Maxon AD-999 Analog Delay

The AD999’s Delay tone is pure analog heaven – rich, round and three-dimensional, it reacts to your playing and breathes life into your performance.
The AD999 is loaded with eight custom Bucket Brigade IC’s for 900 milliseconds of warm, organic analog tone. These BBD’s are clocked extremely low to achieve the longest delay time possible, creating a HUGE delay tone that recalls early 70’s Pink Floyd with stunning accuracy.
Yet the real magic of the AD999 is in the Delay repeats – they exhibit a slightly overdriven tonality that sits perfectly behind dirty tones and adds depth and dimension to clean sounds. This distortion reacts dynamically to your pick attack, making the initial repeat pop slightly while the remaining repeats blend seamlessly with your original notes.
The repeats also feature a slight EQ spike at around 1.5 kHz, preventing them from getting muddy or non-descript. This also allows the AD999 to maintain presence in a mix without having to raise your volume.
While there are more affordable and more feature-laden Delays out there, you’d be hard-pressed to find one that sounds better than the AD999. When players wax poetic about the mojo and mystery of analog delay – THIS is what they are talking about.

Tech Talk
A high impedance input buffer passes signal to a Compander stage that acts as a compressor/expander, bringing the input signal up to an ideal level and keeping it there as it decays. This is good for signal-to- noise ratio and also gives the delay chips a clean, strong signal to work with.
The eight x Maxon MC4107D BBD delay IC’s are controlled by 2 of the 3 clock drivers in the pedal. These drivers are running the BBDs at a very low clock rate to achieve maximum delay time. This rolls off a fair amount of high frequencies, giving the AD999 its big, warm delay sound.
The delayed signal hits another Compander to level everything out and then goes to a mixer/amplifier that blends the clean and delayed signals and provides a low impedance output.
The AD999 features Mechanical True Bypass switching on both outputs via a Fujisoku 4PDT switch.