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Looper's Delight
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Hi John:<<<<
We are not connected with Gibson, just fans of the original Oberheim Echoplex Digital Pro. From our perspective, the reason you aren't seeing advertising for the "reintroduced" Gibson Echoplex is because the roll-out has been, ahem, bumpy. This is just our perspective, but bear with us for anecdotal evidence.
We ordered and received one of the first of the new batch of Gibson Echoplex Digital Pros. It turned on just twice and ran for about ten minutes before the power supply went south. We sent it back to Gibson for repair, asking that they look at the power supply. It came back two weeks later with a changed fuse, and nothing else done. It promptly refused to turn-on. At this point, we sent it back to the dealer with the promise that we would be one of the first to receive one of the next batch to arrive from Gibson's supplier, Trace Elliot in England. We waited, and waited, and waited...finally, a month or so ago, we got tired of waiting. We were told no one knew if and when Echoplex's would appear again in the USA. Would we like our old one back, this time with a properly repaired power supply? Grudgingly, and because we love M. Grobb's work of genius, we agreed.
We got it back two weeks ago. Power supply worked, but now there were digital nastys that crackled with every loop. We sent it back again. Stay tuned.
We offer this as a real world case of what's going on with Gibson's "reintroduction" of what was a brilliant and relatively road worthy piece of equipment when produced under the original management at Oberheim. (Yes, we bought an original Oberheim Echoplex in 1997, it wasn't perfect but worked as advertised and it was amazing!) As for the Gibson Echoplex...advertising? To paraphrase...they don't need no stinkin' advertising because what the hell is there to advertise? There's no product, and we suspect that there are still, ahem, a lot of bugs to be worked out in getting there manufacturing act together with Trace Elliot, or there has been a change in corporate strategy. If someone with more knowledge about what's going on with Gibson and the Echoplex has evidence to the contrary, please post. We'd love to stand corrected and we'd love to have, after forking out our dough, (and all the UPS shipping bills for repairs,) a genuine, operable, musical, quiet, functioning Gibson Echoplex! (You know, kinda like the original Oberheim!)
There are some other interesting if less sophisticated loopers out there, and hopefully more sophisticated loopers on the horizon. We hope Gibson gets their act together, but I think you can understand why we are rooting, strongly, for some good solid competition. Also, we hope the original Echoplex Digital Development team will offer a pc and Mac "plug-in" soon, since we have confidence in the software, it's just this darned Gibson hardware that's giving us hiccups.
Best,
Roctologists (AKA LoOpdOctors)