Eventide

When you say "Eventide," you think "the company that invented digital audio effects." Literally. Because Eventide isn't just one of many companies that left a mark on audio history — it's the company that rewrote that history from scratch. It all started in the basement of a New York recording studio on West 54th Street, around 1970. Recording engineer Stephen Katz, inventor Richard Factor, and businessman/patent attorney Orville Greene founded Eventide for an almost laughably simple reason: Katz needed a device that would automatically rewind tape to a specific location so he wouldn't have to hire a tape operator. Factor built the prototype. It worked. The company existed. Nobody yet knew that this basement would change the face of music. The real breakthrough came in 1974, when young engineer Tony Agnello — working literally underground — completed a device that had no precedent in audio history: the H910 Harmonizer. It was the world's first commercially available digital audio effects processor, combining pitch change, delay, and feedback in a way that opened an entirely new sonic universe. Agnello chose the model number as a tribute to John Lennon — it's his birthday. The first user of the prototype was Jon Anderson of Yes, who took the unit to his London studio and used it on his solo album Olias of Sunhillow (1976). Soon the H910 was in the hands of David Bowie, Brian Eno, Frank Zappa, AC/DC — and in the studio where R2-D2's voice in Star Wars was crafted. More than half of the films scored in Los Angeles had the H910 or its successor on the scoring stage. And that was just the beginning. In 1981, Eventide released the SP2016 — the world's first fully software-based multi-effects processor, with reverb algorithms, shimmer, comb filters, reverse reverb and more that still sound fresh today. The unit was so groundbreaking that its presets could be expanded via ROM modules — which the company prophetically called plug-ins, two decades before the VST era. In 1986 came the H3000 Ultra-Harmonizer — still considered the "holy grail" of multi-effects processors. Steve Vai used it so prolifically that later H3000 versions included an entire bank of his own authored presets. The H3000 was inducted into the TEC Awards Hall of Fame in 2016. Eventide didn't stop at rackmount units. In 2008, the company entered the stompbox market with TimeFactor — the first effects pedal to bring studio-grade algorithms to the pedalboard. The Factor series (ModFactor, PitchFactor, Space) and the later H9 — a single pedal containing algorithms from all previous units, Bluetooth-controlled — revolutionized the pedalboards of guitarists and keyboardists worldwide. At the top of today's range sits the H9000 — a flagship multi-channel processor built on ARM architecture, designed with future expandability in mind. Eventide is the choice for those who know that an "effect" is not decoration — it is an instrument. The company that literally invented digital audio processing is still at its forefront.