Product Description
We've restored more of these Hawk tape delays (both the mono HE-2150 and the incredible HE-2250) than anyone else. We've had to sacrifice some unrecoverable machines in order to have the parts to fix others. Our BBC-trained engineer is a tape expert, and we guarantee that our machines are reliable and sound as good as they can sound, which is very good indeed. (We like them so much we even made a t-shirt featuring 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…
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'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.
MORE 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'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.