Pittsburgh Analog Replicator

Cleaner, dirtier, brighter, darker, and more versatile than any other analog BBD delay line effects unit available. The Analog Replicator is the astounding result of over a year of ambitious design and engineering.

A New Beginning
The Analog Replicator was redesigned from scratch to be the finest analog delay available with a sound and feature set focused around the modular synthesizer.

Our original Analog Delay module grew out of the circuitry of a guitar pedal. The new Analog Replicator module does not share the same stompbox lineage. Michael Johnsen, Pittsburgh Modular’s analog engineer, created a modern BBD core fed by a unique clock source and proprietary signal processing circuits. The result is a flexible, more musical, eurorack delay module.

How It Works
At the heart of the Analog Replicator is a pair of 4,096 stage BBD chips. The name BBD stands for [B]ucket [B]rigade [D]evice in reference to a line of people passing buckets of water to quickly extinguish a fire. Each stage of a BBD chip contains a single capacitor. Pairing two chips together creates a chain of 8,192 capacitors. Like the water buckets, an audio signal is passed from capacitor to capacitor within the BBD chips once every clock step. A slower clock produces a longer delay and a faster clock produces a shorter delay.

Multi-Mode Delay
The controls of the Analog Replicator can be used to produce a wide range of delay effects. The STAGES switch flips between 4,096 and 8,192 BBD stages. 4,096 uses a single BBD chip and 8,192 uses two. Using both BBD chips doubles the available delay time, perfect for echos and longer delays. Using a single BBD is useful for reverb and chorus effects. The SHORT/LONG switch drastically adjusts the delay range. Using a single BBD, the SHORT range varies between 10ms and 175ms and the long range varies between 10ms and 1300ms. The SHORT mode produces bright, clean analog repeats. LONG mode is dark and grimy. Mud and clock noise (whine) begin to leak in and eventually take over as the Analog Replicator reaches the longest available delay time.

Chorus and Reverb
The design of the Analog Replicator allows it to mimic Chrous and Reverb effects. Setting the switches to 4,096 and SHORT, adjusting the TIME control to create shorter delays, and adding a small to medium amount of FEEDBACK, the Analog Replicator generates an analog reverb effect. Add modulation using the TIME CV IN to take advantage of a range of chrous like effects.

Delay Ranges
4,096 and SHORT Selected: 10ms to 175ms
8,192 and SHORT Selected: 20ms to 350ms

4,096 and LONG Selected: 10ms to 1300ms (1.3 seconds)
8,192 and LONG Selected: 20ms to 2600ms (2.6 seconds)