For about thirty years, Eventide was a name guitarists said with a certain reverence and a certain resignation. The reverence was earned — the H910, the H3000, the DSP4000, the machines that put the shimmer on records you have loved since you were fourteen. The resignation was financial and logistical. Eventide made rack units. Rack units live in studios, or in the flight cases of touring acts with a dedicated tech and a rack tuner and someone whose entire job is patching. They did not live under your feet on a piece of carpeted plywood in a rehearsal room in a basement.
Then, in 2007, Eventide did something that in hindsight looks obvious and at the time looked slightly mad: they took the algorithms that everybody actually wanted, threw out the rest, and put them in a box with knobs on the top and footswitches on the front. The TimeFactor was the first of them. It was the first Factor pedal, the first Eventide stompbox, and the opening move in a chain of events that eventually produced the H9, the H90, and a whole generation of players who assume as a matter of course that a delay pedal should have MIDI, presets, an expression input and a menu system.
Nearly twenty years later it is still in the catalogue at $499. That is not nostalgia. That is a design that landed correctly the first time.
Where TimeFactor Came From
Eventide’s problem in the mid-2000s was a good one to have. The company had spent decades building processors for broadcast, film post and high-end studios, and along the way had accumulated a library of algorithms that guitar players kept discovering second-hand — through producers, through session rigs, through the small number of touring guitarists who could justify a rack. The company noticed that a handful of those algorithms were doing most of the work. Rather than keep selling the whole cathedral to people who only wanted one window, they carved the good bits out.
The Factor Series that emerged from that decision comprised four pedals: TimeFactor for delay and looping, ModFactor for modulation, PitchFactor for pitch and harmony, and Space for reverb. TimeFactor came first, in 2007, and reached reviewers in the UK in early 2008 at £299 including VAT — a serious price for a stompbox in a year when the standard-issue digital delay on most boards was a Boss DD-6.
Sound On Sound‘s Matt Houghton reviewed it in March 2008 and, tellingly, spent as much of the review talking about studio use as about guitar. He tracked with it, sent a mix to it in Cubase, ran a synth through it. That dual identity — pedalboard tool and outboard processor — has been in the TimeFactor’s DNA from day one, and it is the single thing that most separates it from the delay pedals it is usually compared against.
The Firmware Story Nobody Tells
Here is a detail worth holding onto, because it explains why used TimeFactors vary so wildly in what they can do. The 2008 unit shipped with 20 presets, organised as ten banks of two. The current unit has 100. The pedal has been updated over USB repeatedly across its life, and the changes were not cosmetic.
The most significant of those updates arrived around 2014 and rebuilt the Looper algorithm from something that recorded and overdubbed into something genuinely strange: overdub ordering, reverse, retriggering, loop windowing, a version of tap tempo, and up to two octaves of pitch scanning in either direction — from clean octaves and fifths through to completely smooth linear speed movement, all assignable to an expression pedal or aux switch.
Writing in Premier Guitar in March 2026, guitarist Mike Baggetta — of mssv, alongside Mike Watt and Stephen Hodges — described reading about that update in 2014 while surrounded by “inadequate and unobtainium looping gear in various states of disrepair,” and buying the pedal on the strength of the looper alone. Twelve years later he has not felt any need to upgrade. His argument for the TimeFactor over the smaller, cleverer H9 that shares the same looper code is worth quoting in spirit: the H9 has one giant knob, and you cannot reasonably operate thirteen-plus surface-level parameters through one giant knob. Eventide’s own solution for controlling the H9 from a tablet was to draw a picture of the TimeFactor’s control layout. That is a quiet vindication of the original panel.
Specifications
Two of those lines deserve underlining. Centre positive power is unusual and catches people out — more on that below. And 500mA is a lot of current for a 9V pedal; a daisy chain will not do it.
The Ten Algorithms, and What They Are Actually For
Eventide describe nine of these as their nine best delays, with the Looper as a tenth effect. The important structural point is that you cannot run two different algorithms at once — but every algorithm gives you two independent delay lines, which is a different and in practice more useful kind of flexibility.
Digital Delay
Clean, uncoloured, full-bandwidth repeats. This is the one that sounds like the rack unit it descended from, and it is the reason a lot of studio engineers bought TimeFactors. Xnob controls crossfade behaviour, which matters when you are changing delay time on the fly.
Vintage Delay
A deliberate degradation of the above. Xnob sets bit depth, so you can walk the repeats backwards through the history of digital delay until they sound like a 12-bit rack from 1984. This is the algorithm that answers people who claim Eventide only does sterile.
Tape Echo
Depth and Speed become Wow and Flutter here, and Xnob sets tape hiss level. It is not trying to be a physical model in the manner of the Strymon El Capistan — there is no capstan simulation, no motor lag, no tape age. It is a good, musical impression of the effect rather than a reconstruction of the mechanism.
Mod Delay
Repeats with an LFO across them. Depth and Speed do what you would expect. This is the chorus-delay hybrid territory that gets used constantly in post-rock and worship contexts.
Ducked Delay
The repeats drop in level while you are playing and come back up when you stop. This is the single most underused algorithm on the pedal and the one that most reliably solves the problem of a delay that sounds enormous alone and turns to mud in a band.
Band Delay
Bandpass filtering across the repeats, sweepable. Telephone echoes, radio-scanner effects, and — with the filter parked and the resonance up — a very specific sort of dub delay.
Filter Pong
Repeats bouncing across the stereo field with filtering applied. Only makes sense in stereo, and in stereo it is spectacular.
MultiTap
Multiple non-uniform taps, which is where the TimeFactor starts doing things a conventional delay pedal simply cannot. Rhythmic patterns rather than echoes.
Reverse
Backwards repeats. Predictable in concept, unusually musical here because you retain independent control of both lines.
Looper
Roughly twelve seconds of mono loop, three transport-marked footswitches, and — post-2014 — the deep parameter set described above. Baggetta’s Premier Guitar piece is the definitive argument for it.
Famous Players: What Holds Up and What Doesn’t
The brief we were working from claimed there was no reliable artist connection for the TimeFactor and suggested angling the article purely on sound character and pedalboard placement. That turned out to be badly wrong, and it is worth saying so plainly.
Eventide’s own product page carries a substantial artist gallery for this specific pedal, and Equipboard lists 119 professional users with photographic and video documentation attached. The TimeFactor is one of the better-documented delay pedals of the last two decades. Here is the honest tiering.
First-party confirmed
Eventide’s TimeFactor page names, among others, Bootsy Collins (Parliament, Funkadelic), Carl Broemel of My Morning Jacket, Chris Carter of Throbbing Gristle and Chris & Cosey, Dave Kilminster (Roger Waters’ band), Dave Weiner (Steve Vai‘s long-serving second guitarist), John Petrucci of Dream Theater, Peter Frampton, Peter Stroud (Sheryl Crow, Don Henley, and co-founder of 65amps), Robin Finck of Nine Inch Nails and Guns N’ Roses, Angel Deradoorian of Dirty Projectors, and the guitarists of Young the Giant.
Manufacturer artist galleries are the weakest form of first-party evidence, because brands recycle rosters across product lines. So the Finck listing is the useful one: it is corroborated independently. Premier Guitar‘s Nine Inch Nails Rig Rundown documents Finck running Eventide Factor boxes across the set alongside a Keeley compressor and a Voodoo Lab Proctavia, and multiple published rig diagrams from the 2010s show the TimeFactor specifically. Finck has since moved substantially to Axe-Fx platforms, which is itself a useful data point about where big-box digital delay sits in 2026.
Independently documented on Equipboard
The names Equipboard surfaces with supporting photos or video for the TimeFactor include Adrian Belew, Guthrie Govan, Jerry Cantrell, Joe Perry, John Mayer, Jonny Buckland of Coldplay, Mateus Asato, Neil Halstead of Slowdive, and — outside guitar entirely — Flume and Oneohtrix Point Never. Treat crowd-sourced entries as indicative rather than gospel; boards change tour to tour, and a pedal photographed in 2013 is not necessarily a pedal in use in 2026.
The Belew inclusion makes intuitive sense given a career built on making guitars sound like things that are not guitars. So does the presence of two electronic producers: the TimeFactor’s line-level switching means it works as a hardware send effect in a studio in a way that a standard guitar delay does not.
The lineage argument
Baggetta frames his relationship with the pedal in terms of a looping tradition running through Robert Fripp, Brian Eno, Daniel Lanois, David Torn, Henry Kaiser, Bill Frisell and Nels Cline. None of those players is a documented TimeFactor user and we are not going to claim otherwise. The point is about what the pedal enables, not about whose board it sat on — and in an era when looping hardware had regressed from the Lexicon PCM 42 and the Electro-Harmonix 16 Second Digital Delay, the TimeFactor’s post-2014 looper was one of very few devices carrying that lineage forward.
Tone Recipes and Settings
The Rack Slap
Algorithm: Digital. Delay A 90-110ms, Delay B off (Mix B at zero). Feedback A at minimum for a single repeat. Mix around 9 o’clock. Filter fully open. This is the sound of a studio delay used as a thickener rather than an effect — nobody in the room will identify it as delay, and everything you play will sound like it cost more to record.
The Dotted-Eighth Cathedral
Algorithm: Digital or Mod. Tap in the tempo, set Delay A to dotted eighth and Delay B to quarter. Feedback A at 10 o’clock, Feedback B at 8 o’clock. Mix at noon, Depth at 8 o’clock, Speed slow. Two lines at different subdivisions is what separates this from a single-line delay attempting the same job — you get the rhythmic drive of the dotted eighth with a quarter-note anchor underneath it that keeps the part legible. This is the territory The Edge mapped out with two racked Korg SDD-3000s, and running two lines rather than one is closer to how it was actually done than any single delay can manage.
Band-Friendly Ambience
Algorithm: Ducked. Delay A around 400ms, Feedback at noon, Mix at 1 o’clock — deliberately more than you would normally dare. Xnob sets duck depth; start at noon and increase until the repeats vanish entirely under your playing. The result is a huge tail on every phrase ending and complete clarity while you play. Anyone who has fought a delay in a loud band will recognise this as the fix.
Degraded Tape
Algorithm: Tape Echo. Delay A 380ms, Feedback 1 o’clock. Depth (Wow) at 10 o’clock, Speed (Flutter) at 11 o’clock, Xnob (hiss) at 9 o’clock. Filter rolled back to about 2 o’clock. Then switch the input to line level and drive it slightly hot for extra grit in the repeats.
Rhythmic MultiTap
Algorithm: MultiTap. Tap a tempo, then use Xnob to set tap spacing and Depth to set the level slope across taps. Play a single note and let the pattern do the work. This is where the TimeFactor stops competing with other delay pedals and starts competing with sequencers.
Stereo Filter Pong
Algorithm: Filter Pong. Two amps or a stereo interface required. Delay A and B at the same subdivision, Mix at 11 o’clock, Filter swept slowly with an expression pedal. Assign the expression pedal to sweep Filter and Feedback together and you have a one-foot ambient build.
The Baggetta Aux Trick
Any algorithm. Assign two different values of the same knob to an aux switch — for example Feedback at 0% and Feedback at 70% — and you can jump between a dry attack and a self-oscillating wash at a click, with no menu diving and no latency. The TimeFactor accepts an expression pedal and an aux switch simultaneously, which most pedals in this class do not.
All settings assume a clock-face convention. Delay time is set in milliseconds or by tap; the numbers below describe character, not absolute values.
How It Compares
TimeFactor vs Strymon TimeLine
The obvious matchup, and the one that has been argued in forums for fifteen years. The Strymon TimeLine arrived in 2011 with twelve machines, 200 presets, a friendlier interface and a general voicing that most players describe as warmer and more immediately musical. The TimeFactor sounds more like a studio processor: cleaner, more neutral, less flattering, more useful when the delay needs to sit inside a dense mix rather than sing over the top of it. TimeLine wins on preset management and looper capacity in stock form; TimeFactor wins on the looper’s deep editing and on studio integration via line-level I/O. If you want a delay that inspires, buy the Strymon. If you want a delay that solves problems, buy the Eventide.
TimeFactor vs Boss DD-500
The Boss DD-500 has a screen, deeper editing, more modes and a more modern interface. It is also cheaper. What it does not have is the Eventide algorithm pedigree or the immediacy of ten knobs on the surface. The DD-500 is a menu machine that happens to have knobs; the TimeFactor is a knob machine that happens to have a menu. Players who set and forget should look at the Boss. Players who tweak mid-song should look at the Eventide. The DD-200 covers similar ground in a smaller box for considerably less money.
TimeFactor vs Line 6 DL4
The Line 6 DL4 was the pedal Sound On Sound named as the TimeFactor’s closest competition in 2008, and the comparison still frames the two pedals fairly. The DL4 is faster to use, has a beloved looper, and has three footswitches per preset rather than three footswitches full stop. The TimeFactor is a substantially better-sounding device with far more control depth. The DL4 became a cultural object; the TimeFactor became a tool.
TimeFactor vs H9 and H90
The H9 runs the same looper algorithm and many of the same delay algorithms in a much smaller enclosure with one knob and a Bluetooth app. The H90 is the current flagship and does considerably more. If board space is the constraint, those are the answers. If surface-level control is the priority, the TimeFactor remains the best interface Eventide has ever built for these algorithms — which is why the H9 tablet app is drawn to look like one.
TimeFactor vs analogue delay
Nothing here competes with an EHX Deluxe Memory Man or an MXR Carbon Copy on their own terrain. Bucket-brigade delay has a specific dark, compressed, slightly unstable character that the Vintage algorithm approximates but does not replicate. Many boards carry one of each for exactly that reason: an analogue box for the always-on 300ms smear, and the TimeFactor for everything that needs to be recallable.
Buying Guide
New, the TimeFactor is $499 direct from Eventide, with free ground shipping in the US, a one-year warranty and 30-day returns. Street pricing at major retailers has historically sat around $349-449.
Used is where this pedal gets interesting. Clean examples turn up regularly between roughly $150 and $260, which for a device of this capability is one of the better value propositions in delay pedals. The market is soft on the Factor Series precisely because they are large, and large is unfashionable.
Things to check on a used unit:
- Firmware version. Any TimeFactor can be brought current over USB free of charge, so an out-of-date unit is a negotiating point rather than a dealbreaker — but confirm the USB port works before you buy.
- The rotary encoder. It is the most-used control on the panel and doubles as a push-button. Scratchy or skipping encoders are the most common fault.
- The display. The large blue billboard display is central to using the pedal. Dead segments are a repair.
- The power supply. Original units shipped with a US-spec adaptor. If you are buying internationally, budget for a correct replacement.
- Footswitch feel. The metal switches are robust but not infinitely so after eighteen years of touring.
The blue-chassis 2010s revision is the common used variant and is functionally identical to current stock once updated.
Ownership Notes
Power is the number one gotcha. The TimeFactor wants 9V DC at 500mA, centre positive. The overwhelming majority of pedals — and the default output on most isolated supplies — are centre negative. Plugging a standard Boss-style supply into a TimeFactor with the wrong polarity will not work, and 500mA is beyond what a shared daisy-chain output can deliver in any case. Use the supplied adaptor, or a dedicated high-current isolated output with a polarity-reversing cable. This single issue accounts for a large share of “my TimeFactor is dead” posts.
Bypass mode matters more than usual. True analog bypass is right for a simple guitar-into-amp rig. DSP+DLY is right if you want tails to ring out when you disengage the pedal — which, with a delay this good, you almost always do. Choose deliberately rather than leaving it at default.
Input and output level switches. These are the pedal’s secret weapon and the thing most owners never touch. Set correctly, the TimeFactor works as a genuine outboard processor on a mix bus send. Set to line output into a guitar amp, it becomes a boost — some players run it that way permanently.
Board space is real. At 190mm wide and 1kg, this is a large pedal by 2026 standards, sitting somewhere between a Boss RE-2 and a small multi-effects unit in footprint. If your board is already carrying a Line 6 HX Stomp or similar, think carefully.
Eventide Control. The USB connection gives you a desktop application for preset management, MIDI configuration, firmware updates and full backup and restore. Back your presets up. Nobody does this until the first time they lose a board’s worth of work.
The aux switch input is worth wiring. A single TRS cable to a three-button switch gives you tip, ring and tip-plus-ring — three independent controls for the price of one jack. Combined with an expression pedal you have genuinely deep real-time control without touching the panel.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is the Eventide TimeFactor still in production?
Yes. As of September 2026 it remains a current product on Eventide’s site at $499, with no end-of-production notice. It has been continuously available since 2007, which makes it one of the longest-running digital delay pedals on the market.
How many delay algorithms does the TimeFactor have?
Nine delay algorithms plus a Looper, for ten effects total: Digital, Vintage, Tape Echo, Mod, Ducked, Band, Filter Pong, MultiTap, Reverse and Looper. Each provides two independent 3-second delay lines with their own Mix, Time and Feedback controls.
Can the TimeFactor run two different effects at once?
No. You select one algorithm at a time. What you get instead is two independent delay lines within that algorithm, each with its own tempo subdivision — so you can run a dotted eighth and a quarter note simultaneously, or a short slap alongside a long ambient tail, but you cannot run Tape Echo and Reverse together.
What power supply does the TimeFactor need?
9V DC, 500mA, centre positive, on a 5.5mm/2.5mm barrel. The centre-positive polarity is the opposite of the industry-standard Boss convention, and the current draw is too high for most daisy chains. Use the supplied adaptor or a dedicated high-current isolated output with the correct polarity.
How long is the TimeFactor’s looper?
Approximately 12 seconds in mono. Short by dedicated-looper standards — a Boss RC-1 offers far more time — but the TimeFactor’s looper is built for manipulation rather than duration, with reverse, retriggering, loop windowing, variable speed and up to two octaves of pitch scanning in either direction.
Is the TimeFactor better than a Strymon TimeLine?
Different rather than better. The TimeLine is warmer, easier to navigate and has more presets; the TimeFactor is more neutral, has stronger studio integration through line-level I/O, and has a considerably deeper looper. Players chasing an inspiring lead delay tend to prefer the Strymon. Players who need a delay to sit correctly in a dense arrangement, or who work in a studio as well as on stage, tend to prefer the Eventide.
What is the Xnob?
A context-sensitive control whose function changes with the algorithm. On Digital Delay it sets crossfade behaviour when delay time changes; on Vintage Delay it sets bit depth; on Tape Echo it sets tape hiss level. It is the single most rewarding knob on the pedal and the one worth reading the manual for.
Should I buy a used TimeFactor?
For most players, yes. Used prices in the $150-260 range make it one of the strongest value buys in high-end digital delay, and any unit can be brought to current firmware free over USB. Check the rotary encoder, the display and the USB port, and budget for a correct centre-positive power supply if the original adaptor is missing.