Well as expected the TC Triple Echo arrived this morning and I immediately set it up and had a play with it.
I had the Wonderful Land echo in five minutes by using the SUBDIV control to achieve the fourth head, thanks for the heads up on that Roger. I actually used the SUBDIV for heads 2 & 3, setting 1 &4 separately with head 4 being the loudest as it should be.( at least 40% louder than the first three)
This is the classic Echomatic 2 pattern that was used for Peace Pipe, The Savage, Kon Tiki and loads of other titles, with varying amounts of level and feedback that allowed subtle differences for each tune.
When I was satisfied, having compared to the real deal from the Meazzi and TVS3, I turned my attention to the Apache (Echomatic 1) echo that has zero feedback. This patch uses only three heads 121ms, 428ms & 603ms and with added feedback from head 3 it's the same pattern for The Frightened City, Man Of Mystery, FBI, Mustang, The Stranger and a handful of others.
I set the middle head slightly lower level than the other two and it works for me.
One thing I miss on this machine is that there's no editing for modulation, Echo Drive , Wear etc which are available on the Strymon Volante, but the sound is acceptable anyway. The SUBDIV knob is the same as the SPACING on the Volante, which groups the heads at various distances apart, thus affecting the echo patterns that aficionados instantly recognise. By using these controls correctly, you can get as close as it gets to perfection if your hearing is good.
My only big disappointment is that there appears to be no storage options for my settings and you have to continually dial in the settings, which is no good for live work so I won't be keeping it.Maybe there's more in the software but I have yet to check that out.
All of that said, it does a good job on Shads stuff and I'd be happy to use it if I could store and recall all my patches.