Analog Delay. The kind of you thing you just can’t understand until you have had your hands on one. These were eventually replaced by digital delays due to the digital delay having longer delay times and crisp exact delays with no signal loss. Then, like most things analog, people realized that the analog delay had a certain character that wasn’t easily replicated digitally and that both digital AND analog were cool and could co-exist with one another and all was good with the world.

The Ibanez Time Machine is a table top analog delay not easily fit into either a rack or a pedal board. I’m assuming Ibanez were thinking “on top of amp” would be a great place for these. It has one 1/4″ mono input jack, variable pad switch for the input signal, two 1/4″ mono outputs (dry plus delay and wet only), and seven pots controlling input level, tone, delay time, regeneration (feedback), blend and two for a flanger mode “width” and “speed”.

Here is what I have to say about the AD190 flanger mode. It has a switch. That switch turns on the flanger. The delay is bypassed when flanging. There are two knobs to fuck with the flange. I’m not a flanger fan so we will not be flanging today. That is all I will write about the flanger.

Delay. The BEST. EFFECT. EVER. MADE. It makes everything sounds better. EVERYTHING. If I could delay my late night chinese food delivery it might make that taste better. The “tone” knob on this does what you’d expect but the need for it ebbs and flows as the tone is also radically altered with “delay time” knob. The longer the delay time the darker the tone gets. There is significant loss in upper frequencies with long delay times even with the tone knob turned up all the way but this is not a bad thing. The delayed signals are dark, warm and muddy. You get a gooey mess of a delay that doesn’t fight for your original signals bandwidth and is extremely pleasant to listen to. The shorter the delay time, the brighter the delayed signal and the greater the effect of the “tone” knob. The “regeneration” knob is your delay feedback that will take you from a pleasant one or two delays to a monstrous gain-heavy feedback loop cycle that is more than capable of destroying the finest of well… anything. Watch your gears and ears people. This thing gets loud and rude FAST. It’s awesome. It’ll even start feeding back on it’s own signal path noise without anything being fed into it which makes the AD190 a capable noise generating instrument unto itself in the correct hands.

The bottom line? You like delays? Get it. You like noise? Get it. Want better food? I’m sure this will help.

-Chvad SB