Erica Synths Zen Delay

Great but doesn`t do it for me

With all my love for Erica Synth I didn`t find a place for the item in my setup. Same happened with the Acidbox. The build quality is nice. The sound is nice but it`s quite doesn`t work for me.

The sound I was looking for.

A delay with a lot of knobs, but a small manual.

Plugged it into the effect loops of a guitar amp and manage to find an amazing sound in less than one minute.

The sound is not hollow and fizzy in the upper frequencies.

Cons :

They should make another version with footswitches for guitar players just to be able to bypass it at will and avoid yet another external footswitch.

IN is on the left, Out it on the right

No presets.

An amazing musical instrument

Very playable, Must have!

overall design is so silk and sexy that you want to just touch it. the unboxing experience was different from other effect pedals. the features are great , adjustable tube overdrive, Analogue multimode filter with resonance, 5 Delay modes ... you name it.

Erica zen delay

I bought it a few months ago. The sound is amazing. Together with the Bass synth from Erica is it really a joy for your ears

Trippy echo textures

Fantastic echo/filter pedal that works in a so delicate way! It went far beyond my expectations.It works really nice with drums, synths, vocals. The price is on the roof but no regrets! Imagine Soundtoys' echo boy and decapitator in your hands!

The Delay+Filter+OD Laboratory

Very high quality stereo delay unit that is unlike any other that I have tried or seen.

Very fun to play with using ANY Audio source, from Vocals, instruments, drums, field recordings, live or recorded material.

I do find there are some issues and missed opportunities that hav finally made me decide to return the product.

I think there will be a Zen Delay 2 for sure in the not so distant future which hopefully improve on these points, and some may even be fixed in updates.

The issues for me are:

- The digital delay high pitched noise that surely can be called a bug.

- The mix issue that prevents parallell filtering without noticable doubleing because it's post dsp conversion even when the delay is turned off.

- No way to modulate parameters with CV or other input.

- Would be great to have even more delay modes like reverse and more!

Great fun - lots of flexibility

The Erica Synth Zen Delay is a weighty and solid unit. Looks kick-ass and sounds better. It works as an external effect with Ableton perfectly and I've also used direct my in effect chain. Fun to experiment with or to do more classic delay processing. I'm using it with synths primarily but have run drum loops through it too.

By-passing the delay allows use of the filter and the tube drive effects which has expanded my options. Driving a Kick drum sounds whopper -defo give that a go.

I have used the midi cable to sync the clock with my daw but the more I've been using it, I'm leaning towards just tapping the tempo to it's not "perfectly" in sync - I've been getting cooler effects with this and less chance of phase when it comes to drums.

Top stuff all round, get one, have some fun, make some noise :)

Best delay and filter! But..

Be aware that the Zen Delay has an annoying high frequency tone when both delay and filter are active. Since the filter and drive signal path is analogue you will have some analogue signal noise. That's totally fine. It's even the reason I want an analogue circuit. It's the character of this device. But this tone is different. It's a high frequency tone that is audible while playing music. It's especially audible when using that BP filter 2/3 open. For me this is unusable.