Any amount of time spent searching forums or YouTube for tips and gear to give you the “ultimate guitar tone” will undoubtedly lead you at some point to consider a real tape echo unit. They are lauded for their liveliness, their clarity and the charm. But they are impossible expensive, unbearably noisy and require constant maintenance to keep running right, not to mention they are big and have to run off wall power, making their portability just a joke. A fair warning, this review is going to have lots of subjectivity to it. A real tape echo, even a well thought out and compact one like the T-Rex Replicator Jr, is not for everyone so lets dig in because, I adore them.
First of all, let me say that I am lucky. I have a large enough house with a finished basement and a funky split-like layout that means the bedrooms are far enough away that I can play loud without waking anyone. I can have a 30 watt PRS HXDA cranked without much problem, or run it wed/dry with a Bloomfield Drive combo and still be good. For those who have to play quiet, I’ve been there and I feel for you. I’ve had the 100 watt Mesa Boogie Mk III where you only just get the master turned on and even then you have to put a volume pedal in the loop to turn it down even farther to not disturb people at night. It’s not fun, and I hate to tell you, it pretty much disqualifies you from the real tape club. Even the modern quieter ones are noisy, and unless you’re able to turn up to the point where you drown out the noise, it takes away a lot of the charm. A quick test, turn your amp to your normal playing volume and strum some chords. If you can hear the clack of your guitar pick on your strings, then you likely don’t play loud enough to enjoy a tape echo.
Now that we’ve deterred half of your, lets talk about maintenance. It’s not rocket science, it won’t explode in a fiery ball or any other such things if you don’t take care of it, but it will wear out tapes quicker and sound “worse”. The good news is the T-Rex Replicator is pretty easy to take care of. Tape swaps are a breeze thanks to the cartridge system they use, just unscrew, push the slider down, pop out the old, put in the new, let go and replace screw. Takes one minute or less. There’s a dead simple adjuster on the record heads, simply back it off until there’s no signal, then move it in a quarter of a turn at a time until you have a clean echo. Done. Last is cleaning, a little isopropyl alcohol on a swab, clean the heads and reels and you’re good to go. All of this together takes less than 10 minutes and only needs to be done every month or two (or when it starts sounding “off”).
Still here? Great! Now we get to the good stuff, let’s talk price. Most vintage or new tape echo units are in the one to two thousand dollar range (USD), which puts them out of the range of most hobby players. T-Rex has made the Jr more simple, and therefore less expensive. A new one will still set you back a good chunk, but they can be found on the second hand market for around $400 making them about the same as a boutique digital recreation. The simplification also has another benefit, it will “fit” on a pedalboard. It is fairly heavy for a pedal, but it will fit on all but the smallest of pedalboards making portability less of a concern. One more quick not about portability, it also runs at 12v 300ma, which means most modern power supplies can get it going with at most a special cable.
So how does it sound? Well to be honest, at first I was a little underwhelmed by it. Now I’m not a huge delay user, having gotten rid of all of my delay pedals except for my Analogman ARDX20 with Amaze0 add-on. It’s not quite the night and day difference that some people would have you believe it is (granted this is a much less expensive unit than most, and it doesn’t have a monster pre-amp like some do) but as I use it more (on day 3 as of this writing) it’s really starting to grow on me. It definitely has a character to it that other digital pedals get close, but so far don’t seem to quite replicate.
So while my Analogman delay isn’t going anywhere, I’ll keep this noisy, heavy, difficult, fantastically glorious beast around. It may be converting me to it’s ways sooner than later.