Catalinbread are proud to brag that the Talisman is 479.99% smaller than the leading plate reverb. They've always felt something was amiss with so-called œplate reverb settings on many products in the marketplace. Let's be honest, they often simply sounded thin, metallic and not so good.

Catalinbread's goal was to capture all the goodness of classic studio plate reverb by actually experiencing a maintained EMT140 at Jackpot Studios with recording engineer Larry Crane. Because plate reverb was born in the studio, on the Talisman they included studio style sidechain effects that are routinely paired with plates. These controls are PRE DELAY, which delays the reverb by about 100mS. And HIGH PASS, which rolls off the low frequencies of the reverb. Both of these controls allow you to tune the reverb, in order to keep it from interfering with the dry signal.

Listen to any recording from the 70' and you™ll most likely hear the sound of a plate reverb, a giant mechanical contraption roughly the size of a king size bed. It was ubiquitous in the studio, and was the only reverb used on Pink Floyd's iconic Dark Side of the Moon album for example. What made plate reverb so cool? It adds lush ambience, dimension, thickness, and depth in an unobtrusive way. When you listen to your favorite albums from the 70s you probably don't even realize how much plate reverb you are hearing. Go back and listen and hone in on the reverb sound and you™ll probably be surprised how much reverb is actually there. In the studio the plate reverb signal was often processed on the way back to the console where the things like filtering and delays were applied.