Orban 111-B Dual Spring Reverb

Three and a half inches of rack space, two independent spring channels, and a limiter clever enough to keep the twang from turning ugly.

Overview

The 111-B is Orban's two-channel spring reverb. It's a rack unit that promised professional-grade sound at a price for people who couldn't afford the high-end digital boxes. Orban built it as an economical answer to a real problem: the cheap consumer reverbs of the day were noisy and the serious studio units were expensive. The 111-B sat in the middle.

At 3.5 × 19 × 12 inches it takes a standard 19-inch rack and a single rack space of height. Those dimensions come from an equipment listing in Modern-Recording (November 1985, p.58), which also recorded a list price of $899.00. That's a lot of money for a spring reverb by the standards of the era, so Orban was not chasing the budget market despite the "economical package" framing. The two channels are entirely independent except for the shared power supply. One unit can treat two sources - a snare and a vocal, say - without one bleeding into the other's springs.

The spring reverb itself is the classic mechanical delay line. A transducer drives a spring, a pickup reads the far end, and the resulting comb-filtered smear is the sound. The problem with springs has always been transient handling. Hit them hard and they twang, overload, and produce the metallic clatter that makes engineers reach for the de-esser. Orban's answer was a proprietary peak limiter, which the company also described as a "floating threshold limiter," designed to protect the springs from hard transients and tame the twang before it reaches the tank. That limiter is what separates the 111-B from a generic spring box, and it's the reason the unit shows up in studios that would otherwise have written off spring reverb entirely.

Key Features

Floating Threshold Limiter

The limiter is the headline. Drive the transducer too hard and the spring assembly overloads, producing distortion and a harsh, ringing twang that no downstream EQ can fix. Orban's floating threshold limiter was designed to catch those transients before they hit the springs, and the company's own documentation calls it the circuit that "minimizes spring twang and eliminates overload distortion." Whether it fully delivers is a matter of taste.

Bass and Quasi-Parametric Midrange EQ

The 111-B includes bass and midrange equalization for the returned signal. The midrange is quasi-parametric - stepless adjustment of boost or cut, with continuously variable control over center frequency and bandwidth. That's unusual flexibility for a spring reverb at this price. A fixed EQ makes you accept whatever voicing the designer chose, while a parametric mid lets you fit the reverb's midrange to the source. The bass control handles the low-end bloom that springs tend to produce, and the midrange section lets you carve out the boxy region or push the presence.

Two Independent Channels

The 111-B's two channels are independent except for the power supply, which means you can run two different sources through two different reverb treatments simultaneously. For a small studio, that's a meaningful efficiency — one rack space, two reverbs, no patching. The channels are also balanced on the output side, which helps with hum rejection and makes the unit easier to integrate into a console without introducing ground loops. Balanced outputs on a spring reverb are not a given, and their presence here is part of what justifies the price.

Fourth-Generation Design

Orban's own documentation describes the 111-B as a fourth-generation design, incorporating refinements while retaining the sound quality that made the earlier Orban reverb units successful. It isn't a first attempt at a spring reverb. It's the result of several generations of Orban's reverb work.

Historical Context

Orban's advertising in DB Magazine (May 1978, p.45) traced the 111-B's pedigree back to the first Orban reverb, introduced in 1970, and pitched the unit as comfortable with home-studio mixers as well as professional setups. Pro-grade sound at an accessible price was the campaign's central claim. It's consistent with the $899.00 list price recorded in 1985, which was cheap enough to undercut the high-end studio reverbs that Tape Op later noted tended to sell for over $1000.

A later advertisement in Recording Engineer (October 1980, p.135) described the 111-B as a professional reverb with an excellent price/performance ratio. That's advertising language rather than independent assessment, but it confirms the positioning the company had settled on by the end of the decade. The unit was still appearing in new-equipment listings in Modern-Recording in November 1985, which gives the 111-B an advertised lifespan of at least seven years, from 1978 through 1985. Definitive production start and end dates have not surfaced in the surviving record. No sales figures, service records, or independent reviews from the period appear to have survived into the archive.

Collectibility & Value

Used 111-B units have traded for around $300 for a two-channel example, according to Tape Op's later assessment, and at least one owner has weighed a $200 purchase against the unit's merits. That's a steep discount from the $899.00 list price.

The repair situation is better than average for a unit of this age. Orban Legacy in Arkansas reportedly carries parts for the 111-B, including the TL072 ICs used in the circuit and the TA-52 direct-out isolation transformers, the kind of proprietary parts that can otherwise turn a repair into a parts hunt. A 26-page service manual exists, and according to owners the manual, service manual, and schematic are all in a single document. Alignment is a known procedure. A video titled "Fix and Align Orban 111B Reverb" circulates among owners, which suggests the process is documented well enough to be done outside the factory.

The honest caveat is noise. The 111-B is not the quietest spring reverb ever built, though Tape Op's assessment called its low noise levels commendable for its price range. Expect some hiss and the characteristic spring character, and budget for a service if the unit hasn't been aligned recently.