There for the Dawn of Digital Audio Production: Eventide DDL 1745 Digital Delay Inducted into TECnology Hall of Fame
If you were recording music in 1971 – and had some serious coin to spend on gear – you just might have installed a groundbreaking unit into your studio.
That would be the Eventide DDL 1745 digital delay, which was $3,800 upon launch in 1971, or about $22k in today’s dollars. But it was worth the coin, then and now: the DDL 1745 was the world’s first commercially available digital delay, featuring 2-channels of independent delay from a single input, with delays ranging from 0 to 200 milliseconds.
If you’ve got one of these classics in your rack, it’s value may have hit a new high. That’s because the NAMM Foundation has announced that the Eventide DDL 1745 digital delay has officially been inducted into their TECnology Hall of Fame for 2018. The ceremony took place at the foundation’s annual event at the National Association of Music Merchants (NAMM) Convention in Anaheim, California.
According to Eventide, studios that originally installed the DDL 1745 routinely took it on to replace tape-based delay for doubling vocals and as a pre-delay to feed plate reverbs.
The DDL 1745 is the third Eventide product to be recognized by the NAMM TECnology Hall of Fame, with the their H910 and H3000 Harmonizers being inducted in 2007 and 2016 respectively.
Since 2004, the TECnology Hall of Fame has honored and recognized products and innovations that have made significant contributions to the advancement of audio. Other notable audio solutions receiving the award include Thomas Edison’s original cylinder recorder, the Neumann U47 microphone, EMT Model 140 Plate Reverb, and Dolby A-Type Noise Reduction. Additional 2018 inductees include the 1857 phonautograph, Sam Philips’ 1954 tape echo slap, the Shure 1968 vocal master PA system and more.
“The Digital Delay Line was the first piece of digital audio equipment to make its way into recording studios,” said Eventide founder, Richard Factor. “Until 1971, all signal processing equipment was analog. When Eventide introduced the DDL 1745, it ushered in the digital age. Today digital audio is ubiquitous. The DDL 1745 spearheaded that revolution.”
The Eventide DDL 1745 now resides in the NAMM TECnology HOF.
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