Tony Agnello, who joined our “engineering staff” in the early ’70s, was working in the basement (literally – in fact we all did) on what would become the famous H910 Harmonizer®. This modular product also sported an optional pitch change module, another novelty in that it was the first such product available with a frequency response suitable for music. This became the classic model 1745 Digital Delay Line, which rapidly transmogrified to the 1745A (using shift registers that required far less patience and having nice LED readouts) and finally to the 1745M, in which appeared, for the first time (we believe) Random Access Memory in an audio product. The delay went from 0 to 200 milliseconds, which required a hundred shift registers and lots of patience to get them working. From this show, and from a fortuitous order by Maryland Public Broadcasting, came our initial product line, the Instant Phaser® and, for Maryland, a digital delay line giving two channels of independent delay from a single input. In this first year we also presented at the Audio Engineering Society meeting in NYC a fanciful aggregation of “products” that we were unable to demonstrate due to the complete lack of any internal electronic components, but that we felt nonetheless might attract some customers were they realized in commercial form.
In a spasm of zeal he presented the unit to the Ampex representative, who notified the factory, which said “we need some of them!” Hence we survived for a while OEMing tape search units and a handful of other low (very low) volume products such as a two-second delay line for telephone research and an electrostatic deflector for dispensing nanoliter quantities of chemical reagents. The unit was an immediate success, allowing Katz to engineer records solo. Co-founder Orville Greene, owner of the studio, financed the initial unit. Eventide had its start in a small New York studio where there was no room for a “tape op.” Co-founder Steve Katz requested co-founder Richard Factor to build a gadget that Katz could use to return the tape to a specific location.
Our original “product” was a tape search unit for the Ampex MM1000 multitrack recorder. The stuff we had been making wasn’t particularly inspiring. An improbable name by the standards of the day, it being 1970.
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