Strymon Volante – Magnetic Echo Machine
$899.00
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Delivering truly exceptional sound quality and intuitive playability, Volante is designed to radically enhance the sonic expressiveness of your pedalboard. Featuring magnetic drum echo, tape echo, and reel-to-reel studio echo, Volante is a stereo multi-head delay that also offers a Sound on Sound mode and a vintage spring reverb algorithm. The Volante’s powerful sound-sculpting controls provide limitless sonic possibilities.
Three Vintage Echo Machines.
- Drum Delay With Unprecedented Control -
Magnetic drum echoes are famous for their warmth and for their harmonically rich and saturated sounds. This is due in large part to the many tube stages present in the most sought-after units. There were tubes in the input buffer, the signal mixer, the record and playback amplifiers, the tone shaping circuit, and the output mixing circuit.
Every sonic aspect of our favorite drum echoes has been meticulously reproduced within Volante. Dial in any possible sound from the full range of the best vintage drum echo units in conditions ranging from fresh-from-factory to road-worn classic.
- Classic Tape Echo Experience -
Volante gives you superbly crafted multi-head tape echoes, including the smooth tape saturation and the characteristic imperfections and nonlinearities inherent to the sound of those vintage machines.
Mechanical alignment, head wear, and tape crinkles, splices, and contaminants are all accounted for in Volante, giving you all the richness and complexity of a classic tape echo, with modern control and stability. Volante also allows you to recreate the irregular head spacing of some of the classic tape echo machines.
- True Studio Tape Sound -
The professional reel-to-reel machines of the 50s and 60s were high-fidelity units built to accurately reproduce full-range audio signals. In the hands of creative engineers, these machines also doubled as some of the earliest studio effects, producing some of the fattest sounds imaginable.
Of Volante’s three magnetic echo types, the Studio Echo provides the cleanest sound, able to sustain the highest number of repeats with minimal degradation. Volante gives you a pristine studio delay with the full-bodied warmth and fidelity of reel-to-reel tape.
Vintage Vibe.
To capture the nuance and complexity of classic tape and drum echo machines, every last magnetic delay system attribute was relentlessly studied and faithfully recreated. From the sought-after natural saturation and soft clipping of magnetic media when driven hard, to hands-on real-time controls for mechanics, wear, head-spacing, and low cut, Volante instantly adds tons of vibe to your sound.
Magnetic Record Head Saturation.
Not only does Volante deliver the warm, luscious delay signals that magnetic echo machines are known for, it is also capable of a high degree of saturation. Turn up the Record Level knob to increase the gain of Volante’s analog class-A JFET input preamp circuit, sending a hot signal with analog warmth to the record head for any amount of saturation you desire.
Completely Analog Dry Path.
In a typical digital effect the dry signal gets converted to digital, causing conversion noise and latency. Signals are often attenuated before combining digital dry and wet, with makeup gain amplifying the conversion noise. To avoid this, Strymon have equipped Volante with a completely analog dry path, featuring all-analog, ultra low noise, discrete, class-A stereo JFET preamps. Volante is truly a studio-quality effect.
Dedicated Spring Reverb.
For Volante, Strymon captured this vintage vibe while creating a spring reverb algorithm with a gorgeous, gentle character that stands on its own, in addition to enhancing delayed signals.
Instant Access to Eight Presets.
Even without using MIDI, Volante gives you instant access to eight presets. The playback/feedback buttons represent preset locations, and you can use the FAVORITE footswitch to recall from or save to any of those eight locations. Of course, if eight is not enough, MIDI gives you access to 300 preset locations!
Sound on Sound with Magnetic Personality.
Create dynamic loops that degrade and evolve. Change loop direction at the touch of a footswitch.
Press PAUSE for a mechanical tape stop effect. Change the speed of your loop and simultaneously change the pitch in octave increments.
Find an inspiring sound in Echo Mode, and all your echoes remain intact when you engage Sound on Sound.
When your loop has reached the perfect state of mutation, you can engage Infinite Repeats to minimize further loop degradation, creating an infinite loop while disengaging the loop record head.
Specifications
- Multi-head magnetic media delay machine providing four playback heads with individual feedback, panning, and level controls
- Processor-intense algorithms deliver meticulously nuanced recreations of vintage magnetic echo systems (drum echo, tape echo, studio reel-to-reel echo)
- Dedicated control over echo machine tone and media: Low Cut, Mechanics, Wear
- Input Record Level for clean reproduction to warm, fat saturation
- Independent Spring Reverb
- Sound on Sound looping mode (mono) with reverse, pause, splice, and infinite repeat functions
- High impedance stereo input
- Stereo output
- Input Level switch allows for both instrument and line level signals
- On, Favorite, and Tap Tempo footswitches
- Expression pedal input allows the connection of an expression pedal, external tap pedal, 1/4″ to MIDI cable, or MultiSwitch Plus.
- Full featured MIDI in/out supporting MIDI CCs, program changes, and more
- USB jack for controlling MIDI via computer
- Analog dry path for a zero latency dry signal that is never converted to digital
- Premium JFET analog front end
- Ultra low noise, high performance 24-bit 96kHz A/D and D/A converters provide uncompromising audio quality
- Super high performance SHARC DSP
- 32-bit floating point processing
- 20Hz to 20kHz frequency response
- Audio Input Impedance: 1M Ohm
- Audio Output Impedance: 100 Ohm
- True Bypass (electromechanical relay switching) or selectable transparent Analog Buffered Bypass
- Strong and lightweight anodized olive green aluminum chassis
- 9V DC power supply included
- Power requirements: maximum 9 volts DC center-negative, with a minimum of 300mA of current
- Dimensions:
- 4.5″ deep x 7″ wide x 1.75″ tall
- 114.3 mm deep x 177.3 mm wide x 44.5 mm tall
- Designed and built in the USA
