Hawk HE-2150A Open Reel Tape Echo

These are becoming increasingly hard to find in good condition and many we’ve seen of late have been either beyond economic repair or showing signs of having lived very hard lives. It’s great to see one like this again in great condition showing few signs of use.

We’ve undoubtedly restored more of these Hawk tape delays (both the mono HE-2150 and stereo HE-2250) than anyone else. There are no parts available so we have to sacrifice machines in order to fix others. They require extensive recapping and testing of other components as the build quality is more “hifi” than “pro-audio”. They are tricky to set up and the journey to perfect the tape loop for them has been far from easy. But they really do sound as wonderful as they look – both the echoes and the preamps are great.

Spare tapes: we will supply some but if you need more get in touch. They are not simple to make (we can use our Roland tape, but can’t use the same splice technique) however we will provide them for our machines. If you source them elsewhere please be very careful with tape stock as abrasive tape will wear down the heads on these.

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MORE HAWK INFO:

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.

We love Hawk machines – read about some of them in our Hawk/Mirano tape echo and spring reverb blog post.