I JUST BOUGHT AN EMT 140
4YearGraduate
2,945 Posts
moving it across town and in morning - all 450lbs of it.PLEASE PLEASE KEEP US IN YOUR THOUGHTS - one false bump and the whole thing could come unsprung and ruin the driver inside. I am so shook right now. 11amPST it's on.Solid State model, Martinsound upgrade, mid-late 60's fabrication.450lbs 9' x 6' i think it's only appropriate: 
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what does it do?
http://mixonline.com/TECnology-Hall-of-Fame/EMT-140-reverb-090106/
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reverb happens when something vibrates so fast, the human ear can't distinguish between the vibrations. kind of like roget's theory of persistence of vision:
Let me know how it goes
in other models the piece of metal is an ultra thin coil of 18 carat gold, my mate is repairing one of those at the moment.
incredible machine, $$$$$$$$$$$$$
A friend of mine who's building an all-analogue studio bought one of these and had to drive it across the whole country - in winter with a car trailer. He told me how they had to climb an icey street up a hill and suddenly started sliding backwards down the hill. Somehow they managed to get the thing safe home and it works beautifully.
These pieces make such a diffrence in an recording. Digital reverb is getting nasty easily. I would always prefer analogue but I am not geeky enough (nor have money and space) to get a thing like an original plate reverb.
Usually when you have a 60s or 70s track and it has some strong reverb on it that doesn't sound natural but artificial in a cool way it's an analogue plate reverb (there where also some with iron springs and spirals).
The Mission to Mars album by Roland Kovac is a good example.
I have four spring reverb here, my favorite being the akg bx5 and 10. I passed on a bx20 to get the plate... It wasn't expensive necessarily because the guy needed to get rid of it and go to a good home, but they are getting really rare. Existing, working to spec units in the hundreds or less.
Think beck's Sea Change, release of an oathe, pet sounds, etc.
Fukkin nuts dude. Congrats.
very cool
Mix Magazine:
Today, with the proliferation of low- and high-end digital reverberation, room simulators and the like, it???s hard to recall a time when adding a little ???verb to a track was a complicated undertaking. Natural reverb has always been available, and it was always possible to create reverb while tracking using a distant room mic or placing your sound source in a reverberant space, such as a bathroom or stairwell. A few studios even went so far as to build reverb chambers???hard-surfaced rooms equipped with a mic or mics to pick up a speaker feed. Less well-heeled studios could always use their hallways in a pinch. However, electronic reverberation finally appeared with the debut of the Model 140 from German company EMT (Elektromesstechnik).
Developed by Dr. Walter Kuhl at the Institute for Broadcast Technology in Hamburg, the EMT 140 used the concept of vibrating a large, thin metal sheet (about 1x2 meters and half a millimeter in thickness). The metal plate was suspended by springs from a rigid metal frame enclosed in a heavy wooden case. The vibrations were generated by a center-mounted transducer (essentially a speaker-style driver) that was amplified and fed from an effects send, with the reverb output coming from a mic-style pickup transducer placed at the outside of the plate. The system???s ???reverb time??? was controlled (or at least kept from going out of control) by a damping pad that pressed against the plate.
The results hardly sounded like a cathedral but were thick and diffuse, and well-suited to vocals and drums. Given their massive size, 400-plus-pound weight and need to be placed in a vibration-free/noise-free space, plates were hardly the perfect solution but sounded far better than spring reverbs and were much cheaper than building acoustic chambers. In 1961, EMT debuted the Model 140S, which added a second output pickup for a stereo effect. Even with the power of modern DSP to conjure up almost any space, nearly all of today???s digital reverbs include plate reverb programs.
Just thought I'd share.
I have asked myself numerous times if maybe i have a problem, an addiction to gear and stuff.
Why would anyone make a commitment to something liek this when the end result ends up on mp3. WHATS WRONG WITH ME
If I could make all the sounds I find on record, I wouldn't be a samplist. The sweet sounds of a real plate reverberate through my MP3s like a mofo!
Also, MP3s won't be around as long as that thing will. When we have 48bit gigawav. files, you'll be glad you soldered that bitch!
For real.
At the end of the day, you can be proud of the fact that you did the shit right.