Just about a year ago I published an article entitled “Obscure Mechanical Reverbs of the 70s.” Included in this this survey was the Quad-8 RV-10. Now, y’all know how much I love spring reverb (also here…), so I was pleasantly surprised when I received a phone call from one J. VanLeer (his photo at left), who claimed to be the inventor of this obscure device. In VanLeer’s words:
“When with the HAMMOND ORGAN CO. I worked on spring reverb tanks – after HAMMOND closed, these were made first by GIBBS, and OC ELECTRONICS than ACCUTRONICS who sold out to BELTON (Korea) and now a Chinese firm MOD makes spring tanks. The RV-10 still sounds the best ’cause it makes use of 4 different (length, diameter & wire gauge) rather that 2 or 3 with only difference in length.”
Vanleer patented this unique twist on spring-reverb technology and then apparently leased said license to Quad-Eight. By his reckoning at least 357 of these units were sold. VanLeer sent me via post the original product-sheet for the RV10. I reproduce those here for your edification and downloading: QuadEight_RV10
Below are some photos of the interior of the RV10 (from an eBay listing that ended in January 2014 at $446). The parts and build quality is extremely high – with hefty input/output transformers, and a UTC O-series (inside an O-17 case), which I presume is the recovery-pickup transformer.
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ed. note: Mr. VanLeer had quite a long and interesting career as an innovator of electro-acoustic devices; click here for an article about his career (use Google Translate to translate into your own reading language).
4 replies on “The Quad-Eight RV10 outboard spring reverb unit of 1972”
Dear Chris,
It used to be that on the top right of the original Dutch language article of the “mfbfreaks” site, one could click ENGLISH and a computerized translation would
appear, sometimes awkward and hilarious like instruction of Chinese made items.
I cannot get this feature anymore and as a computer illiterate, don’t know how to advise interested parties to read this in English.
Thank you for mentioning this !!
JOHAN VANLEER.
Hello Johan. It is easy to do. Simply go to http://translate.google.com/ and paste the URL http://www.mfbfreaks.com/geschiedenis/johan-van-leer-philips-pick-up-pionier/ into the text-box on the left. Then hit the blue ‘translate’ button on the right side of the page. Good luck, c.
Excellent piece!
I’ve just picked up one of these .. shall have to see if it works..
I have 2 RV10s-they are unique and incredibly good sounding.