Zoom 508 Delay

It's fairly easy to get good sounds out of this unit once you set it up. The presets give you a good idea of what the 508 can do. The manual is fairly well laid out. I wouldn't want to edit this unit in the middle of a gig.

I play mostly noise pop and vintage rock (50's 60's and 70's). I own many killer tube amps and several American Fender and Hamer USA guitars. For effects I use mostly fancy (i.e. expensive) boutique pedal effects. I'd go into more detail, but the list is just way too long. If you want to know more, write me.


First off, I want to say that if you think that this pedal sounds just as good as a Line 6 Delay Modeler, you should spend more time with each of these units. I own both of these units (See my review of the Line 6 Delay Modeler), and have spent much time working with them. The Zoom 508 is not even in the same league as far as sound, design, and build quality goes. The only thing these two pedals have in common is the fact that they're both delays. Anyone who thinks they sound the same probably think a Danelectro Pastrami Overdrive sounds just like a Klon, Centaur or a Fulltone Fulldrive 2. Now that that's cleared up...

I bought this unit a few years ago because I was looking for a unit with a long delay time and a repeat hold function for the Fripp/Eno type of delay stuff I like to do (The Line 6 pedal hadn't hit the market yet). Since the old Digitech Delay pedals can be hard to find, I thought this would be my best bet. Now that I have a Line 6 I only use this pedal as a 4 second delay looper and only when I need a second loop when I have one loaded in the Line 6. It doesn't get as much use these days, but it still comes in handy from time to time. I will probably replace the 508 with the new Boss Loop Factory when it hits the market.

For the money, the Zoom 508 is not a bad pedal. It's a bit noisy and it kills your tone a little bit (most people might not even notice), but for $99 it does the job as well as or better than most delay pedals in its price range. The fact that you can store several settings in it's memory just adds to the 508's value. Still doesn't sound as good as a Line 6. You get what you pay for people.

I use this pedal in a MIDI loop switcher. I wouldn't even think of stopming on this thing. If I didn't have a loop switcher, I wouldn't even own this pedal. It's lightweight plastic case can only mean trouble on the stage. If this unit were housed in a metal enclosure I would have been willing to pay more for it. I called the people at Zoom to tell them that and they didn't seem to give a shit.

If this unit were housed in a metal enclosure I would have been willing to pay more for it. I called the people at Zoom to tell them that and they didn't seem to give a shit. I really don't think Zoom is the type of company that bothers to listen to feedback from their customers. They just churn out so-so stuff and hope the market responds. Oh well. Fortunately because I use this in a loop switcher and not on the floor, I have never had to deal with the generally disinterested people at Zoom.

Overall, for $99 bucks you can't really go wrong. I don't know if they still make the 508. They have new pedals with a metal "looking" enclosure. I think that's pretty lame. If it were lost or stolen, I'd apply the insurance money towards the purchase of a Boss Loop Factory. I wouldn't waste the money on another 508.

It's about as difficult to use as most digital boxes with lots of settings. Pretty logical, though the tiny LEDs are not that user-friendly. The manual is very good.

Using three different guitars and a 30-watt tube amp, I found the sound to be consistently weak. Made a fat humbucker sound thinner, and single-coils almsot shrill. It seems as if there's a notch taken out of the mid-lows. The delays themselves were good, and you can set them to do practically anything you like, but the tone of the guitar was affected so much that I ended up not using the thing.

I wanted to like this device, as it is inexpensive and versatile. For some styles the loss of, for want of a better word, "balls" in a guitar's tone might not be a problem. If you use a solid-state amp, the tone might not be as drastically altered -- it sounded okay in the store through a transistor Fender. I'm going to do a little comparison shopping for high-end (and high-priced) delays now.

You must read the manual, but it's easy to understand and after that
you'll have a complete working knowledge of the unit.

Didn't notice any detectable single loss in bypass mode as compaed to going straight into the amp. I found all the factory presets useless. You must tweak the mix setting, feedback, and tone. Once I started tweaking everything became more usable. It's digital so roll off the high end. Better than BOSS, as just as good as the Line6 DL4 (which is over priced).

had it for a week so .......???

never talked to them, but they are part of Samson and I did return a mixing console for repair, though I had to dive it out to their office. No problem good service.

Good for the money, versitile, and very usable sounds. If you want better than you have to pay the piper, nuff said. It's digital so if that is a turn off don't even consider it. Best bang for the buck and some very usable delays with very good quality.

This box is very simple to use and with respect to programming your own sounds and also the ease of switching between different programmed delays. Nice big foot pedals so you can't miss a beat.

I'm running it through a Hyundai Acoustic/Electric through a Fender Deluxe 360W amp and to tell you the truth, it rocks. No hissing, no extra noise. The delay is virtually crystal clear from the feed. You play a note and it sounds like you're still playing it. No feed is lost in the delay. I can immitate Brian May's Brighton Rock stuff as easy as I can listen to it! The sounds quality is just as good with my Squire Strat pumped through tonnes of distortion and othe effects that i run through my DOD VGS50 which I plug right into which is THEN plugged into the 508. 100% no quiality lost!

I've used this box by myself in live solo gigs with my acoustic and it hasn't failed me yet. I'm quite pleased with the Seamless option so you don't lose your final repetitions when you switch to another effect. It finishes off what it started which is KEY to playing professionally.

n/a

I play acoustic jam stuff (ie Dave Matthews Band) and this product is 100% perfect for my style of playing and having fun with delays and echos. Especially for the crazy Tim Reynolds techniques that I'm learning everyday. This Box is the #1 and most important effects box that I have ever owned.

I found the 508 easy to use i only looked at the manual once
to find out what each setting did and I was away. Very simple
and user friendly.

I'm running my 508 though a strat and a vox ac30. I use mine to recreate the classic sound of Hank Marvin and it works very very well.
it can create an aray echoes such as the classic rockabilly slapback type echo. The only drawback of being a digital unit is the cold tone.
A friend of mine has an amtech age-1 echo unit which cost 7 times more and i can get the same sounds and run faster echoes in a smaller and cheaper package.

I have had mine for a year and gig with it and not the hint of a glitch

Don't know read above

Top value you could not get anything under #100 to beat it.
The only thing that could improve it for me(For playing The Shadows and Rock 'n' Roll) would be:
1: Warmer tone
2: A tape flutter control

Other than that its ni on perfect.

Very easy, but keep the manual just in case.

Hey it's digital!

Try to only step on the pedal part of this, I don't think the main case could take it (at the lcd display). Also, the input jack on mine is crackling when I first turn it on, it goes away, but it is weird.

Got a catalog of all the 500 series pedals real fast. Never actually needed them after that.

Alot of people here say that most of the patches suck, but I've only modded one, (B3 I think, only because it was annoying with it's sustain set at 99!)

Easy enough. Patches are simple to edit, all it takes is a little patience and experiment to taste. Themanual is the infamous foldout, but very straight forward.

I tried it first with my Squire tele, then through my home made LPS. It sounds nice, very nice indeed! Agreed, some of the presets are more or less usable, but of the 24, 6 sound just right to my ears with no need to alter: A2 Spacey arpegio, A3 Sound on sound, B2 Deep old delay (my pet favorite), B3 Odd meter (hee haw! I like it a lot!), C1 Dotted eight (Albert Lee, Dave Gilmour, Steve Stevens, Edge etc), and E1 150bpm.

Treat it with respect, it will prove to be very reliable!

Unknown

OK, off the bat, the weak point: it's a pain to put on bypass. A seperate bypass pedal can be adapted easily, so it's not an issue to me.

The big plus, even if 6 presets out of 24 are usable to me, it means that 6 presets match my style of playing. By no means am I saying that the rest are crap, far from it.

Which means that for a unit with the same price as a Dan-Echo, I get 6 delays I like, accessible via foot control ... that's excellent value for the money. Try and calculate a Dan echo times 6 ... see what I mean?

I basically took advantage of my credit line with L&M's and am making affordable monthly payments on it. My timing was flawless: they were just about to increase the price!

I went nuts with the Odd Meter setting: play a chord, let it repeat rythmically, improvise lines on top, whooooa!

The dotted eight is also very useful (just listen to any 80's tune by Pink Floyd, U2 or Billy Idol) but my fave is the Deep Old Delay setting, it's just such a nice rythmic sound ... I love it!

Top marks, other than the impractical bypass switch (you must hit both pedal switches at the same time, and if you do, it sounds dry and sterile) it's a very vesatile unit. I can easily put a few external bypass pedals (one for it and one for my Rotovibe) and solve that.

Hmmm ... tres difficult to say. It's very easy to get a good sound out of it - some of the preset patches are just great instantly. However, it is difficult to fiddle around with. Not difficult actually, just very very slow. If only it had a couple of dials on it ... So on the one hand, I give it 10, on the other, about 4, although the manual explains everything. I think I'll give it an 8. No reason. Just an eight.

It can be quite noisy, and some of the effects I think are weak. Some people might like them though ...
Anyway, the patches I do like (and the ones I've programmed for myself) are very good. They sound as good as the Boss-DD5, and because it's all done with patches, you can change settings very quickly once you've programmed in your patches. I can't criticise it much here ...

Yes, it's plastic, but think about it - it's a delay pedal. Not distortion. A pedal you should really only use on clean sounds. So stamping on it shouldn't be a problem. I've never heard of problems with Zoom circuitry, so I think it should survive. It's also much sturdier than you think. I'd gig without backup.

Never met them. Or spoken to them. Oh wait, I called them and they sent me a brochure of effects they made. They were quite quick and friendly I suppose. I can't fault what they were like.

Bad Points 1) It eats batteries. So you need to buy a 9V adaptor. 2) It would be very helpful to have the footswitch to go with it, so I could tap in delay times. But I don't, so there we go. 3) Some of the patches are really freaky, some are excellent, but as you can change them all, it's okay. 4) It doesn't have a reverse feature ... 5) It doesn't really have reverb. 6) It's a bit noisy. 7) It's a bit fiddly at first
BUT the sound quality is very very good indeed. I can get everything I like out of it, delay-wise (it's a shame about the lack of reverb/reverse). AND it was about 40% of the price of a Boss DD5. So, value for money, it's unbelievable.
If I lost it, would I replace it? Yes, if I could find it for #50 again. I bought it because I wanted something to beef up/add interest to my clean tones, but I didn't want a chorus (although you can set the 508 up for some mean chorus sounds) because they're shit (is it just me, or does chorus just make it sound out of tune?), I din't want a flanger (too limited), I didn't want a phaser (same again) and I toyed with the idea of getting a multi-effects unit, but realised they were cutting corners to produce cheap, numerous effects for impressive variety but pathetic quality. So I got this, and it's really really good. But you HAVE to get a 9V adaptor. I used a brand new battery (not a very good one, mind) and it was dead within an hour.
Oh, and another thing I like about this, while I'm here. The chromatic tuner is quite good. I've never had a tuner (always tuned by ear) and I don't need one to get my guitar in tune with itself, but I don't have absolutely perfect pitch, and it tells you (incredibly accurately) what the note is, intonation wise. I guess this is especially useful for people with a less good ear, but it is still very useful I reckon. Bearing in mind that a good chromatic tuner can cost #20-#30, then that a foot-operated one (e.g. the Boss one) can cost #40, and this Zoom cost only #10 more, I think it's a snip.
So, shame it has no reverb/reverse, but it is INCREDIBLE value for money.

i'm used to digital type, two-million-pages-to-browse-through boxes in the studio, but for guitar work i prefer knobs. if you're gonna buy this thing, you'd better be prepared to have the manual handy for a while (when editing patches it's impossible to decipher the two-letter codes for each delay mode-- and this little thing is pretty feature-packed, but you need to know how to use its six buttons just right to do things). hate the tiny little buttons, too... you practically have to pick the thing up off the floor to do any extensive editing. although, for the bones, i guess you can't complain.

i bought this kind of on a whim, because it seemed to have a ton of features and delay time and i liked the fact that it had 24 patch memories... not only that but it was only a hundred bucks brand spankin' new. in the store i checked it out with one of those new, bland fender all-tube things that people are always trying to pawn off. i expected a certain amount of high-end rolloff but didn't catch much-- it actually seemed to perform better in this regard than the boss pedals i'd tried out (how can Boss charge so much cash for something that sounds so dull?). so i took it home.
thing is, once i got it near a *real* amp (my '64 princeton, VHT 50/ST, gibson GA-5T), it became apparent that it was padding down the input noticeably, even in bypass mode, and made everything sound thinner. the high end still sounded great! (or, i should say, it "stayed intact.") but suddenly my BIG FAT AMPS were all sterile little tinky-tink wussies. back it went.
this is definitely not a sweet-sounding unit and while i bought it for ambient/experimental noisemaking as opposed to retro-moron slapback or, even worse, "PINK FLOYD, DOOD!@#@!", i just couldn't live with what it did to my basic tone when plugged into the chain, nor could i live with the lengths one had to go to merely to change the delay time or HF rolloff on a patch or to invoke the hold/tap mode (external pedal practically a must). if you need tons of different options and loads of delay time, and you need 'em cheap, check this thing out. but don't expect it to sound like, oh, i dunno, an eventide or something. (not saying i anticipated this... but if you did, you're either extraordinarily gear-naive or just a moron.) :)
i think the "thin" factor would probably be less important to those playing through any kind of solid-state amp; not a slam against those boxes, but they do tend to be less sensitive to differences in input level.

one of my bandmates has a 505 (although i'm not sure why i'm letting him keep it) and it seems to be pretty stable after a few years of use. the whole 50x series looks awfully cheesy to me, but then again they're feather-weight, so it's not like it's going to suffer unless you physically hurl it onto the floor.

if this thing had triggerable sampling onboard, i probably would have kept it. as it was, i took it back to the store after four days, and traded it straight up for an old korg sdd-3000-- one of the most satisfying trades i've ever made-- and i also have a DOD DFX94 on the way for the longer delay times and triggerable samples. it's neat that they can pack so much into this little box, but if they would have added a couple of honest-to-god knobs, and focused a little more on the interaction between guitar and amp to make this sound better in a chain, i wouldn't mind paying another $50 or something. as is: a good deal features-wise but ultimately not useful to me, and if you're picky about your tone... best stay away from this one.
oh, one more cautionary word that has been emphasized time and time again: if you get this, *buy the adapter* while you're at it. i had a pretty neat experience with a brand new manganese battery that this thing literally chewed through in ten minutes flat (i just *had* to ignore the little warning card!), and it ate a new duracell in about 3.5 hours.

Since this isn't a knob-and-switch unit, it does of course take some time to read the manual and see what everything does. After you do that, however, it's VERY easy to use. The buttons are nice and all have (more or less) only one function. There is a display listing all patch parameters, and the cone you are currently editing lights up. There is also a two-character LED which, surprisingly, is a major help. Switching through patches is easy, as well. You just click the pedal through them to the one you want, and you're either switching the patches, or you can make it so it doesn't switch patches untill you find the correct one and "confirm" it, and it will swtich between the present one and the confirmed one.

I am not using this with guitars at all, but with synths. Mainly a Roland MC-202 monosynth/sequencer and a JX-3P poly synth. I usually have the 3P's chorus on, which is VERY noisy, so this unit being noisy wouldn't be a problem with me. However, it isn't noisy at all. It sounds great.
At first, I thought having 24 patches for a single delay unit was silly, but I can get a lot of different sounds out of this one pedal. I usually program patches that are nearly identical right next to each other, with one having the feedback set really hard. Since it has "seamless patch switching" (which is editable per-patch and NOT a global setting!), when I switch back to the low-feedback patch, the residual echoes take a while to fade. Just like thwacking a knob back really quick. It's fun, and quite effective.
One essential feature of the patch structure is "tone", which many digital delay units lack. When set from 0-39, it kills higher frequencies as the echo decays (0 being the most extreme, and 39 being the most subtle), and the range of 40-50 boosts the higher frequencies as the echo decays. Although you can't get it rich'n'syrupy like some old tape unit, you have to consider that this is a digital box that was under a hundred bucks. I do get goin' pretty angelic during those high-pitched filter sweeps. 4 seconds of delay!! That's just awesome, I swear. And you can edit the delay time by 1 millisecond! That was SUCH a win with me. (And it's not even tedious at all! Take my word for it.) I have to have my delay time synced with the tempo or I go crazy. That's why I went with this insted of one of the knobbed Boss units (DD-5, DD-3, RV-3, etc), and those were MUCH pricier, besides.

Well... it seems to be a bit, uhm... plastic. Still, it's sturdy plastic and I'm a wussy keyboard player -- I won't be a stompin' and thrashin'. I'll be clicking with my hands with this thing on my lap, thank you. Personally, I can't bring myself to stomp on anything I paid a hundred bucks for. Still, I'm sure it's sturdy enough for you aggressive types.

I doubt I will ever have to deal with the company at all. I'm nice to my equipment, and it's nice to me.

I play good ol' nerdy synthpop, and the Zoom 508 does me fine. I can get plain delays, ping pong delays, springy reverb, and weird metallic sounds (with very short delay times and high feedback) out of it. I've used it on synth loops, live synth playing, vocals, and drums. It's all good.
For the price and usability, I would buy it again. On top of that, the sound is awesome. it adds a richness to my synth gear that just isn't there dry. It added a whole new dimension. Since my experience with this unit has been so positive, I plan on getting a Zoom 505 (or two) to give me other effects. They're just so cheap and easy to find on the used market. The only reason I didn't get one of those was the whole delay-preset thing. I am VERY picky about delay, and when I found out that they had a delay pedal, I bought it immediately and I have been extremely pleased with it. I can't say enough good things about it. I don't "hate" anything about it. One feature I wish it had was the ability to grant 3 wishes when rubbed.