What will I lose upgrading to Echosystem from Superdelay or Vintage Modified Super delay?
1. Hardware, Inputs/Outputs
The echosystem expands on everything in the SD (superdelay/vintage modified superdelay) so you won't lose anything. (Of course you gain stereo, control port, ability to use expression pedal on (m)any parameter, upgrade ability w/SD Card, transformer isolated output, ability to run wet/dry setups, cab sims, and more).
2. Controls
Again, the Echosystem has more control over the modes compared to the SD. We don't have a dedicated modulation control on the ES, but most of the modes where modulation is an important part of the sound we put it on the thing 1 and 2 controls. In many cases, we have thing 1 as modulation speed, and thing 2 and depth for ultimate control. The ES tone control gives you better control than the SD toggle.
3. Modes
Here things get a little more complicated. I'll go through them 1-by-1 below, in some cases we left off modes that people didn't seem to use on the SD, but of course you could vote for them to be re-included in our voting forum and the ones we left off could be re-added.
Digital: The ES covers all the SD these modes with greater control over modulation. You also get longer delay up to 8.0s for ambient stuff.
Tap: Every mode on the ES uses tap with a few exceptions where it doesn't really make sense (like stutter). So this mode is kind of redundant on the ES.
Auto: This is a mode that we don't currently have on the ES. We didn't find it was popular on the SD....that being said, it would be fairly simple to add. Also, our implementation would be better because the ES has much more processing power, which means we can detect triggers much better.
Reverse: ES does everything the SD did. The popular REV C sound can easily be achieved using the Reverse Pitch algo, with the thing knobs set to an +1 octave.
Rhythm: ES does the SD sounds and more because we have volume and tone variations on the different multi-taps which make it sound way cooler. With the SD we had a preset dynamic variation with one setting only.
Tape: We had the ability to make the tape saturation more accurate in the ES with the additional processing power. We also currently have 4 tape modes that cover a wider range of tape sounds and 3 of them are in the same realm as the SD. That being said, there's some people who may find there's some esoteric part of the VMSD sound that we've left out. It would be possible to make it exactly the same if people voted for it in the voting forum. The Echoplex sound is different in character than the VMSD - it tends to have brighter decays compared to the darker decays in the VMSD. The controls have changed though, so to match a VMSD tape sound you'll have to dial it in a little bit differently.
Misc: The dynamic modes we have under the digital category in the ES. You can dial them in more precisely, and they should be more useful with a wider range of guitars and playing styles and parts in the ES. We haven't done the gated mode because having trails with the ES sort of makes this mode redundant.
Looper: As of May 8th, 2017 there's no looper in the ES yet. It's on its way to being implemented though. Our plan is to have it much more capable than the SD looper. Steve's working on this presently.
4. Other New Stuff on the ES
Dual-engines, Lower noise, midi, dual-engine, trails between single engine presets, 2-preset systems, way more modes (and counting).
Disclaimer...The superdelay modes were coded 8 to 10 years ago so it's probable that I'm forgetting some intricacy of one or two modes. That being said, the ES has so much more processing power so if there's something important that's missing you can put it in the voting forum and we can most likely add it.
Cheers,
Jay(Audio DSP person on the ES and many of the VMSD/SD modes)