Marshall Time Modulator

This is a very unusual delay unit. The Marshall Time Modulator. The designer has his own Wikipedia entry.

The black boxes inside labelled "ADL-70-D" and "ADL-60-S" are the secret delay units.

A nice walk through of a Time Modulator can be found here: synthtech.com

A great interview from the late '70s with Steven St. Croix can be found here: ampage

In the above interview, Steven mentions designing his own CCD IC capable of clean 1 sec delays, but seems to indicate that a different CCD IC is used in the Time Modulator, which has a 400mS delay time. It is unclear if the CCD inside the delay modules is something completely custom, or just an expensive CCD chip. BBDs and CCDs were available by the mid '70s when the Time Modulator first appeared, but they were cost prohibitive. This deluxe piece of gear is designed with expensive parts all around, so expensive CCD chips aren't surprising.

The delay range is from very short flange to very short echo. With its wide range controls and CV jacks, this feels more like a piece of modular synthesizer gear than a pro audio delay unit. It is very easy to set the controls to awful settings that just plain hurt your ears. At certain settings you can coax rhythmic patterns out of it. There is a demo disc you can find on the studioelectronics.biz site that was made by St. Croix that covers just about all the fun stuff you can do with this. At the end of the day, it is just a delay unit. I can't say it "sounds" any better than any other delay, but it definitely has every control option you could possibly want in a delay.

This particular unit just had a busted input jack. Otherwise you have to send them over to studioelectronics.biz as they are the only place in the world with the schematics, calibration notes, and parts. I actually got the replacement input jack from them after not being about to find the exact same part online.