The EMT 250 and 244 Digital Reverbs

Download the original product-sheets for the EMT 250 Digital Reverb and its baby bro the 244:

That giant 99-lb star-wars-lookin thing above is an EMT 250. Ten years ago I was working on a session at Ocean Way Nashville and they still had one of these things right next to the console. Anyone out there still using a 250 in the studio? The 250 uses 12-bit, 24k convertors, which means that both input and output are low-passed at 11Khz.

This brings up a good point about reverb in general: you don’t need a lot of hi-end to create good-sounding reverb for most applications… I always keep some sort of low-pass filter active in my reverb returns to trim off anything that’s not contributing in a meaningful way. Luckily, even the most basic reverb plug-ins tend to have a low-pass adjustment built in. My $0.02: use it!

Very interesting to read this: so apparently the 250 uses 19 different taps, with feedback only on some of them.

The lesser-known 244 (i’ve personally never seen one, FWIW) uses 13 bit convertors; no sampling rate is specified, but given that the frequency response is stated between 30hz and 8khz, it’s likely around 20k.

To you veteran engineers out there: was the 250 the first high-quality digital reverb? Were there any earlier units that you have used? Let us know,,,

chris