Retro Delay

In my opinion, this is the best free VST effect that came out in 2004. It truely is a jewel.

This delay delivers, big time, and it is the only delay that I use now. I got rid of the 15 other free delay plugins I had installed because this one surpasses them in so many ways.. It has a beautiful sound, great features, and a cool GUI.

I still want to get the commercial Ohmforce Ohmboyz delay, because it has a character of it's own, and has that unique Ohmforce flavor, but even when I do get it, I know that I will still use Retrodelay for a more traditional delay sound.. this is the best folks..

e-Phonic could charge a decent amount of money for it, and it still blows my mind to know that it is free.

Do yourself a favor: Download it. You will never look back. It's hard to put it in words. Just try it! You should immediately notice how special it is..

okay, KVR requires 1000 characters minimum for a review but I have said what I had to say, so I will say it again:

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You think of a delay and what comes to your mind? an effect that simply repeats the imput audio signal. forget about it when you consider Retro Delay. It's a lot much more.

Retro Delay is a plug in by e-phoniq, and as such you can expect it's great. not simply good. amazing. why?

well, first it's a delay so it repeats the signal. right. what else? there are a lot of delays, many of them free and some of them quite good. Well, Retrodelay is full of features. first it has a reverb, a distortion, filters (lowpass, highpass, bandpass, etc), it has a LFO with lots of different parameters. and it is still a delay.

But it's not a delay for those who just expect a repetition. when you try passing your audio signal through it you must be ready to experiment, cos that's what this plug in is for. the delay repetition can be looped forwards and backwards, the included reverb and distortion and lfo and filters are inviting you to experiment. it's capable of giving new life to your drums, to your bass, pads, etc.

it's free. yeah, lots of free stuff so that doesn't surprise you. what if I tell you this is one of the really top delays including payware ones?

the gui is clear, and no matter the number of presets may be limited, since this plug in is demanding your own touch of experimentalism.

I use this plugin in most of my songs. a hint: duplicate your percussion and put one of them through Retrodelay in a slightly lower volume and experiment. it will add life to your drums, I can tell you.

enjoy it.

If I only had one fx plugin in my VST folder, this would probably be it. The GUI is lovely, and the combinations of delay and delicate mangling are endless fun. It's donationware so VFM is up to you, but I'd say a pretty heavy donation would be needed to make it score less than a 10. Cool presets, too. Some minor trouble initialising made me give it a low score on stability, but is probably unfair as the fault could be with my host (Tracktion).

What! No reviews!

RetroDelay certainly deserves one. It's free and it has tons of character. It's also one of the more flexible delays available even for money. The names gives you an obvious hint - old-style delay with a filter to let you dampen the delays aka tape delays. But there is far more than that. You can make modFX such as phasing, chorusing, flanging; filters not only lowpass but all the other types you could reasonably want. Saturation to grunge it up, distortion to destroy it, reverb to dub it up. For many at KvR, you'll probably find that Ohmboyz by OhmForce is high up on their list of delays (and with good reason) - well it has another competitor now, and it's free! It isn't actually a direct competitor, becuase RetroDelay has its own distinct character - it's not quite as madly flexible as Ohmboyz, but nevertheless there ain't much you can't do with it. CHARACTER - that's the key word. You can give real flavour to your delays - it's not a sparkly clean echomachine.

Sounds & Feautures - to business then. Can be made to really dirty up delays - saturation is mild and the distortion is dirty, but useable. Added bonus of a limiter to control the peaks - which WILL happen if you set it extremely with lots of resonance on the filter etc. This makes it invaluable as a big dub delay - you can have simply huge echoes lasting minutes with loads of feedback and filtering without overloading your host. Bloody marvellous!
The filters are sweet sounding - LPF, BPF, HPF, low-shelf & high-shelf. They have a particularly sweet spot in the lowermids and mids - which is exactly where any big delay is going to have its biggest impact - big delays work perfectly for that reason on vocals, stabs, guitars etc. And drums for dub .......seriously - if you make dub, you'll be in absolute heaven with RetroDelay - it is the best delay for dub I have yet come across in the VST world. The reverb is just grungy and grainy enough, there's a panic button to fade out delays when you're done feedingback to buggery (and the panic has a time setting too - so your fadeout can be smooth over several seconds - Bliss!)
The filters are sweet, the limiter is extremely handy, you can temposync it, crossfeed it for ping-pong, set it by ear, switch to v.small delay times for modFX such as flanging, reverse delays too! You can apply an LFO or env to the filter as well as resonant feedback, you can LFO delaytime to make pitched FX. And you can switch on or off all or any of those features - seriously - this is one very heavy duty delay. e-phonic deserves a blowjob for giving us this delay for free (but I'm not offering).

GUI - sweet. Easy on the eye, well laid out, nothing there that shouldn't be, and nothing that should be there that isn't.

Stability & CPU - can use CPU strongly IF you use all of the features, but that's not unreasonable. Rock-solid.

This gives ANY commercial delay (inc h/w) a bloody good run for its money (can you tell I love it?). I love it.