Syd Barrett’s Binston Echorec Baby

Syd used this effect extensively during his time with Pink Floyd. Even after Syd had left the band, David Gilmour continued using the effect, as it was key in achieving some of the early Floyd sounds.

The Binstone Echorec is a delay effect unit, which instead of a tape, used a magnetic disk to achieve the effect by playing the sound back with a slight delay. It was made in Italy, and nowadays working units are extremely rare, and extremely desirable, often selling for thousands of dollars.

The two people who are definitely most responsible for the popularity of the unit are Syd and David. Syd seemed to have used the “Baby” version, which was as the name suggests a smaller-sized unit, while David, at least in the early days used an Echorec 2.