Aria ADD-100

This thing has all the same controls as an early 80's DeltaLab Effectron rack mount delay, but stuffed in a pedal and formatted for guitar use. Even the red "Infinite Repeat" button from the DL shows up as a "Hold" footswitch on the Aria. I would not be surprised to learn it was made by DL, but info on this is very hard to come by, so who knows? Aria doesn't even mention it in the history section of their own Website. Anyway, it's very easy and very versatile to get all kinds of warm, natural delays, choruses, doubling and flanger effects. It's just a bit bulky by today's standards.

I have a very full true-bypass pedalboard, with this at the end. This pedal is not true-bypass, but it's quiet and it makes a perfect buffer/line driver at the end of my effects chain. It is preceded by a flanger, phaser, tremolo, compressor, and 6 different OD/fuzz/boost pedals.

I've been desperately trying to find a replacement for this pedal because it's so large, but I may have to give up. This pedal sounds so natural and transparent - not in a bright, shimmering way, but rather warm and unobtrusive. I mainly use it just for ambience, just barely there with 3 or 4 repeats. I've recently tried the Boss DD-20, the Guyatone MD-3, and an 80's vintage Boss DSD-2 (DD-2 + sampling), and none of these sound right to me. The DD-20 can't handle any distortion pedals before it - it just turns the overdriven guitar signal into bright fizzy echos. The latter pedals do this to less degree, but the echos are just not natural. I suspect it's the compansion circuitry in those pedals, which seems to make the first repeat jump way out, and the subsequent ones trail off too abruptly as the compansion squelches down to cut off any noise - especially the vintage Boss. By contrast, the Aria just sounds very real. That said, I think the Aria may have slightly less high frequency response, requiring less noise reduction, so less coloration. The end result is, the Aria sounds super natural, loves distorted guitar, is warm like an analog delay but more real sounding. It's obviously a low-bit processor, either 12 or even 8 bit, which you can hear on longer delays, but not nearly as artificial as any bucket brigade based analog delay. I love this delay.

When I got this pedal 8 years ago on Ebay, it didn't work. I found the main PCB inside unmounted, banging about, and tearing apart at the ribbon cable. I painstakingly rewired it and basically padded the inside so the board would stay put. It's never, ever let me down since, except for having scratchy pots. For the life of me though, I have no clue how that board was ever supposed to be mounted inside - there's no sign of standoffs or anything. I keep the pedal firmly mounted to my pedal board and never abuse it.

This thing was made sometime between 1983-85, or maybe a little later. I think I can safely bet the current Aria company would be of little help if this needed repair. That said, I've never tried to contact them, and never owned any other Aria gear.

I think most of the industry is missing the boat. Everyone's bending over backwards to emulate analog delays and tape delays, when really it was the low-bit digitals of the early eighties that had the perfect combination of tone, warmth, and naturalness. I beleive there are a couple companies out there, like Providence from Japan, possibly taking this approach. I may have to bite the bullet and order one of them. Till then, the Aria remains on my pedal board while the Boss pedals are put away.