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 in excellent working order.

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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 only flaws to note are a small crack (hard to see) by one of the screws on the front perspex, two of the switches are replacements and the VU meter does not light up. If you want first look at the shots of this machine then get in touch.

We’ve got seriously into these Hawk machines over the last year or so – read about some of 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: