T.C. Electronic: M300 Dual Engine Effects Processor

I'd been keeping my eye on reviews and comments on the M300 for a while after its introduction, as I needed more effects for my increasingly ridiculous mixdown sessions. When T.C. lowered the street price to $200, I had to bite. One of the features that really enticed me was that this unit has no hidden screens you need to access-everything is simply controlled by knobs and buttons on the front panel. Dual engine means that there are two effects sections. You can send in a signal, run it through the left section-which has 15 items like echo, de-essing, compression, phaser and flange-and then you can run it through the right section-which has 15 reverbs, from tiny, tight rooms to large cathedrals. You can blend the amount of these effects with a mix knob, and both sections have front-panel parameter control knobs, accessing time, depth, frequency and threshold features on the left side and pre-delay, decay and color on the right. You can also store settings and trigger them from MIDI. The sounds on this box are almost all highly usable, with "Drum Box" being one of my favorites for livening up a drum sound without returning to the 80's. Though I was doubtful it would work, the de-esser actually helped tame some crazy amp-fed vocal tracks. For $200, this is an amazing deal on some great effects, and with the S/PDIF I/O on the back it might even appeal to people taxing their computer rigs with plug-ins. My only complaint is that the tiny lettering on the dark silver finish is really hard to read in a dim studio, but maybe I'm getting old....