HAWK HE-2150A 5-HEAD ECHO UNIT

Another of these ridiculously good-looking, high quality Japanese tape echo units – a Hawk HE-2150A 5-Head Echo Unit fully serviced and excellent working order.

We’ve sold several of these machines now and since had rave reviews from the customer who bought one of them – he liked it so much he bought a second one!

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…

However, 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 with only minor signs of age. Click on the photos to zoom in and see more shots.

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 HE-2150 we posted to our Instagram:

• It is a 100v Japanese model and needs to be run at 100v only
• A step-down transformer is required for use on North American or European supplies..
• We do not recommend using cheap generic Chinese mains transformers – for 220/240v mains we can supply a high quality UK-made unit if required; for use on 120v supplies we recommend a converter like this.