The Catalinbread Belle Epoch is Catalinbread’s emulation of the classic Maestro Echoplex 3 tape echo including the preamp. The Belle Epoch has been carefully tuned to sound as close to a real Echoplex as possible. It features five controls for shaping your sound: Mix: from completely dry to completely wet. Record level: controls how hard the delay line is hit by your dry signal. Set low, the initial repeat be quiet and thin. Set high, the initial repeat will be loud, thick, and slightly distorted. Even out the volume differences with the volume knob. Mod: controls the wow and flutter of the wet signal. Higher settings sound better with longer delay times. Echo sustain: how many repeats of the delayed signal will be heard. Above noon repeats will get into infinite territory. Higher than that the delay will go into self oscillation. Echo delay: delay time, from around 80 ms to 800 ms. There is an internal trimpot for setting the gain of the preamp. Maxed out if will provide a fuzzy boost that can be cleaned up using your guitar’s volume knob. There is also an internal switch to change between buffered and true bypass. Buffered bypass will result in delay trails when the Belle Epoch is switched off. The Catalinbread Belle Epoch can be powered by a standard 9 volt DC adaptor with 2.1mm negative center barrel. Current draw is 60 mA.
