Here’s why Softube Echoes is almost a great delay plugin€149/$149, softube.com
We all have access to several different delay plugins, whether it be the tools that come with your DAW, modules that are built into multi-effects or guitar effects suites, or via additional plugin purchases. The humble delay can, however have multiple flavours based on various techniques and hardware tech. Whilst some plugins will focus on a single style, Softube’s new Echoes delay aims to be a workhorse that covers a number of these bases.

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Echoes is a multi-tap stereo delay plugin with six delay types, a wide sonic palette and a comprehensive preset selection. Although it’s versatile and sounds excellent, a lofty price and restrictive design decisions stop it from reaching its true potential.
Softube has a broad catalogue of plugins, with a blend of classic emulations that favour hardware-like designs and contemporary effects with crisp, modern user interfaces. Echoes falls into the latter camp, with easy-to-read text and a large grid showing individual delay taps as nodes. You can choose to work with a single delay line, or you can click to add up to 10 taps to spread across the stereo field. Each tap can be positioned as a percentage of the main delay time, although this is fiddly to fine-tune, as there’s no obvious snap feature. You can, however, select multiple nodes and move them around at the same time. Once you start digging into the amplitude, time and pan modulation, you also get useful visual feedback as each node changes in size and position.
The bottom half of the plugin presents the main controls where you can tweak delay time (with DAW sync), dry/wet amount and feedback. There’s an FB. Limit button that engages a limiter in the feedback loop set at -6dB. This is an excellent safety feature that stops the delay tails from getting dangerously loud at high feedback settings.

Aside from the intuitive visualisation of the taps and their placement, the main thing that makes Echoes stand out is its six delay modes; Filter, Reverb, BBD, Tape, Pan and LoFi. Each one has mode-specific controls for basic editing, although it’s not always immediately obvious exactly what each is doing, as some controls affect more than one parameter. Filter mode lets you choose from a low-pass or high-pass filter to help shape the tails, alongside three options that alternate filter types across each tap. This gives the tail more variation and can help to separate each tap in the stereo field.
The next mode is Reverb, which can create an FDN (feedback delay network) algorithmic reverb effect. You can increase the Diffusion amount to smear the sound and make it more reverb-like, while the Tone control shapes the overall tonal balance. There are also Modulation and Mod Balance controls that add movement to the pitch and amplitude of each tail. These introduce a more organic and chorus-like feel, but given the limited controls, it’s difficult to edit speed and pitch with precision.
BBD mode emulates the warm-sounding bucket brigade stomp boxes of the 70s, along with their crunchy aliasing artefacts. The mode includes an LFO with five shapes that can modulate the delay time for crazy-sounding effects, plus a low-pass filter, should you wish to tame the aliasing noise.
Modes. Image: Press
Next is Tape, with controls for Drive, Dirt and Wobble. And then Pan, which lets you use an LFO to modulate the stereo position of each tap. This is useful for widening mono sources or adding movement to static sounds. Finally, there’s a LoFi mode that delivers crunchy degradation alongside a modelled four-pole filter with envelope follower.
Softube has a history of coming up with quality-sounding plugins, and Echoes is no exception. It’s clean when it needs to be, but can sound deep and rich when pushed. The BBD, Reverb and Tape modes are definite highlights when it comes to adding character; each mode gives a different flavour of delay to play with, and it’s useful to have them all in one plugin.
However, the controls are limited and you can only choose one mode at a time. Although this makes sense in terms of certain algorithms being used, it’s annoying that there’s not more flexibility that would allow you to combine the features of different modes. So, if you want to apply filtering, drive and the excellent pan modulation of Reverb mode, you’re out of luck. It boils down to a fundamental design limitation where each of these modes is separate, whereas it would be more useful to have several character modes, followed by the filter, pan and lo-fi sections as additional effects in the chain.
Taps. Image: Press
Thankfully, there are a few useful extras that help redeem Echoes and increase its usability. The output has a built-in Ducking section complete with Threshold and Release controls, and an optional sidechain input. You also get filters to help tame the wet signal, plus a Width control (from 0 to 300%) with a mono maker to keep low frequencies in the centre. Echoes also has Softube’s ‘Extended Parameters’, which can be shown or hidden from the plugin window. This adds in-depth input and output metering, multiple plugin states, gain matching, latency-free bypass, as well as Headroom, High Pass and Phase Invert controls. It’s also worth noting the excellent preset browser that includes useful tags and a search feature, and a decent collection of presets that cover a lot of bases.
Echoes is a good plugin, it’s just not a great plugin. At €149, you expect a bit more. Concise editing controls for each mode make it fairly quick to dial in, but the lack of flexibility when it comes to modulating the parameters and the fact that certain features are tied to single modes, it’s far more limited than it should be.
Issues aside, there’s no denying that Echoes sounds awesome and covers a lot of sonic ground. And with useful additional features like ducking, a feedback limiter, width control and gain matching, it still stands up as a potential workhorse delay. Softube often has sales, so picking it up at a lower price would also sweeten the deal.
Extras. Image: Press
Key features

Stereo multi-tap delay plugin (VST, VST3, AU, AAX – requires iLok)
10 available taps
6 modes (Filter, Reverb, BBD, Tape, Pan, LoFi)
X/Y grid visualisation of taps
Feedback limiter
Onboard ducker
Output filter and width control with mono maker
Wide range of presets with search and tagging
Resizable interface

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