HAWK HE-2150 5-HEAD ECHO UNIT

Another of these ridiculously good-looking Japanese tape echo units – a Hawk HE-2150 5-Head Echo Unit fully serviced and excellent working order. Price inc 20% VAT (see below).

The last three of these units sold very quickly and we’ve since had rave reviews from the customer who bought one of them and liked it so much he bought a second one.

NOTE The photos in this listing are of a previous unit. The current one is currently with the tape tech, but it is in excellent condition and does not have the cracks in the perspex (apart from one very small one that you won’t see without getting up close). Get in touch if you want to see photos of this unit – however, if you buy it in order to reserve it we will of course send you some shots before it ships anyway.

Mid-seventies Japanese manufacturer Hawk Technical Works Co Ltd put out a range of tape echoes and spring reverbs branded Hawk/Mirano aimed squarely at domestic home recordists. We were immediately intrigued on first sighting the Hawk HE-2150 open reel style tape echo: even if it sounded bad, it was one of the coolest tape echoes we’d seen. Classic clean seventies hifi styling and backlit vu meter below twin aluminium spools spinning behind the translucent smoked (aubergine!) plastic dust-cover; adds a dose of classic Bond villain lair to any studio…

It doesn’t just look cool: serviced and fitted with new custom tape loops, this five head echo sounds as good as it looks. With three switchable replay heads – Off, Super-Repeat (at 0db), Repeat & Swell (at -6db) – and controls for tape speed, input level (for echo and dry signal), echo level/repeat/tone and master output – this is a full-featured tape echo. The sound is somewhat classier than the contemporary Ace Tone EC-20 – with which it shares a similar feature set – especially when driven into self-oscillation; this is yet another distinct flavour of tape echo – flexible and with a very pleasing sound quality indeed.

The condition is excellent: the veneer is looking great with only one significant ding which is on a back corner so not visible from the front at all; there is one small crack in the perspex next to one of the screws but you have to get up close to see it.

We landed a selection of these vintage Japanese machines recently – read all about them in our Hawk/Mirano tape echo and spring reverb blog post.

Here’s a quick demo of another recent HE-2150 we posted to our Instagram:

Price includes VAT at 20% (for sales in UK/EU) – buyers outside the EU please contact us for tax-free prices. VAT-free sales possible to businesses and individuals in the EU (outside the UK) with a valid VAT Number.