Sound

• Drawing inspiration from Benson's history in tape and bucket brigade echo servicing, their design goal was to create floaty and colorful repeats with a chaotic yet musical degradation. That’s the heart of the thing, the whole point.

Range

• With a 30ms-1250ms range, the Benson delay goes fast enough to do chorus, vibrato, and slapback, and slow enough to create blurred and haunted soundscapes, with a whole spectrum of warbly musical sounds in between.

Aliens

• Users can hold down the tap knob to boost feedback for some self-oscillation! This feature is perfect for holding notes out and especially for making alien invasion noises in tandem with the time knob (within a toe’s reach). It works when the feedback knob is up a bit and does not introduce unwanted clicking sounds into the signal path. It is adjustable via an internal trim pot.

Warble

• The Low Frequency Oscillator has a tremendous range of both speed and depth, as well as sine, square, and random waveforms. It can produce warble, seasick, tape flutter, and all the good sounds.

Tap

• The Benson Delay has the most accurate tap tempo ever applied to the PT2399 thanks to Bontempo, an open-source technology concocted by Antoine Ricoux at Electric Canary, which was then refined and implemented by film colorist Octave Zangs (two geniuses). Each pedal calibrates itself—it’s so cool.

Smooth

• Benson wanted to avoid the more modern issues of delay design, like the digital jaggedness that can come from adjusting the time control on a digitally clocked device, whether analog or a fully digital simulation (has this ever happened to you?). In other words, they didn’t want to assume the aforementioned aliens have glitchy spaceships.

Wow The Narrative

• The design process was characteristically obsessive and obliquely dysfunctional, so Benson will spare you most of it. Lots of bright people in the industry left their mark in one way or another. Special shout outs to Jack Deville, Bryan Sours, and John Snyder. After dutifully slogging through the modern bucket brigade scene for a while, Benson found their paradise in the form of the ubiquitous PT2399. It turns out, when treated well, this chip can produce a great-sounding delay with a massive range. Benson utilized a combination of gooey compander chip, analog filtering, and careful gain staging (amp designers are decent at that). They hope you love it.

The Menu

• To access the LFO waveform and tap division menu, users should hold down BYPASS for two seconds, then tap TAP/HOLD once. The BYPASS switch toggles between SINE, SQUARE, and RANDOM waveforms, which will blink 1, 2, or 3 times respectively. The TAP/HOLD switch toggles through QUARTER, DOTTED EIGHTH, and EIGHTH note tap divisions, and the LED will blink 1, 2, or 3 times (respectively). Hold down BYPASS for two seconds to exit MENU.