EMT 250
Nearly $20,000 in 1976, shown to a surprised audience in Zurich. This was the machine that convinced the recording industry digital reverb was possible.
Overview
The EMT 250 Digital Reverberator was shown publicly at the 1976 Audio Engineering Society convention in Zurich. According to Mix-Magazine (May 1985, p.36), the audience was genuinely surprised. The price didn't help. The unit cost nearly $20,000, a huge figure for a reverb box in an era when plates and chambers still ruled every serious room. The engineers behind it, working under the EMT banner, had spent years arguing that a producible digital reverberator was economically feasible at all. Many experts at the time felt it wasn't.
The 250 changed how studios thought about reverb. An EMT 140 plate was a physical object, a sheet of steel suspended in a frame and excited by a transducer. The 250 was computation. Studios that adopted it treated it as a flagship tool, not a curiosity. By the mid-1980s it showed up in equipment lists alongside the plates and chambers it was meant to complement rather than replace. Spectrum Studios in Venice, California, listed an EMT 250 digital reverb alongside its EMT 140 reverb chamber, Cooper Time Cube, and UREI limiters.
The 250 also got a direct successor. Mix-Magazine (May 1985, p.36) describes the EMT 251 as an improved, second-generation version of the EMT 250, carrying the same design philosophy into a revised package. Studios frequently ran both. Chateau Recorders in North Hollywood listed "EMT 250s" among its outboard extras. Freddie Piro's studio ran an EMT 250 and 251 side by side with a Lexicon 224, a pair of EMT 140 plates, Lexicon Prime Times, DeltaLab DL-2s, and Eventide 949 Harmonizers.
By the early 1990s the 250 had settled into a quiet workhorse role. A 1991 Mix-Magazine (October 1991, p.245) listing shows an EMT-250 alongside an EMT-251 with the 250 program, two Eventide 949s, and a Lexicon 200 digital reverb. A 1993 Mix-Magazine (March 1993, p.154) studio inventory puts the EMT 250 in the same rack as three EMT 140s, an Echoplate, AMS reverb, a Lexicon 224XL, Lexicon 200, Lexicon 480, PCM60, and a Lexicon PCM42.
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