Eventide H3000-B
The Harmonizer that studios bought for the pitch shifting and kept for everything else - as long as the operating system behaved.
Overview
The H3000-B sits in the middle of Eventide's H3000 family, between the H3000-S and the H3000-SE. It's the one that shows up most often in period studio listings, partly because it was the working model, partly because its operating system could be reset without wiping your presets. Not every H3000 variant could say that. The manual is blunt about it: in S versions, a full reset clears all user memory. In the H3000-B, the operating system can be cleared without losing the user presets. Anyone who has fat-fingered a factory reset on a rack unit at 2 a.m. will see the difference.
The reset procedure is a small ritual. Hold the FUNCTION key while powering up, release it, answer "NO" when the display asks "REMOVE ALL PRESETS?", then "YES" when it asks "RESET THE OPERATING SYSTEM?" The unit then loads program 100, "DIATONIC SHIFT," and shows its parameters. The manual warns that on rare occasions the upper display line will flash and then black out. This does not necessarily mean anything is broken. The procedure continues by pressing the third softkey from the left, then the second. The manual also warns that moving from S software to B software without clearing memory produces garbage: wrong characters in program names, extra characters where they don't belong. The fix is to answer "YES" to "REMOVE ALL PRESETS?" and lose the user data after all.
Under the hood, the H3000-B is built around a 512 K EPROM at U53 holding the brain's operating system. Address lines A0 through A13 come off the brain address bus, and A14 through A16 are handled by the expansion-enable multiplexor at U52. The application EPROMs - U250 through U253 - hold programs for the TMS32010 processors. In the B version there are as many as four 512 K EPROMs designated ROM1, ROM2 and so on. Those four chips are interchangeable within their sockets, which helps twenty years later when one has failed and you're swapping chips to isolate the fault. Installing 256 K versus 512 K chips requires different jumper settings. X8 and X6 hold A16 and A17 at +5 volts for 256 K parts. 512 K EPROMs need X8 cut from +5 volts and connected to X7 to enable A16, with a physical cut on the PC board between X8 and +5 volts. A17 was left for future expansion.
Eventide shipped a handful of running technical changes after first delivery. The manual describes them as not drastic, usually doable in under an hour, and invisible from the user's point of view. They improve durability under extreme heat and immunity to random timing problems. The documented modification concerns the MIDI thru port: specific parts near the MIDI input connector at the rear of the PCB need to be in place to guarantee maximum drive capability on the MIDI thru signal. Units in the field may need one or more of these changes. Current production had them implemented at the factory.
The H3000-B shows up in the studio press the way working gear does - as line items in equipment lists and used-gear classifieds rather than as the subject of a review. A Nashville facility, Audio Vision, was noted in Recording-Engineer (October 1988, p.94) as having taken delivery of an H3000B Harmonizer alongside a Neve V60 Series MkIII console with Flying Faders automation, a Sony PCM 3324 digital 24-track, two Lexicon LXPI reverb units and a Yamaha SPX1000.
Used pricing in the period is well documented because brokers advertised constantly. One East Coast dealer listed the H3000-B at $2,200 in a Recording-Engineer classified, with the H3000S at $1,700 in the same block. So the B carried a premium over the S on the secondhand market. Another broker's listing put the H3000B at $1,800, and a third priced it at $2.2K. For context, the same lists carried an AMS RMX16 at $4,200 - $4,500, a Lexicon 200 at $1,500 - $1,800 and an Eventide H969 at $750 - $1,000.
UK buyers saw it at £1,920.00 in a Studio-Sound (September 1989, p.86) dealer listing, with the H3000 Broadcast at £2,300.00 in the same price sheet. That Broadcast variant is a separate model and should not be conflated with the B. The naming is close enough that listings and forum posts have muddled them for decades.
What the H3000-B actually did in use is best captured by Mix-Magazine's April 1989 audition coverage (p.90), which praised the machine's simplicity: the programmability of an effects processor is worthless if nobody uses it, and the H3000-B's strength was that people did. The same piece describes the unit prompting the user to enter the length of a program and how long or short it should be, after which the H3000-B calculates the required pitch change and speed variations automatically — the pitch-shifting and time-compression work that made the Harmonizer name mean something. The review's preset list reads like a tour of late-'80s effects clichés and pleasures both: steam bath, airport page, stadium, telephone, CB radio, underwater, traffic report. The traffic report preset, per Mix-Magazine (April 1989, p.90), provides the drive shift.
Collectors should note two things. First, the B's software lineage is different from the S and SE, and mixing EPROMs across versions without a memory clear produces the corrupted display behavior the manual describes. A unit with an unknown service history should be reset properly before it's judged. Second, the documented MIDI thru modification is worth checking on any field unit, since a machine that never received it may show weak MIDI thru drive.
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