OK, I searched but couldn't find much information relating to tape echo here. I know that a few of you use it (or have done in the past), so I am going to irritate you with questions.

It hasn't arrived yet, but I recently bought a Dynacord Echocord Mini over eBay. I have no idea as to its usability, just that it had a poor choice of keywords ("echo" being the only one that gave it away) and I was the only bidder, scoring it for about $55. I think it's worth a gamble at that price. The seller said that it once belonged to a prominent Australian band... I've no idea how she came to have it and I don't care who may have owned it, but it's been kept in a custom wooden case that should have protected it better than the usual garage find.

There's a decent YouTube demo here... it takes a couple of minutes to get going if you're thinking of watching it.

So... there seems quite a lot to like about the Echocord. The play head is mounted on a slider, so changes in echo speed don't require a corresponding change in tape speed. There are separate tone controls for the guitar signal and the echo... that alone does it for me, as it'd cost a fair bit to get the equivalent in an analog delay (like a Diamond Memory Lane, or the much cheaper but I'm-still-waiting-for-it-to-be-released Malekko 919). Tape loops seem reasonably easy to come by as they don't follow some weird proprietary format.

However, the connections are all DIN 5-Pin. This unit was manufactured in Germany from 1966 to 1979, so the older European hi-fi standards apply. It seems a little difficult to source DIN to 6.5 mm jack cables unless I want to order expensive ones from the UK (I don't). Perhaps I need to search more thoroughly. Would it be a major undertaking to change the DIN inputs to regular 6.5 mm inputs? My electronic wizardry extends only as far as turning things on and off and yanking out tubes. I suspect there's no power cord either, but from photos it looks to be a standard electrical appliance socket at the back.

I've grabbed a few bits of information that have been scanned in -- schematics and the like -- but they're mostly in German. There's quite a lot of Dynacord gear selling through the German arm of eBay, so I'd be most interested to hear from anybody from that part of the world who may have come across their products before.

I had a Univox EC80 in the 70's, It was very cool and hissy, but it was really cool. I had a Maestro Echoplex too. A lot more features, but again, a bit hissy and had a cool warble. Tapes are a bit harder to get now. Some people splice their own and rebuild the carts.

They are analog to the bone. Fulltone makes an Echoplex clone and at least at one point limited sales of the tapes to their customers. None od the tape echos are real quiet, but they are a lot of fun.

Personally I would look for the Roland Space Echo, the Fulltone or Echoplex. Roland also makes a digital Space Echo that actually does the wobble thing pretty well.

Good l luck with it, I hope it works well for you.

The watkins copycat was (and still is, in many respects) the echo unit in the uk. I dont think tape echo's differ too much one from another. Have a look at the following link and see if any of it equates to your pedal.

http://www.watkinsguitars.co.uk/copicats.htm

I'd drop em a mail and see if they can help you out, even if its to point you towards someone else.

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No no and no

heh... I have certainly lusted after all of those at one time or another. This was very much an impulse buy after searching for analog delay pedals. I was (still am) interested in the Malekko 600 dark, but wasn't quite in the mood to drop $255 plus postage to Australia... even though that's a very reasonable price for a new hand-built delay pedal. I thought that this might tide me over and keep me occupied for a while, as long as I don't spend a small fortune on cables and replacement loops. Provided the thing works at all, that is. Worth the risk for the price. Space Echoes run to nearly $1000 here, and the Fulltone probably twice that (only one dealer that I know of), so I had resigned myself to never trying a tape echo.

I'm a longtime Maestro Echoplex (EP-3) owner/user.

The sound of a tape echo is the best, IMO.

I don't know anything about that Dynacord. You should be able to convert the inputs and outputs to standard phone plugs. Are you sure it doesn't require 220V mains? Is that the standard in Australia?

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Member #26797
My other guitar is a Strat.

Mains are 240V here, but most appliances are rated at 220-240V. There's a sort of rotary fuse thing at the back (well, that's what it looks like in photos) with markings for all the different voltages it may encounter. Since it was supposed to have belonged to an Australian band, I'm sure it's set up for the correct mains voltage. I can't help feeling that some hi-fi store out there has to have cables with male 5-Pin DIN connectors at one end and 6.5 mm jacks at the other... Tape can be had from mytapeecho.com if I can't find anywhere else, but it'll have to be posted from the U.K.

I do hope it's salvageable... I've got a list of things I want to try on it... freak myself out with sputnik sounds...

So power isn't a problem, good!

I Googled quite a few DIN plugs, so you could make your own cables, but the question would be figuring out which pin does what. How many connectors are on the back of the unit?

A single 5 pin connector could handle both input and output?

You'll have to scope it out carefully!

Another issue is condition of the tape.

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Member #26797
My other guitar is a Strat.

So, it's update time... this thread is quickly going to become officially Worthless Without Pics soon, but I'll have to clean it up and work out what's what with it first. I hope my description isn't too baffling.

I had the Dynacord delivered to my workplace... the seller couldn't post it, so I organised a courier from her place to mine. I was impressed: about five dollars more than regular postage to get a heavy article delivered interstate overnight (that's Melbourne to Sydney for anyone who has ever dreamed of an Aussie roadtrip, the same distance as Land's End to John-O'Groats).

First impression was poor, as the chassis had apparently been home to a colony of moths at some time in the past thirty years. Upon closer inspection, the moths had been subsisting on the felt lining of the Plywood roadcase and had left the Dynacord unmolested apart from making a mess. Any electrical gear from that era probably needs a thorough blowing out anyway, I guess. My colleagues were all "If you can get that working, you are as a god to me... otherwise, what were you thinking?!"

Everything looks pretty much stock around the front, with the two previously-mentioned 5-pin DIN inputs. However, the back has been modified (presumably for the better) with two XLR inputs and a current-for-1975-but-now-utterly-bewildering mains power socket. Unless I can track down an appliance lead from the '70s I think I'd be best off getting someone to swap that out for a new socket. I can't even tell which of the wires connecting it is positive or negative... perhaps it doesn't matter. It's earthed, though, which I think was done when the socket was installed.

OK. The XLR inputs seem promising. The stock version of this box had two more 5-pin DINs, missing in mine. The XLRs have been installed right where the description of what each input does used to be. D'oh! Have the front input/outputs been relocated to the back, or are these ones Line Out and Amplifier? I'm not sure why anyone would elect to keep a mixture of connections like that, unless they just couldn't work out a way to go from DIN to PA / Amp. I'm hoping that the basic input/output connections are now around the back as XLR to 6.5mm jack is something I can work with.

There is, as an afterthought, what appears to be a stock 6.5mm jack down the bottom which could be for a footswitch.

So, I suppose the first thing on the list is to work out some way to get this baby powered up, and then I'll have to start thinking about the tape transport (if it turns on at all!)... The heads don't look too bad to my untrained eye, and the rubber roller attached to the motor hasn't dried or cracked. The tape loop itself is probably useless, but that'll be easy to replace if the rest of the machine looks like behaving...

I'll come back when I have some pictures. Apart from anything else, it's quite an entertaining item, but it would look better with the front panel moodily backlit by those two globes I can see hidden just behind it... heh.

*edit* There's still a sticker on the back from the original dealer and sole Australian supplier of Dynacord products. The store was located in a suburb about ten minutes away from my house. I looked them up, and they're now trading from a slightly more upmarket suburb closer to the water but not far from their original location. I gave them a call, and they still seem to deal in PA gear. The girl who answered the phone just told me "I wasn't even born back then!"..heh. I'm really not sure what she thought I was asking of her. I was just curious, and happy to see that they were still in business in some form.