“Strangers passing in the street,
by chance two separate glances
meet, and I am you and what
I see is me. And do I take you
by the hand, and lead you
through the land, and help me
understand the best I can. And
no one told us to move on, and
no one forces down our eyes.
No one speaks and no one tries,
no one flies around the sun.”
–Pink Floyd, “Echoes”
(Meddle, 1971)
Y
ou feel yourself floating on
a foggy ocean, the dank air
seems to hold a haunting
energy and a darkness that
seeps into your lungs with each
breath. Every direction across you
blue, and with each slight movement
you feel ripples washing across your
humble vessel. A humid azure that
is neither warm nor cold surrounds
you, and formlessly descends on your
skin. Out of nowhere, the warm blue
turns bright, and the still air screams,
every droplet of water down to the
subatomic layer seethes, spits, and
pulses with energy. The water below
you lurches with each pulse, and a
veritable mass of sound, somehow
lost in its own magnitude, crashes into
every pore of your body. . .
If you want an idea of what the
Binson Echorec sounds like, look
no further than YouTube demos or
classic examples smattered across
Pink Floyd’s back catalogue. If you
want to know what the Echorec feels
like, I have tried my best to synthesize
into words my many hours of sonic
exploration into the world of the
Binson Echorec for you, dear readers.
I dove deep into the underwater
caverns and colossal space craters, to
pull out what discoveries I have found
to share with you today. As always,
from my travels I come bearing gifts,
explorations of the other side; the
dark side, if you will.
The Binson Echorec was the
brainchild of Dr. Bonfiglio Bini, an
Italian entrepreneur who owned and
operated the Binson Amplifier HiFi
Company in Milan, Italy. While it
manufactured many music and audio
products beginning in the late ‘40s,
the Binson Echorec remains to be one
of its most hallowed and heralded
units to this day, namely because
of the association with one of the
biggest names in music: Pink Floyd.
The Echorec works quite different
than other tape machines of the
time, by utilizing a magnetic drum
head over four different tape heads,
as opposed to the tape loop system
employed by other tape echoes of
the time, such as the Watkins Copicat
or the Meazzi Tape Echo. This method
of delay provided a more stable and
reliable system, without the extra
pains of tape tension and excessive or
uneven head wear. The original Binson
Echorecs have long since been out
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