EMT Model 250
The first commercial digital reverb. It cost twenty thousand dollars and took up nearly three feet of rack space.
Overview
The EMT Model 250 stood nearly three feet tall and cost around $20,000 when it appeared. Nobody bought one on a whim. It was the first commercial digital reverb, which sits alongside EMT's own earlier landmark, the plate reverb introduced in 1957. The same account notes that the 250's size and cost kept it out of most rooms. Lexicon's 1978 Model 224, at a comparatively modest $7,400, was what began to bring digital reverb down in price.
The Model 250 was an electronic reverberation unit, and it showed up where you'd expect: trade-show previews, broadcast facilities, and studios that could justify the spend. A 1979 AES convention preview in Studio Sound (April 1979, p.72) listed the Model 250 among EMT's exhibited range. The rest of that range was the Model 244 digital reverberation unit, the Model 446 digital audio delay system, the Model 950 direct-drive studio turntable, and a cluster of filter and dynamics modules. The same publication, in its July 1978 APRS preview (p.XX), placed the "EMT model 250 electronic reverb unit" in the FWO Bauch display of studio equipment. In the UK, then, these units came through a distributor rather than direct from the factory.
A 1980 Mix feature (April 1980, p.29) put the choice between EMT's plate reverbs and its digital box in blunt commercial terms. The EMT "sounds best and is worth the extra several thousand dollars," but for studios without unlimited budget that still wanted digital reverb, EMT offered the Model 250. It had slider controls that let the operator adjust the basic parameters of the reverb sound within any of the basic programs, and bass was among those parameters. So the 250 was a program-based digital reverb with front-panel sliders for shaping the sound, not a knob-per-function plate emulation.
Contemporary writers also filed the 250 in a broader category. A 1978 Broadcast Programming & Production editorial reply (p.XX) grouped it with the Eventide Clockworks Harmonizer, the Lexicon 201, the Marshall Time Modulator, and an MXR Innovation unit as digital delay or pitch-changing devices. It also noted that EMT's Model 250 was available in the US through its exclusive sales agent, Gotham Audio in New York. Anyone chasing one today should note that: the American distribution path ran through Gotham, and the unit circulated in professional rather than consumer channels.
The 250 is remembered less for how many were sold than for what it proved. Mix (October 2007) draws a straight line from the 250 through the Lexicon 224 family, the AMS rmx-16, the Quantec Room Simulator, and Eventide's SP-2016 to the sub-$1,500 reverbs of the mid-1980s.
For collectors, the Model 250 is a specialist's machine. It is large, and it is old enough that service documentation and parts are the real obstacle. Its value is bound up with its historical status as much as its sound. Expect a restoration project as much as a reverb.
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