Empress Vintage Modified Superdelay
Empress is known for making high quality, versatile stomp boxes, but they have truly outdone themselves with this pedal. They have packed an immense amount of functionality and some truly gorgeous sounds into a relatively small footprint. This pedal is a spectacular sounding piece of engineering.
External Control: EXP
Cost: $$$
HornFX Review
Interface: 3/5
Although this pedal’s vast array of functions are laid out on a chart on the front of the pedal, it can be difficult and complicated to fluidly use and understand the interactions between the knobs, switches, and modes. The tap tempo and preset switches do make up for the pedal’s complicated interface at least a little bit.
Versatility: 4.5/5
This pedal has an immense amount delay types and modes, including looping and various styles of tape delay that can all be tweaked using multiple parameters.
Tonal Reproduction: 4.5/5
This pedal, at its cleanest setting, reproduces tone and sound with marvellous integrity and clarity. It sounds gorgeous. The ability to manipulate tone and sound with individual parameters and with modes cannot be taken for granted either. This pedal can achieve many wonderful different tonal and sonic textures.
Complexity: High
Live application: 4/5
Although creating new delay settings can be tough on the fly, the 8 available preset banks make that less of an issue. The settings and modes vary greatly, but are mostly useful for performances of many styles.
Product Information
Rich, lush tape delay in an incredibly small box. 3 flavors of tape age let you choose how dark and gritty the repeats will get while filter and modulation controls allow for even more fine tuning. Tap tempos with ratio multiplier mean rhythms like dotted eights are all at your fingertips.
Now with an analog dry path, the Tape Delay is packed with features, all accessible from the advanced configuration mode. Presets can store all your settings and be recalled at the touch of a button, making switching live fast and easy.
Features
Killer Sound Quality - The Signal to Noise ratio is around 105dB.
2.8 Seconds of Delay Time - For your extra long delays.
8 modes - normal, tap, autoset (delay time is set by tempo played), reverse, rhythm mode (multitap), tape mode, misc (dynamic, gate), and 11 second looper.
Expression Pedal Input - allows you to control either mix or feedback with your foot.
High Pass/Low Pass Filter - high pass is good for electronic music, low pass is sweet for darker analog delay type sounds.
Fast/Slow Modulation - slow adds extra texture, fast is a little crazy.
8 Presets - Settings can be saved to 8 presets. With three stompswitches, accessing the presets is easy.
Tap Tempo with Ratios - many of the modes use tap tempo, and the ratio selection makes fast in-time delay times easy.
True Bypass - The Empress Superdelay employs true bypass, so you can be sure that it's not affecting the signal when disengaged.
Small Size - The enclosure measures approximately 5.7" by 3.75" by 1.75", which is delightfully small when considering all the features packed into this unit.
Specifications
Power Input Voltage 9 - 12 V DC (Positive tip)
Power Input Connector 2.1mm barrel connector (Positive tip)
Power Consumption ~300mA
Enclosure Material Die Cast Aluminum
Input connector 1/4" Jack
Output connector 1/4" Jack
Height (Enclosure only) 1.75"
Height (including controls) 2.25"
Length 5.7"
Width 3.75"
weight 1.5 lb
Signal to noise ratio 105dB
Product info from the Empress website.