I’m writing this on the third playing occasion with the recently released Boss RE-202 Space Echo. I have to thank the owners at The Arts Music Store for making this review possible.

The first question that I get asked is “does it sound like an original Roland RE-201 Space Echo?”

I have no idea. It’s been over two decades since I played through a tape based Space Echo, and contrary to myth, human auditory memory is crap. So in terms of comparison to a real tape delay, I have no useful data. What I do know is that over the many years, none of the digital delays that I have tried have ever felt like what tape felt like. There was a less than hi-fi feel to tape, and a warmth that has never been present in digital delays for me. Analog delays are their own beast, and some folks love them. I never really found one that I thought was awesome for a long time and so I live under the potential illusion that I prefer the sound of tape, or even moreso, drum echo a la Binson Echorec, where my only experience is hearing either in concert or on a record. A vinyl record to be specific.

The RE-202 is built to deliver the sound of the old tape echo from Roland, without the mechanical challenges (those I do remember) and delivered through a digital signal processing complex, aka DSP. I cannot tell you if the device sounds just like an RE-201 but I can say that with the exception of having a fourth head (virtually) it behaves to a large extent like the RE-201.

Using the RE-202

Certainly it has all mod cons. There are four presets on unit with more available if you use MIDI. You can choose if you are simulating a new tape loop or an old one. You can also determine how much preamp saturation you get, a very popular thing, amongst those building preamp emulators based on the front end of the Echoplex EP-3. You can also control the amount of wow and flutter, real constituents of real tape echoes. The unit also has a reverb emulator that defaults to spring, but is switchable at start to do hall, room, ambience or plate if you prefer. My testing amp has mostly been a Fender ‘65 Princeton Reissue that has a real Accutronics spring tank. I left the RE-202 in spring mode and turned down the amplifier reverb. The DSP reverb from the RE-202 sounds quite good. You know it’s not a real spring, but in the heat of a gig, you likely will neither notice nor care.

Next I decided to see how it would play with other pedals. To do this, I engaged it at the end of an existing board that has a lot of known pedals on it. As the last thing in my pedal chains are delay and reverb in that order, I simply turned off the board’s default pedals. I tried it with my commonly always on clean boost and it sounded like it should. I keep the boost at neutral gain, because I use the boost only to open up the sound, not make it louder or push the inputs of the amplifier. With a clean tone, I engaged the V2 Empress Compressor and found that the compressor and RE-202 lived well together. Turning the compressor off, I tried two different gain pedals, a Nobels ODR-1 Mini and a JHS Morning Glory. I also used the recently purchased Greer Sure Shot not clean dirty boost in tests with both gain pedals and then with everything gain stacked. Things got a bit muddy but that happened with or without the RE-202. To that end, I also turned off all the other pedals and raised the saturation on the RE-202 and it provides a nice slightly overdriven tone, more or less depending on the pickups used. The single coils in my Sire S-7 are standard output and sounded good in this regard. The humbuckers in my old PRS SC245 are a bit hotter, but not overwound and I confess I liked the saturation effect on the RE-202 more with that set of pickups.

I then tried some modulation over and above the new/old tape selector and the wow and flutter controls on the RE-202. My favourite tone, that I set as a preset is a gentle echo using heads 2 and 3 in the old tape position with the modulation at about 12 o’clock. To this I added a very subtle flanging effect from the super Walrus Audio Polychrome flanger. The combination of the RE-202 and the Polychrome together is spectacular. I set the effects to be subtle, as I find a little goes a long way.

After running the gamut of tests that I was interested in, I changed amplifiers to the REXX D20. I run the REXX into an FRFR cabinet instead of a general speaker cabinet, because the entire point of buying the D20 in the first place is that it has a Two Notes Captor built into it. The Two Notes IRs are, in my opinion, very good. I set the D20 so I had six different cabinet and microphone combinations right on the front panel for simple switching. It sounded good with Marshall style cabinets, VOX AC30 cabinets, and a variety of what Two Notes calls “Fender like” cabinets.

I started with two different Princeton IRs, one for a Blackface and one for a Silverface, both with Jensen speakers as in the actual Princeton. The FRFR has a larger cabinet and speaker, so sounds a bit fuller than the actual Princeton, but in the important places is on the money. I also used a proven Silverface Twin Reverb IR and a Super Reverb IR. All sounded great with the RE-202 and when I wanted some grit, I got it from pedals, just as I do with the real amplifiers because to overdrive them naturally requires deafening volume levels. I also used a Fender Bassman 4x10 IR and got tones very much like my actual ‘59 Bassman reissue. One can go on and on as to whether IRs are as good as real amps. I have decided that while I hear a difference, it’s not enough to lose sleep or productivity from and once the guitars are in a mix, no one could tell anyway.

Short Sample

In this short sample, I am using the PRS 245SC with both pickups, tone all the way up, volume at six on both pots. The guitar is going into the Walrus Polychrome Flanger, then the RE-202 and into the Princeton Reverb. Reverb on the RE-202 is on, but turned down. The RE-202 is set to head 2 with a new tape and modulation at 12 o’clock. The amp is miked with a Sennheiser 906 on axis about one foot away from the grill cloth. The sample was recorded through a Focusrite 816 into an old MacBook Air running Logic Pro 9 (the Mac is so old it cannot run a current version of macOS).

The AIFF recorded file was loaded into a Presonus Studio One project on a Windows machine with a screen that I could read. The track was duplicated and the tracks were panned 70 left and 70 right respectively. They ended up on a Bus, and that bus had a Universal Audio Teletronix LA-2A Silver plugin activated with a roomy preset. This recording structure very much sounds like what the guitar, pedals and amp sounded like in the large room where I recorded it.

The Good Stuff

There are twelve head combinations on a very simple to use dial with a simple LED array that shows you which of the heads is active. There is also the aforementioned fourth head so you can get echoes that you would never have gotten out of a real RE-201. Boss has succeeded in making what could have been a very ugly menu or secret squirrel multi button dance into a single knob. Big kudos to the designers for that. There are separate bass and treble controls for tone. There is an Echo volume control so you can control the amount of echo in the signal and the unit supports stereo ins and outs. My testing involved a single amplifier as it would have been for me so many years ago.

The echo is set by two knobs, the repeat rate which controls how much delay you get and an Intensity knob which when cranked up will send the box into happy psychotic episodes. For me, once I found an Intensity level that I could live with, I have spent most of my time playing with repeat rate and head combinations.

The unit sounds smooth and warm not all bright and pristine as I have found with more traditional digital delay pedals. I own a few of those, from Strymon (Timeline - although that is really DSP) and Eventide (Time Factor). Both have tape modes. The Boss only does tape emulation and in that regard, the specialization pays off in my opinion.

The RE-202 is also really quiet. Device noise is a real bugbear to me and I could actually set the RE-202 for an always on preset that I built to give me some space and roominess. Setting that was super easy, and the ability to have three other presets at button press would serve me well. The knobs are large and easy to use, but the text is small so memorize what each one does. There is also a tap tempo switch which is a great boon to any delay.

The On/Off switch, the Preset switch and Tap Tempo switch do double duty when you press and hold. The On/Off when held down takes you to Warp and stays there until you release. It creates longer reverberations the longer you hold it down. The Preset allows you to set whether Reverb is Active when Echo is and the Tap Tempo takes you to Twist. Twist brings on sort of rotating oscillations. I confess I really dislike labels that don’t tell you much, but while these labels are somewhat annoying, their description is not completely useless.

You can connect an expression pedal or remote switch to the device as well. The MIDI ports are of the 1/8th inch variety. MIDI cables are not included. The device comes with its own power supply of the wall wart type. There is also a USB-C port but it is only used to update the device.

The Other Stuff

The included documentation is a very short getting started guide with multiple languages on a small foldout page. The text is so small as to be nearly illegible. There is a QR code on the page that should take you to the manual, but it only gives a page not found error. You can surf the Boss site for your country and download the full user manual in either PDF or HTML format. This is a powerful device and making the buyer chase around for useful documentation is to my mind, rather rude.

The unit is well built. Initially I was concerned about durability and longevity because the case looks like plastic. It is actually made of metal and the knob deck while looking flexible is solid. The footswitches look weak, but are solid and are of the silent variety with no detectable click as you engage them.

The RE-202 is priced at $539 CAD and the standard sized RE-2 which is a simpler smaller version with less function at $339. The RE-202 gives you four tape “heads” the RE-2 gives you three, like the original RE-201. While the controls are nicely spaced on the RE-202, the RE-2 is jammed pretty tight and after a quick glance, I determined that everything was too close together for me to want to try it out. Both units use DSP processors so I expect similar sounds from the RE-2.

I have to confess that I am not the buyer looking for the Warp or Twist functions. Perhaps thirty to forty years ago, I would have been excited. Actually, I know that I would have been. They do sound cool, I just don’t have a use case for them.

The closest thing that I own to the RE-202 is a Strymon Volante, and the comparison is not really fair because while the Volante does have a four head tape mode, it also has a drum mode and a studio mode, and is presently marketing at $497 CAD. In that context, the Volante wins hands down as it’s tape mode is at least as good as the RE-202, in my opinion, the Strymon is better and I get two completely separate multihead delays for less. It is DSP based like the RE-202 so that’s not a contest.

In pure tape emulation, the Strymon El Capistan offers single or multi-head and while it’s user interface is simple, the RE-202 is easier to use in my opinion because there is more real estate used for controls. The Strymon costs less at $372 CAD and while I really like the ease of using presets on the RE-202, if I did not require that, nor the warp and twist effects, I could certainly get by with the El Capistan.

There are numerous other tape echo emulation pedals in the market, and while some are superb for the money such as the Wampler Tape Echo, I don’t think that you can make a comparison in that space. In that price point, the Boss RE-2 is the clear winner to me.

Summary

I really credit Boss for what they have done in the RE-202. It looks like the front end (mostly) of an old RE-201. It sounds great. The default maximum delay is 1 second, but there’s a documented method to boot the device for up to two seconds delay. You can also set it to boot in a trails type mode, and as mentioned it offers multiple reverbs. It’s at the higher end of the price point, more than the Volante, more than the Starlight but less than a super powered delay like a Strymon Timeline or Empress Echosystem and definitely with a shorter learning curve than either. The reality is that I like it a lot. It was very fast to get to a sound that I liked and once I memorized which knobs did what, it became very easy to use. I think it’s distinctive and for those looking for the sound and aesthetic of the old Roland RE-201, it’s an excellent choice.