Around the mid to late 80's the 'new-digital' boom was well underway; and the plethora of new budget gear was flooding the market as the home studio boom really took off after the release of the early fostex 8 tracks etc. Quite a few manufacturers responded to the call bringing to the table a whole bunch of cheap plastic-cased tabletop 1/2 size effect units - Companies such as Roland got in there with their BOSS 'mini-rack' series which appeared in two releases... the early grey plastic mini-rack series and the later 'posher' black metal cased series around the early 90's... Accesit were there already with their popular mini series, and others like rebis & Studiomaster had rack slot-in case type racks reminiscent of the famous rack set makes like Neve etc... Then to seal this type of series Alesis brought out their well known 'Micro' series including the famous groundbreaking Microverb 1 & 2... yup.. there certainly was a ton of cheap fx to get your paws on...
Akai entered the fray around 1988 with their 'mini-series of FX units... and this is the EX-65D Digital delay unit -
This is a real little gem and nope, i don't mean it's a tasty lettuce !!... delays are a MUST HAVE for dance, and if you use hardware outboard, the more delays the merrier, two is the minimum you should have in your studio, so an item this cheap is a steal to get fluid rocking beats, panned synth & drum FX, tempo delays etc etc...
The EX-65D features a wacking 1 second of delay time, (1024ms)... so it'll cover any beats you might be doing, even super fast hardhouse & drum & bass or hardcore beats etc -
The delay time is set by two controls... 'RANGE' which steps up the times from 2MS to 512MS in steps of: '2, 8, 32, 128 & 512 MS' ... then it has a sister 'MULTI' control knob which multiplies the set 'RANGE' up to two times (2X)... So you set the RANGE, then fine tune it with the MULTI control to get the exact delay time you want !!...
You get all the rest of the normal controls - FEEDBACK and a modulation section with DEPTH & RATE to create chorus, flange & other modulation delay FX etc... There is also an Input and Output trim gain controls & a handy IN/OUT switch -
There is also a 'HOLD' LED lamp display, but as there is no 'Hold' button I can only assume the unit might have a facility for a footswitch to switch the HOLD function into use... useful to get hendrix style delay swirls & other yard style dub fx... The EX-65D frequency range goes from 20Hz to 16Khz which is plenty for a delay... you don't need 20Khz bandwidth for a delay unit at all... As far as I know these Akai mini-series work off a 9V or 12V wall-wart power supply...
Well, a cracking little delay unit that can be had well-cheap in the Free-ad's... check it out if you see one... User comments please !!...
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