• 1966: ADT at Abbey Road makes micro-delay a studio standard. 

• 1969: BBD invented at Philips; compact analog delays become feasible. 

• 1974: Roland RE-201 Space Echo becomes the touring tape icon. 

• 1976–78: EHX Memory Man lineage evolves from Reticon SAD-1024 to Panasonic MN3005—noise down, times up. 

• 1981–84: BOSS DM-2—warm analog repeats; later runs switch to MN3205. 

• 1983: BOSS DD-2—first digital delay pedal—drops the studio into your stompbox. 

 

The chips who shaped your repeats (the short, geeky dossier)

 

 

• Reticon SAD-1024: 2×512 stages, gritty & glorious; powered the earliest Memory Mans and many 70s designs. Also: Reticon gets bought by EG&G in 1977, the most unexpected crossover in delay history. 

• Panasonic MN3005: 4096 stages, longer/cleaner delays; the gold standard in late-70s/80s analog stomp delays. 

• Panasonic MN3205: 4096 stages at low voltage—cheaper, friendlier to 9V designs, a bit raspier. Kept analog delay alive when boutique wasn’t a thing yet. 

• NE570/571: Companders that made BBDs studio-tolerable by clamping noise, then expanding dynamics back—your repeats’ noise police. 

 

Coda: Delay outside audio (because time is everybody’s problem)

Engineers used mercury and acoustic delay lines to store bits in early computers, bucket-brigade principles in video signal processing, CCDs (Reticon again!) to image the cosmos, and broadcast delays to keep the airwaves safe from your drummer’s vocabulary. Delay is the Swiss Army knife of “not yet.” 

 

Closing riff

Delay is the art of making yesterday sing harmony with today. From tape that needed babysitting to chips that demanded companders, from dub feedback swells to polite dotted-eighths, it’s a love story with time itself. And yes, sometimes it leaks oil. That’s rock ’n’ roll.