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Click/tap the mouse over the PSP Echo logo on the bottom and it acts as a taptempo button. If you click and hold on the logo it becomes a panic button in case your echo and feedback gets out of hand, and—trust me—it can happen. Stereo capabilities On each side of the center panel are matching controls for the left and right delay lines. Each one has independent control of Feedback, Feedback Panning, Drive and Level. There are also high- and lowpass filters set at 20 Hz–2 kHz and 200 Hz–20 kHz respectively for shaping the sound of the delay. The filters also contain another somewhat hidden feature which fellow reviewer John Rossi III referred to as ‘azimuth’ controls when he looked briefly at this plug-in in his review of the iPad DAW Auria (for which this plug-in is optionally available) in our September 2012 issue. This azimuth control is a combined filter control; as you click and drag over the arrow symbols between the filters it gangs the controls together and changes cutoff and filter distance proportionally. The output section along the bottom of the plug-in contains individual dry and wet sections with independent level, spread and balance, as well as a stereo linking and a bypass control. In use As you can see, that’s a lot of controls for your standard tape-delay plug-in, but as you should have guessed by now this is not your standard tape-delay plug-in! Sure it can do Rockabilly slapback, and simple tape-based delay tricks like sliding pitches and self-oscillating feedback loops, but the real fun happens when you start getting things ping-ponging in the stereo field, melting and warping the repeats and more. What may not seem obvious is that PSP Echo is actually 4 mono delays in one, as the ping-pong taps and regular delays are separate, yet combined. Also, panning acts on the feedback loop, so it does not work merely in left and right, but also in narrow and wide and you can use crosstalk as well. The maximum delay time is 8 seconds and setting each channel’s feedback to zero creates a perfect loop (although highs are still attenuated over time), while pushing it above zero creates the cascading and oscillating feedback that tape echoes are known for. Add in ducking and the fact that you can use your DAW’s automation on any of the parameters and—yeah, it’s deep! Sound Its overall sound is smooth, warm and wide and reminds me a lot of PSP NobleQ and oldTimer in its “analogness”. The filters offer a nice amount of sonic
RECORDING November 2012

control, and while it can get pretty lo-fi it never gets downright raunchy like Universal Audio’s EP34; of course it’s more tape-deck hi-fi than the EP34 so they each fulfill different roles. Functionally it compares nicely with SoundToys’ EchoBoy in its capabilities as a sound-design tool, but where Echoboy offers a whole host of models and modulation choices, PSP’s tape modeling in PSP Echo sounds more realistic. Power Perhaps not surprisingly, PSP Echo is really efficient. In Steinberg Cubase 6.5 running on a 2.7 GHz i7 MacBook Pro running Mac OS X 10.7 Lion, or on my ADK-built quad-core 3.33 GHz i7 Windows 7 PC, both with 8 GB of RAM, I opened up 20 stereo instances of PSP Echo and it just barely hit 20% CPU usage. At this point I stopped trying, since I have never used more than 2-3 tape delays in a session, ever. Conclusions PSP Echo sounds great, it does all the tape-delay tricks you could wish for, is equally at home with simple classic presets or can be a tweaker’s dream, and it’s beyond CPU efficient. And it does all this at a very respectable price. Impressive!

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Recording - November 2012

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