Belle Epoch vs Empress Tape

[synthezatory]

Which one wins your ears? Not sure if this has been asked before but pretty sure I couldn't find a direct comparison thread anywhere.

Btw, I just bought another Timeline after returning the Alter Ego X4 twice for different problems, it's really good but no mas! I'm still not impressed with the Timeline, cold & sterile then and it still is now but damn I love the presets and everything else but the sound. Very convenient for live use, but I ain't got no time for tweaking. Lacks of attack/kicks in the repeats at all on all parameters and presets, everything is smeared and soooo P&W, which can be usable sometimes but.. gosh

Anyway, not sure if this one will go back let's see if I should replace it with the VMSD instead (just hate the fact that you'll have to scroll the entire presets to switch between them), or to keep the Timeline and maybe getting either the Belle or Empress Tape as a companion, which is kinda silly since these "super-delay" costs a lot already and shouldn't need any other delay unit to cover their asses.

[Uncle Grandfather]

i dont know about the empress tape, but the belle epoch is pretty good so much that I kept it, and thats compared to my echoplex ep-2 tubed tape machine. the belle has the cool trails and depending on where you set a knob when powering up you can get a seriously wide range of subtle to crazy modulation. it also has this grittyness that you can dial in that is really nice.

[rfurtkamp]

I've seen more than a few demos on the Empress and they all just sound like a run of the mill digidelay with frequency rolloff.

Belle Epoch isn't amazingly Plexlike to my ears (but I owned the 3s and 4s when I had them before moving on to the Space Echo), but it's closer to "tape" than the Empress by a mile.

Haven't pulled the trigger on one simply because there's so much more cool stuff I want versus another basic pseudomodelling delay.

[synthezatory]

I've seen more than a few demos on the Empress and they all just sound like a run of the mill digidelay with frequency rolloff.

Belle Epoch isn't amazingly Plexlike to my ears (but I owned the 3s and 4s when I had them before moving on to the Space Echo), but it's closer to "tape" than the Empress by a mile.

Haven't pulled the trigger on one simply because there's so much more cool stuff I want versus another basic pseudomodelling delay.

Good beans, yea somehow the BE sounded better from all the demos available and I'm leaning towards it. It's the features of the empress which lured me in. What delay unit/pedals are you currently using, Rfurtkamp?

[rfurtkamp]

Let's see....

A custom analog delay with warp/runaway (on master board).
A pair of Digitech RDS 3.6 delays (with ugly, ugly LFO that runs the whole delay time, one has been tweaked to about 5.5s of unclean delay).
Lexicon Vortex
Alesis Quadraverb+
Digitech Time Bender
Roland Space Echo
plus the built-ins in the GR-55, GT-001, and Mustang V amp.

I have more in the unused stack in the closet.