Frequently asked questions
Who are we, and how did it all start?
Echoline Pedals is run by Andrew James (with a little help from my wife on the solder station!). An ex-touring backline tech based in Surrey, England, and self confessed gear-obsessed guitar player since my youth - I’ve also been in the UK guitar retail & repair industry for over 20 years.
Echoline was born from my desire to create UK made, quality guitar pedals without compromise, yet also without the unfairly high price tag charged by many others. We’ve achieved this whilst solving the technical issues with build quality, integration and noise that we have often found in many of our favourite pedals during home, studio and live stage situations.
I’ve been lucky enough to own and work on some of the best and most desirable vintage and modern equipment ever made, and my obsession led me to begin designing and creating my own products back in 2008.
What parts do we use?
We use various full size through-hole components, depending on the circuit and critical locations within. A mix of Wima and Kemet capacitors, 1% metal film resistors, Texas Instruments op-amps / transistors, NOS 1970’s military spec germanium diodes, NOS paper-in-oil capacitors, Japanese carbon comp resistors, Alpha pots, Neutrik jacks, etc. We proudly use lead-free silver solder and are fully RoHS compliant.
Where we can, we use British companies to help design and manufacture our parts. Our PCBs are custom designed and manufactured in Newbury, and our faceplates are custom made and laser-etched for us in Southampton. We order the bulk of our components from UK based suppliers, our artwork is drawn by a good friend of ours in Brighton, and even our web design / photography is looked after by local independent teams.
What does NOS mean?
NOS means ‘New Old Stock’. These are parts that were manufactured back in the good old days, but were never used (so are effectively brand new). NOS parts are desirable because they were often built to a higher standard using special materials that are no longer available today. They can be critical in certain stages of a circuit to achieve vintage and classic tone, and we search the globe to find these rare parts.
Why do our pedals use Buffers?
Line Drivers, Class A Buffers, Vitalizers… part of our initial design brief was to avoid this type of pre-amp and use True-Bypass switching for our pedals, but we ran in to the usual problems; switching noise, pedalboard tonal inconsistencies, mismatched impedance etc.
My most recent setup was a reissue Gibson ’63 335, a handwired Vox AC30, and three metres of quality cable each side of my pedalboard (with three True-Bypass pedals on it). This was as much as I could shrink the signal path for rehearsal and live use. When I added in a pedal with a quality transparent buffer (first in the chain, as a test) I couldn’t believe the difference… the top end presence returned, the fragile harmonics returned, and most importantly the feel and attack returned. This allowed me to perform and sound like I normally would with that amazing AC30 tone I’d achieved when plugged straight in to the amp with no pedals.
It frustrated me, but it just sounded better. It sounded like nothing was missing this time… and I was converted!
By utilising this transparent, critically acclaimed ‘Class A line driver’ circuit in each of our pedals it has eliminated problems with impedance and switching noise while retaining tonal consistency whether the pedal is engaged or not, and even improved the sound and performance of other pedals in the chain.
The circuit achieves this by showing your guitar pickups the same impedance that you would have if you plugged straight in to your amplifier, therefore preserving your original signal strength, tone, dynamics and detail. Our design is also fully screened with RFI / EMI suppressing components.
It’s a bit of a boring subject (let’s be honest) but sometimes if you sweat the details early on, then everything later is just… better!
Why did we discontinue the big box versions to make the smaller V2.0 pedals?
Put simply, we listened to you. You asked us for smaller pedals at a better price point, but without sacrificing tone and quality. While we still love the big box versions we made, they were extremely time-consuming to produce and expensive for our customers to buy.
We had to go right back to the drawing board to make it happen, and redesign / engineer the pedals from scratch. The process took much longer than we originally anticipated, but they had to be perfect. The V2.0 pedals are still made by hand in the UK using the finest components available, and are now available at a much more player-friendly price. We nailed it!
Anything else?
If you have any questions at all, then why not get in touch using our contact form? Andrew will personally get back to you within 24 hours!