I have heard that the chips in Analog Delays are no longer available. Whats up with that?
That is true, Panasonic was making them until about 1999, now the Panasonic chips are all discontinued. Panasonic told me that the BBD (Bucket brigade) chips were originally made for use in their own products – for reverb and echo in TV sets and other audio products like karaoke. Matsushita owns/makes Panasonic and hundreds of other brands. Now that they are using digital in all their products they no longer need the analog chips, and the other companies who were buying them do not buy enough to make it feasable to keep production going. These chips use about a thousand capacitors (i.e. 1024 in an SAD1024 or MN3007) and electronic switches in each one to pass the analog signal value through the “bucket brigade”. Not high tech but a very specialized part. There are some Chinese low voltage BBD chips being made now and used in most mass produced and boutique analog delays. EH is still using the old chips for now. We had some high delay time chips made for our Analog Man AR20DL Analog Del
