We checked out what EHX’s founder Mike Matthews has called the most anticipated and ambitious project since opening shop in 1968
Here we have Electro – Harmonix’s aka EHX’s Pico NYC DSP range of 9 brand new pedals.
We tested out the Pitch Fork polyphonic pitch shifter, The Ocean 3-verb featuring three kinds of reverb, the Canyon Echo delay pedal, The Deep Freeze freeze pedal, the Attack Decay filter, the Triboro Bridge overdrive, distortion and fuzz, The Rerun Tape Delay, Platform, a “studio style” compressor and limiter, and the classic POG polyphonic octave generator.
Each of these units has harnessed DSP, digital signal processing, to produce tiny, pedal board friendly versions of EHX units, and all are completely comprehensive pieces, whilst being only 93 by 31mm.
Hold tight while I talk about miniaturisation for a sec.
Moore’s law, conceived by Gordon Moore from Fairchild in 1965, observes that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit chip doubles every year.
He revised this in 1975 to the transistors doubling every two years. And he’s pretty much been right ever since.
So, thanks to the tiny size of the ICs that can now be produced, EHX is able to cram a micro box with a fully featured digital pedal.
And because it’s the titans at EHX, they haven’t skimped on the sound of these things.
Now, I’m pretty suspicious of digital versions of what are generally effects produced by analog processes, especially drive, distortion and fuzz.
I feel like the digital based units like the freeze, the digi delay, or even the tape delay emulation are all pretty solid.
Although I don’t know if the Triboro Bridge would be my first choice for my distortion needs in the future. But besides that, these all turned out really cool!
The prices on these range from $369 Australian for the Platform compressor/limiter through to $649 for the POG (secretly our favourite).
You can learn more by checking out the Electro-Harmonix website.
