Eventide 3000SE
A Harmonizer that turns up in other people's gear lists far more often than in its own documentation.
Overview
The archive has a stack of studio inventories and rental sheets that name the Eventide 3000SE, and almost nothing that describes it. What survives is context. The 3000SE shows up as a line item in working rooms and rental racks of the early 1990s, always next to the same cast of gear, and never with a spec sheet attached.
The clearest picture comes from a rental house's "Rack Attack" listing in Recording Engineer (August 1990, p.65). An Eventide H-3000SE is bundled into the $265-per-day Rack System 'A' next to an AMS DMX 1580S, an AMS RMX-16, an Eventide SP-2016, a Lexicon 480L with LARC, a Lexicon PCM-70, a TC Electronic 2290, and a Yamaha SPX-1000. That's a serious rack, and it puts the 3000SE among the most expensive outboard of the day. The same listing appears again in Recording Engineer (August 1990, p.71), so it wasn't a one-off typo. A "Short Guy System" at $165 a day and a Rack System 'B' at $225 round out the offerings, and the 3000SE appears in both the 'Short Guy System' and the top-tier 'A' rack.
The 3000SE seems to have done its best work in the sampling and pitch-shifting chair. Engineer BC, interviewed in Recording Engineer, described his processing rack plainly: no cheap reverbs, no absurdly expensive ones either, a Lexicon 480L as the ritziest piece, and then "the Eventide 3000SE for sampling or pitch-shifting." That's about as specific as the surviving record gets on what the unit was used for. It was the box for grabbing a chunk of audio or moving its pitch, not the box for reverb.
The studio inventories back this up. A facility list in EQ magazine places the Eventide DSP-4000 and H-3000SE together in the outboard rack of a working room, alongside a Lexicon 480L with LARC, a TC Electronic M3000 and Fireworx, a Summit DCL-200, and a rack of vintage Neve compressors. A separate EQ studio profile, Barking Doctor in Mount Kisco, New York, lists the Eventide DSP4000, H-3000SE Ultra Harmonizer, and SP2016 as a trio, next to a Sony DPS-V77, a Yamaha SPX-990, and an Ensoniq DP/4. In both cases the 3000SE is one effects processor among several, not the headliner.
A note on the name. The archive's source material is inconsistent. "3000SE," "H-3000SE," and "H3000SE" all appear, sometimes within the same document. The period advertising in Mix (April 1990, p.95) is for the H3000SE Ultra-Harmonizer, which Eventide pitched as an improvement on "the original H3000 Ultra-Harmonizer - the most successful Harmonizer in Eventide's history." The ad touts a Function Generator for programming autopanning, arpeggios, sweeping flangers, and randomized vocal doublers, plus Soft Functions for customizing the front panel. EQ (July 1990, p.75) reported that current S models could be updated to SE performance via a $600 factory upgrade, and mentioned a true stereo sampling option. Whether the "3000SE" in the rental and studio listings is the same machine as the H3000SE, a variant of it, or a separate model entirely is not something the surviving documents settle. Verify against the unit's own rear panel before assuming anything.
What the archive does not contain: production years, original price, DSP architecture, converter specs, I/O configuration, or any independent bench measurement. Anyone claiming a definitive figure for those is working from something other than this record.
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