Little Ferry, NJ – As part of its ongoing 50th Anniversary celebration, Eventide’s Flashback Series, which highlights groundbreaking legacy Eventide products that solidified the company as an audio technology leader, continues with the latest installment — Flashback #9.2: Dump & Go – The Profanity Delay. For 50 years Eventide has pioneered unprecedented ways to bend, distort, and manipulate sound, but the creation of solutions for broadcast applications has been a whole other side of Eventide’s history.
In Flashback #9.2, Eventide recounts how memory chips finally became just inexpensive enough for a digital alternative to the cumbersome tape-based seven-second delay that allowed radio station operators to bleep an offensive utterance before it reached the airwaves. The first such Eventide product, the BD995 Digital Delay, was contemporary with Eventide’s 1745M delay line and H949 Harmonizer® effects processor. The BD995 used 20-chip memory boards that each housed more memory than either the 1745M or the H949, and the BD995 required eight of these memory boards to achieve the needed delay time for its single function. Beyond the elimination of tape and moving parts, the BD995 applied Eventide processing wizardry to allow the on-air chat to continue while the delay rebuilt in the background. The Flashback addresses the challenges of the process and the progression of technology and DSP prowess through successive (near indispensable in talk radio) profanity delay products to the current Eventide BD600 – with a brief detour into the esoteric Eventide PD860 precision delay with two-channel, 20 kHz audio bandwidth and micro-second delay adjustment resolution conceived to address issues surrounding digital FM and the short-lived experiments into synchronization of multiple AM transmitters to increase coverage.
Flashback #9.2 is the latest in the ongoing series that help celebrate Eventide’s 50th Anniversary while providing readers a true historical perspective on the company and the technology that fostered audio’s significant advances over the last five decades. The episodes feature design and application insights, photos, videos and documentation excerpts that chronicle Eventide’s ongoing quest to find unprecedented ways to bend, distort and manipulate sound.
The Eventide 50th Flashback retrospective episodes can be found at the following links:
Flashback #1: The PS101 Instant Phaser
Flashback #2.1: The DDL 1745 Delay
Flashback #2.2: The DDL 1745A Delay
Flashback #2.3: The DDL 1745M Delay
Flashback #3: The Omnipressor®
Flashback #4.1: The H910 Harmonizer®
Flashback #4.2: H910 Harmonizer® — The Product
Flashback #4.3: H910 Harmonizer® —”Minds Blown”
Flashback #5: FL 201 Instant Flanger
Flashback #6: HM80 – The Baby Harmonizer®
Flashback #7.1: The H949 Harmonizer®
Flashback #7.2: H949 Harmonizer® — The New One
Flashback #7.3: H949 Harmonizer® — Bending, Stretching, and Twisting Time
