TC Electronic Effects

[Sacred Synthesis]

I've heard a number of TC effects pedals used in conjunction with synthesizers, and they sound excellent.  Although I prefer rackmount units, these pedals have a high-quality sound and stereo inputs and outputs.  They each seem small enough to fit in that small open space on the right of the Prophet '08, where the output jacks happen to be; the prices for each are under $170, so they offer some advantages.  Sweetwater's recent demo of the Model D used the Flashback Delay, which I thought sounded quite impressive, and the Hall of Fame reverb sounds excellent, too.

Does anybody on the forum use either of these effects?  Care to offer a few comments on them?

http://www.sweetwater.com/store/detail/Flashback
http://www.sweetwater.com/store/detail/HallOfFame

[chysn]

I've had a Hall of Fame for maybe a couple years. I use it mostly for the Little Phatty, just for my casual playing. I love the sound, and the TonePrint system gives it an insane amount of programmability under-the-hood via computer.

I have reservations about its reliability. The switch on mine sometimes just stops working, sometimes for weeks at a time. I'll eventually need to get something else, I'm afraid. But in all likelihood, I just got a bum unit.

[Sacred Synthesis]

Yeah, it was probably a bad unit.  But the problem sounds fixable with a screw drive and a soldering gun.

[chysn]

Well, I checked it for the simple things like cold solder joints and a stuck switch. It's something on the board, like a bad relay. If I need to replace it, it could very well be with a NanoVerb.

[Sacred Synthesis]

You know I've used Nanoverbs for a few years now, both the first model and the second.  Not bad, not great, but fun and convenient to use if you can put them at eye level.  For ordinary studio projects, they're good enough.  I'd say the delay is the best, then second, the reverb.  The chorus is fair.  The nice thing with the Nanoverb 2 is that it offers the option to use effects either individually or mixed.  The reverb-delay mixture is actually quite nice.  I've compared it many times to my Lexicon MX300's reverb, and the quality comes close enough.  But each effect does get a bit hissy and distorted at higher levels.  That's the worst of it.

[Fuseball]

I've had both a Flashback delay and Hall of Fame pedal on my guitar pedal board for 3 and a half years now. The Flashback has been great. I most often use the tape delay setting. The Hall of Fame, however, has broken on me. When I activate it now, all I get is a very loud buzz. Tried it with various 9v power units and it does the same with all of them.

Were it not for that, I would have recommended it or the 'Arena' pedal which is tweaked for longer reverb times, while retaining all the best algorithms from the Hall of Fame.

I've also had occasional problems with the activation switch on one of their other pedals. I think they have now changed from that 'clicky' design to a newer design of switch.

As good as the Hall of Fame was, I still noticed a leap in sound quality when I switched to a Big Sky for synths.

[DavidDever]

As reverbs go, the TC stuff works very well for mix purposes, though I do believe that the Strymon units are far more interesting for dense, saturated 'verbs that work from an artistic perspective.

In the days when Lexicon dominated the landscape, the TC units provided a different sound that was more surgical, and the analogue input and output stages were much cleaner than the Lexicon units, especially the cheaper ones, making them great choices for ambient trance where one might have multiple reverbs occupying the same mix space.