So if you’ve been watching a couple of big announcements have just been made in the analog delay world:

Boss has released the DM-101 delay. Long delay, many chips, much luscious modulation, stereo out, different modes, midi control. There are several gushing demos online, and I agree that it sounds great. It’s got that special something to my ears that most of the Memory Mans have. I had just discovered my digital delay has a bad output in one side that day, so I took it as a sign from from the guitar gods (probably The Edge) and preordered it.

Here’s the complication though… EAE had also just announced a killer BBD delay the Sending V2 which also has long times, modulation, midi, but also has a preamp (which they seem to do a superb job at), ramping, “better” BBD CHIPS, and an FX loop. There are only a couple of sound clips so far, and it sounds good, but doesn’t really excite me like listening to a Memory Man or the DM-101 did. It also doesn’t have stereo out, but to be fair the BOSS only has mono in, so it is a little problematic coming after my stereo mod too. Lastly it is even more expensive than the $500 Boss at $650.

Can I overcome the lack of an fx loop and preamp by running the BOSS in parallel with mod and reverb in kill dry mode and putting whatever effects I want there? Is this a bad idea for any reason (besides $)? What do you think of the sounds and what the merits and shortcomings of these delays are? Should I just get a Memory Man 1100TT?

  • Baron Von JMEnglish
    2•1 year ago

    I’ve been going down this rabbit hole myself lately. I wouldn’t swap out a mono in/stereo (dm101) out delay with mono in/out (sending, memory man). The stereo in and lack of on-pedal warp/twist footswitches made me lean towards the re202 over the dm101, even though the re202 doesn’t have stereo panning and you should be able to use an expression pedal to approximate warp/twist.

    The only drawback to the parallel signal chain is that you won’t have those other effects on the repeats, but the dm101 does have it’s own modulation so you’re not left with totally dry repeats.