Most delay pedals are polite. They take what you give them, hand it back a little darker and a little quieter, and then step out of the way. The Death By Audio Echo Dream 2 does not do that. It takes what you give it, bends the pitch of the repeats until they sound seasick, and then runs the whole lot — dry signal included — through a fuzz circuit that does not care whether you were finished playing. It is a delay in the same way a hurricane is weather.
That is the point. Death By Audio has never built pedals for people who want a slapback and an easy life. But the Echo Dream 2 occupies a particular and slightly odd place in the catalogue: it is simultaneously the company’s most extreme box and its most useful one. Wind everything back to the left and you have a genuinely lovely short echo. Wind it all forward and you have a machine that eats a chord and returns a warped, distorted, self-oscillating siren. There is no preset. There is no menu. There is a row of numbered knobs and a very large enclosure, and everything in between those two extremes is yours to find.
It is also, on the evidence, the DBA pedal that professionals actually keep. It has sat on stage boards for Idles, Fontaines D.C. and Torres — and in one of those cases it was described in print as the owner’s single most-used pedal. That is not a claim we are making on the brand’s behalf. It is what the artists said, to a magazine, standing next to the board.
What the Echo Dream 2 Actually Is
Strip the mythology away and the signal flow is straightforward. Your guitar hits a delay line with a maximum time of roughly a second. That delay line’s clock is being modulated by a low-frequency oscillator with two selectable waveshapes, so the repeats do not merely repeat — they detune, and the depth of that detuning goes from a gentle chorus shimmer to a full-blown pitch dive. The delayed signal is mixed back with the dry signal (or not, if you kill the dry). Then the whole mix passes through a fuzz stage on the way out.
That last part is the design decision that defines the pedal, and it is the one most people get wrong on day one. Death By Audio state it plainly in their own control notes: the fuzz sits after the echo, and “will make both the clean and the echoes distorted when cranked up.” This is not a delay with a dirt option for your repeats. This is a delay with a fuzz at the end of it. Turn the Fuzz knob up and your dry note gets fuzzed too. If you were expecting clean playing over filthy trails, the Echo Dream 2 will disappoint you within about four seconds — and then, if you stay with it, it will show you why the other arrangement is more fun.
The pedal’s official pitch is “LUSH MODULATING ECHO,” and the product copy runs: “Push the feedback for vast worlds of colorful sound. Introduce a bit of warble with the modulator for ghastly chorus tones, or a ton of it to absolutely warp the delayed signal. Once your delay is thoroughly contorted, turn up the fuzz and pulverize it into repeating, shattered pieces.” Marketing copy is marketing copy, but that sequence — echo, then warp, then pulverise — is a genuinely accurate description of the signal chain inside the box.
Where It Came From: Echo Dream, Then Echo Dream 2
Death By Audio was founded in 2002 by Oliver Ackermann, singer and guitarist of A Place To Bury Strangers, and it started life not as a pedal line but as a web-based effects customisation service. The company spent nine years in a Williamsburg building that was simultaneously a factory, a studio, a live-work space and one of New York’s most beloved DIY venues; the venue closed in 2014 and the workshop moved out to Ridgewood, Queens, which is the address that still appears in the manuals today. The house design philosophy, in DBA’s own words, involves pushing “medical-grade IC chips, obsolete transistors, and military surplus electronics” beyond their limits, and replacing conventional controls with “intuitive arrays of sliders, dip-, and toggle-switches” to break players out of “the same old set-it-and-forget-it sounds.”
The Echo Dream came first. The Echo Dream 2 is, in the company’s own period language, “a new take on the Echo Dream circuit with additional knobs for Fuzz and Master Volume and reengineered with a cheaper price tag so all can bask in it’s glory.” That single sentence is the most useful piece of lineage documentation available on this pedal, and it tells you three things: the “2” is a redesign rather than a fresh start; the Fuzz and Master controls are the new arrivals; and the redesign was explicitly a cost-down exercise, which in the boutique world is a rarer motivation than you would think.
Dating it is a slightly detective-ish business, because Death By Audio have never been a press-release company. The most reliable anchor available is Effects Database, whose Echo Dream 2 entry was published on 5 February 2013, with the earliest catalogued demo video — a retailer walkthrough — dated 2 February 2013. Two independent timestamps three days apart is about as tight a launch window as this brand ever gives you, so the honest statement is: the Echo Dream 2 arrived at the turn of 2012 into 2013, and has been in continuous production ever since. Thirteen-plus years is an extraordinarily long run for a pedal this strange.
It has also spawned relatives. A Micro Dream — a smaller, stripped-back delay from the same family — turned up in early 2017, and DBA also offer the Echo Dream 2 in an xCOLORWAY finish variant, which is a cosmetic alternative rather than a circuit change. Neither is a replacement. The Echo Dream 2 is still the flagship echo in a catalogue of roughly forty pedals.
What’s Inside — And an Honest Word About “Analog”
You will read, on retailer pages and in forum posts, that the Echo Dream 2 is an “analog-voiced” delay. That phrasing is doing some work. Death By Audio do not publish a schematic and have never claimed the pedal uses bucket-brigade devices. Effects Database categorises it as a digital delay with LFO control, which is a more defensible description.
The DIY community has reverse-engineered the circuit, and the layouts circulating since March 2017 are consistent about the parts count: seven pots, two toggle switches and three integrated circuits — a PT2399 delay chip for the echo, an XR2206 function generator serving as the modulation oscillator, and an op-amp. We flag that as community work, not manufacturer documentation, because it is. But it explains the pedal completely, and it explains one first-party spec that otherwise looks like a typo.
The PT2399 is a digital delay chip with an aggressively lo-fi, filtered, grainy character that a lot of people hear as “analog” because it is nothing like a pristine studio delay. That is the source of the Echo Dream 2’s tone. The XR2206 is the interesting one: it is a function generator chip that natively produces sine and square outputs, which is precisely what the pedal’s shape toggle selects between — and its datasheet operating range starts at around 10 volts. DIY builders discovered this the hard way: run a home-built Echo Dream 2 at 9 V and the modulation section can go weak or silent entirely, while at 18 V, as one builder put it, “you get a pure singing sine waveform and a strong square wave.”
Now look at Death By Audio’s own power spec for the production pedal: 9 V, 12 V or 18 V DC. Almost no other stompbox on earth lists three acceptable supply voltages. Once you know what the modulator chip wants, that spec stops looking like generosity and starts looking like an invitation. More on that in the buying guide, because it is the single most practical thing in this article.
Specifications
A Note on the Delay Time Figure
Three sources give three different numbers, and it is worth being straight about it. Death By Audio’s current product page says the D Time knob covers “between 20 ms and 1 second.” Retailer copy that has circulated for over a decade says “20 to 1,200 milliseconds.” A 2016 review, written with the pedal in hand, says “2ms up to 1.2 seconds.” One demo video title even advertises 1,083 ms.
Our position is that the manufacturer’s current figure is the one to quote, and the rest is the ordinary drift of a spec that has been copy-pasted between shops since 2013 — plus the reality that a PT2399 delay line’s genuine maximum is a moving target that depends on how much degradation you consider acceptable. The practical answer for a buyer: you get about a second, the last third of it sounds terrible in a good way, and Death By Audio tell you so themselves — “long delay times can create flutter, noise, and distortion.” That is not a warning. On this pedal, that is a feature list.
The Controls, One at a Time
Master
Output volume for the whole effect. Because the fuzz stage is on the output, Master is doing real work here — this is not a set-and-forget trim. Get in the habit of pulling Master down before you reach for Fuzz.
Fuzz
Gain, sweeping “from clean to fuzzed-out bliss.” Genuinely clean at zero, so you can run the pedal as a pure modulated delay and never touch the dirt. Remember it is post-delay and affects the dry signal too.
Delay
Level of the delayed signal against the dry. This is your mix control in everything but name, and along with FBack it is where the pedal earns its reputation for being usable.
D Time
Delay time, and — unusually and rather wonderfully — the knob is calibrated in milliseconds on the panel. That matters more than it sounds. A commenter on the 2016 Pedal of the Day review singled it out as the reason the pedal is a pleasure to use: “the larger casing, lack of internal trimpots and clearly numbered or graduated dials on all controls make setting the pedal up and repeating favourite sounds far easier than on many other pedals.” For a company whose house style is dip switches and sliders, printing actual numbers on a delay knob is a small act of mercy.
FBack
Feedback, “from slapback to wild runaway oscillation.” Maxed, it self-oscillates. Combine self-oscillation with the modulator and you have an instrument rather than an effect — the oscillating tone tracks the LFO, which means you can play the pedal by hand while your guitar sits idle.
Speed and Depth
Speed sets how fast the modulating oscillator runs. Depth sets how far it swings the delay time, and DBA are blunt about the top of its range: “at high intervals, the pitch of the repeats will shift very far!” This is a delay-time modulator, so the pitch shifting is real, mechanical detuning of the repeats — the same physics as a tape machine with a bad capstan, not a digital pitch algorithm.
The Dry Toggle
Up passes the dry signal. Down kills it, leaving only the repeats. That second position is the one nobody uses often enough. Killing the dry turns the Echo Dream 2 into a send-effect-style texture generator, and it is the setting that makes it work in a parallel loop or as a second-amp voice.
The Shape Toggle
Up gives a smoother, sine-like waveform: chorus, vibrato, seasickness. Down gives a sharp square: the modulation stops sweeping and starts jumping, which at speed turns arpeggios into what the company’s own period copy called “robo-groove arpegiations.” Nobody else’s delay does this. If you buy the pedal and never flip that switch down, you have bought the wrong pedal.
Famous Players — Verified
Three players are documented in print, alongside a photographed board, using an Echo Dream 2. All three are from Premier Guitar, and all three name the pedal in body copy rather than in a caption or a tag list.
Mark Bowen — Idles
The strongest citation. In PG‘s Idles Rig Rundown, filmed at Nashville’s Cannery Ballroom on the tour ahead of 2021’s Crawler and published by Chris Kies on 1 December 2021, Bowen’s main board — the one stationed out front by his microphone, containing what the piece calls “his ‘most standard’ pedals” — holds a Death By Audio Reverberation Machine and an Echo Dream 2, an Adventure Audio Dream Reaper, a Moog MF Delay and MF Ring, a Death By Audio Waveformer Destroyer, an Electro-Harmonix POG2, a 4ms Mini Swash Full, a Red Panda Particle and Raster, and a JHS Haunting Mids, with a Boss TU-3W tuner and a GigRig G3 running the switching.
Read that list again and note the word “standard.” On a rig that also includes four Moogerfoogers, two 95000 loopers, a Nord and three expression pedals, the Echo Dream 2 is filed under basics. That is the highest compliment a pedal like this can receive. Bowen plays an acrylic Electrical Guitar Company EG 500 he describes as sounding like “an angry piano,” plus a 1972 Stratocaster inherited from his father and nicknamed “Stinky,” into an Orange AD200B MKIII bass head and a Hiwatt Custom 100 DR103 reissue. Bandmate Lee Kiernan runs a Death By Audio Micro Dream on his own board — the Echo Dream’s smaller sibling — which makes Idles a rare case of one band carrying two generations of the same delay family at once.
Conor Curley — Fontaines D.C.
In PG‘s Fontaines D.C. Rig Rundown, published 18 October 2023 and filmed at Nashville’s Ascend Amphitheater on the Arctic Monkeys support run, Curley is credited with three delays: the Death By Audio Echo Dream 2, an Ibanez AD9, and an Industrialectric Echo Degrader. Three delays with three completely different failure modes is a deliberate choice, and the Echo Dream 2 is the one carrying the modulation.
Curley’s context matters for anyone considering this pedal for shoegaze duty. He told PG: “There were definitely a lot more shoegazey elements that we were trying to get to, and, obviously, if you start talking about Kevin Shields or even Robin Guthrie from Cocteau Twins, the stuff they did, to me, is almost unreachable, but if you try, you might end up with something new anyway.” His guitars run to a Fender Johnny Marr Jaguar wearing a tortoiseshell pickguard in tribute to Rowland S. Howard, a late-’60s Coronado II Wildwood, a 1960s Framus 03000 bought in Berlin for around $250, and an Eastman T64/v acquired as an affordable stand-in for the Gibson ES-330 that Elliott Smith played. Amps are Fender ’68 Custom Twin Reverbs, chosen because “they don’t flavor anything.”
One honest caveat, and it is exactly the kind we insist on flagging. When PG returned for a second Fontaines D.C. Rundown on 21 May 2025, Curley’s board is listed as carrying a “Death by Audio Echo Dream” — without the 2. Two pedals bear that name. We are not going to pretend a source said something it did not. The 2023 Rundown names the Echo Dream 2 explicitly and that is the citation we are standing on; the 2025 list is consistent with it but does not independently confirm the version. Bandmate Rory Gallagher signature Strat owner Carlos O’Connell, incidentally, runs no DBA at all — his board is Ceriatone, Fairfield, Strymon and Moog.
Mackenzie Scott — Torres
The best single quote available on this pedal. In Premier Guitar‘s “Pro Pedalboards 2022” gallery, published 17 February 2022, Scott’s board is described this way: “Filth and fury come courtesy of a Joyo Vintage Overdrive and an EarthQuaker Devices Palisades. Next is a Death By Audio Echo Dream 2 modulation/delay/boost/fuzz, which Scott says is her most-used pedal.”
Her most-used pedal. Not her favourite noise-maker, not her secret weapon — her most-used. On a board that also carries an EarthQuaker Afterneath, an EHX POG2, an Empress Vintage Modified Superdelay and a Meris Enzo, the Echo Dream 2 is the thing she reaches for most. PG‘s framing of her whole setup is worth quoting too, because it explains the fit: “Little on Mackenzie Scott’s pedalboard could be described as subtle or ‘transparent’ — even her delays and reverbs accentuate the weird.”
What We Could Not Verify
Death By Audio publish an artist page listing Lou Reed, the Flaming Lips, U2, Radiohead, My Bloody Valentine, Nine Inch Nails, St. Vincent, Wilco, Mogwai, Pearl Jam, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Slipknot, the Strokes, the Arctic Monkeys, Wire, Foals, Chelsea Wolfe, TV on the Radio, the War on Drugs, the Black Angels and roughly twenty more. Not one of those entries names a pedal.
DBA make around forty products. A roster like that tells you the brand is on a lot of stages; it tells you nothing whatsoever about who owns an Echo Dream 2. We are therefore not claiming any of those names for this pedal. Our bar is a dated, published source naming the exact model alongside a photographed board, a manufacturer page attributing the specific product, or a direct quote from the player. Three names cleared it. Everything else that circulates — social-media board photos, gear-aggregator entries, forum hearsay — did not, and a padded list would be worth less to you than this paragraph.
One more honest note. Oliver Ackermann’s own live rig, in published interviews, has been built around the DBA Armageddon rather than the company’s best-known boxes. Founder-fronted brands are not monoliths, and the flagship is not automatically what the founder plays.
Tone Recipes: Nine Settings That Work
1. The Honest Slapback
D Time around 100–140 ms, FBack 8 o’clock, Delay 10 o’clock, Speed off the bottom, Depth fully down, Dry up, Fuzz zero. Proof that the pedal can behave. The PT2399 grain darkens the repeat just enough to sit behind a clean chord without the digital glare.
2. Chorus-y Delay
D Time 250 ms, FBack 10 o’clock, Delay noon, Speed 9 o’clock, Depth 9 o’clock, Shape sine. Death By Audio’s own sound samples use this name. The repeats swim rather than warble, and it is the closest this pedal gets to conventional pretty.
3. Bending Echoes
Same as above but Depth to 1 o’clock and Speed down to 8 o’clock. Slow, deep, tape-warp pitch drift on the trails. The single most identifiable Echo Dream 2 sound and the reason people buy it over a Carbon Copy.
4. Robo-Groove Arpeggios
Shape to square, Speed 1 o’clock, Depth 11 o’clock, D Time 300–400 ms, FBack noon. Play clean arpeggios and let the square wave step the repeats between two pitches. This is the trick no other delay on the market performs, and it is worth the price of admission by itself.
5. Shoegaze Wash
Dry toggle DOWN (dry killed), D Time 500 ms, FBack 2 o’clock, Delay maxed, Speed 8 o’clock, Depth 11 o’clock, sine. Run it in a parallel loop or into a second amp. With no dry signal the pedal becomes pure atmosphere, and it stacks beautifully underneath a Shallow Water or in front of a big reverb.
6. Fuzz War Adjacent
Fuzz to 2 o’clock, Delay backed off to 9 o’clock, D Time short, FBack 9 o’clock, Master pulled back to compensate. Now you are using the Echo Dream 2 as a fuzz that happens to have echo in it. It is not the same animal as the Fuzz War — less bottom, more midrange bite — but it will absolutely carry a song.
7. Torn Asunder
Fuzz maxed, FBack 3 o’clock, Depth 2 o’clock, Speed noon, square wave. Everything falls apart. Hold one note and let the feedback build into oscillation while the square wave chops the pitch. Use sparingly; it will end a song for you.
8. The Hand-Played Oscillator
FBack maxed, Delay maxed, guitar volume at zero. The pedal self-oscillates; now sweep D Time by hand and ride Depth. You are playing a synthesiser. Kill the dry for a cleaner result.
9. Bass and Synth Duty
Death By Audio publish sound samples for Jazz Bass and synth as well as Strat, which is a strong hint. Short D Time, Depth low, Fuzz around 11 o’clock, Dry up. On bass the post-delay fuzz behaves like a parallel dirt channel; on a mono synth, the square-wave modulation is genuinely useful as a detune.
All knob positions are clock references. Start with Fuzz at zero and Master at unity, then add.
How It Compares
The Echo Dream 2’s closest competitors are not really other delays — they are other attitudes.
Against the clean-repeat digital establishment. A Boss DD-3, a Strymon TimeLine, a Source Audio Nemesis or a Collider exists to reproduce your note accurately and get out of the way. The Echo Dream 2 exists to interfere. If you need presets, tap tempo, MIDI or a spillover trail, buy one of those and stop reading — the DBA has none of the four.
Against the analog classics. A Deluxe Memory Man, a Boss DM-2W, a Maxon AD999 or a Memory Toy gives you genuine bucket-brigade decay and, in the Memory Man’s case, a chorus/vibrato section. The DMM is arguably the Echo Dream 2’s true ancestor. The difference is that the Memory Man’s modulation is a garnish and the Echo Dream 2’s is a weapon — and the DBA’s modulator reaches pitch depths no BBD chorus circuit was ever asked to produce.
Against the tape emulators. A Strymon El Capistan, a Volante or a Boss RE-2 models the wow and flutter of a machine that is failing gracefully. The Echo Dream 2 does not model failure; it produces it. The wobble is generated by a real oscillator swinging a real delay clock, which is why it goes so much further than any tape emulation will let you.
Against the other lo-fi boutiques. This is the honest comparison set. The Caroline Kilobyte is also PT2399-based and also degrades on purpose, but its personality is preamp gain on the repeats plus a runaway “Havoc” switch. The Chase Bliss Generation Loss MkII chases the same tape-decay aesthetic with digital control and endless configurability. Thermae and the Warped Vinyl HiFi approach modulated pitch instability with dip switches and MIDI presets. Red Panda’s Tensor mangles time in a different dimension entirely. The Echo Dream 2’s argument against all of them is simplicity: seven knobs, two toggles, no menus, and an output stage that fuzzes.
Against the do-everything ambient boxes. An Empress Echosystem, a Meris LVX, an EarthQuaker Avalanche Run, a Walrus ARP-87 or an OBNE Dark Star will give you more sounds. None will give you this sound. And there is a real argument, on a working board, for one pedal that does one violent thing immediately over one pedal that does forty things after a menu dive.
Against the affordable weirdo. If the budget is the obstacle, a EHX Canyon, a JHS 3 Series Delay, a Dispatch Master or a TC Flashback 2 will cover delay duties for well under half the money. None of them fuzz, and none of them detune like this, but they are honest alternatives and pretending otherwise would be silly.
Buying Guide
Run It at 18 Volts
The single most useful thing in this article. Death By Audio explicitly sanction 9 V, 12 V or 18 V DC, and their spec page carries a pointed warning: “many non-9V supplies will vary their polarities so double check!” Given what the modulation chip wants — the XR2206’s datasheet range begins around 10 V — running the pedal at 18 V from a properly polarity-checked isolated output is the configuration most likely to give you the fullest, strongest LFO behaviour. Do not improvise this. Use a supply that genuinely provides 18 V DC at 2.1 mm centre negative, confirm the polarity on the supply itself rather than trusting a label, and give it its own isolated output at 40 mA or better.
Measure Your Board First
5.87″ x 4.72″ x 2.35″ and 21 ounces. That is the same oversized enclosure family as the Fuzz War, and it is roughly the footprint of two standard compacts side by side, with a height that will foul some flight-case lids. This is not a pedal you squeeze into a gap. Plan the board around it or do not buy it.
Know What You Are Not Getting
No tap tempo. No presets. No MIDI. No stereo. No trails on bypass. No separate mix control for the fuzz. If any of those are non-negotiable for your gig, this is the wrong pedal and no amount of character will fix that.
Placement
Because the fuzz is on the output, the Echo Dream 2 does not want to sit in front of your other drives in the conventional way. Most players run it late in the chain — after dirt, before reverb — and treat its Fuzz knob as a separate texture rather than as part of the gain staging. Curley’s approach is instructive: three delays, each with its own job, and the DBA is the modulation one. If you want clean playing with fuzzed repeats, the answer is a parallel loop with the Dry toggle down, not a knob on the pedal.
New vs Used
The pedal has been in production essentially unchanged since 2013, which means a used unit from any year is functionally the current unit. There is no mkII to hunt and no version trap to avoid — a rarity in this segment. Check the toggles and jacks, confirm the modulation actually moves at both shape settings, and be aware that DBA’s lifetime warranty is a company commitment rather than a transferable document; contact them at their repairs form if a second-hand unit is faulty. New direct price is $280.
Living With One
Three things owners consistently report. First, the learning curve is front-loaded and short: the pedal looks intimidating and is not, because every control does exactly one obvious thing and the delay time is printed in numbers. Second, it does not wear off. The commenter on that 2016 review put it well after eighteen months: “I find most pedals have an initial period of infatuation followed by a gradual loss of interest, this hasn’t happened with the Echo Dream 2.” Third, the wish list is consistent — people want a proper wet/dry blend pot instead of the two-position Dry toggle, and more waveform options. Both are fair, and neither has changed in thirteen years, which tells you Death By Audio consider the design finished.
The build is DBA-standard: heavy, hand-assembled in Queens, and backed by a lifetime warranty stated in the company’s own combative phrasing — “If you can possibly break it, we will fix it. We guarantee it.” Repairs go through a form on their site, and the address on the paperwork is 18-71 Greene Ave, Ridgewood, NY 11385.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is the Echo Dream 2 an analog delay?
No, and Death By Audio have never said it was. It is a lo-fi delay built around a PT2399 digital delay chip, according to community reverse-engineering, and Effects Database catalogues it as a digital delay. The “analog” label comes from retailers describing its character rather than its circuit. Its dark, grainy, degrading repeats do sound closer to a bucket-brigade pedal than to a pristine digital one — but if you want genuine BBD, the Deluxe Memory Man or the DM-2W is where to look.
Why does the fuzz distort my clean signal too?
Because it is supposed to. The fuzz stage sits after the echo section, and Death By Audio state in their own control notes that it “will make both the clean and the echoes distorted when cranked up.” There is no way to fuzz only the repeats using the pedal alone. If that is what you need, run the Echo Dream 2 in a parallel effects loop with the Dry toggle down, so the pedal only ever sees and outputs the wet signal.
Should I run it at 9 V, 12 V or 18 V?
All three are officially supported. 18 V is the interesting option: the modulation oscillator chip identified by DIY builders wants more than 9 V to swing fully, and builders of home-brew versions report noticeably stronger sine and square waves at 18 V. Use a genuine 18 V DC supply at 2.1 mm centre negative on its own isolated output, and heed DBA’s own warning to double-check polarity, because many non-9 V supplies differ.
How long is the delay, really?
Death By Audio currently specify 20 ms to 1 second. Older retailer copy says 1,200 ms and a 2016 review says 1.2 seconds. Treat the manufacturer figure as authoritative and expect the longest settings to be audibly degraded — DBA themselves note that “long delay times can create flutter, noise, and distortion.” On this pedal that degradation is the attraction, not a fault.
What does the square-wave setting actually do?
Instead of sweeping the delay time smoothly up and down, the modulator jumps it between two values. Musically, the repeats stop wobbling and start stepping between two pitches. At faster speeds with arpeggios it produces the stuttering, robotic effect the company originally described as “robo-groove arpegiations.” It is the pedal’s most distinctive single feature and the reason it does not sound like anything else.
Does it have tap tempo or presets?
No to both, and no MIDI either. The D Time knob is calibrated in milliseconds, which is the compensation — you can dial a specific time by eye and return to it reliably, which is more than most analog delays allow. If tap tempo is essential, look at a TimeLine, a Flashback 2 or an Avalanche Run instead.
Will it fit on my pedalboard?
Measure first. It is 5.87″ x 4.72″ x 2.35″ and weighs 21 ounces — roughly two standard compact pedals wide, and tall enough to catch some case lids. Death By Audio’s oversized enclosures are a house trait, not an oversight, and this one is not going in a gap between two Boss pedals.
Who actually uses one?
Three players are documented in Premier Guitar with the pedal named in body copy next to a photographed board: Mark Bowen of Idles (2021 Rig Rundown), Conor Curley of Fontaines D.C. (2023 Rig Rundown), and Mackenzie Scott of Torres, who told the magazine in 2022 that it is her most-used pedal. Death By Audio’s brand artist page lists dozens of famous names but attributes no specific pedal to any of them, so we do not claim those as Echo Dream 2 users.
Is it good on bass or synth?
Death By Audio publish their own sound samples for Jazz Bass and synth alongside the Strat examples, which is a fair indication of intent. On bass, the post-delay fuzz behaves like a parallel dirt voice and the modulation stays musical at low depths. On synth it is genuinely strong — the square-wave detune is a classic modular trick, and the pedal is happy taking line-level material.
The Verdict Nobody Asked For
The Echo Dream 2 has survived thirteen years in a market that replaces its favourite delay every eighteen months, without a mkII, without presets, and without ever getting cheaper. It survived because it is not competing with those pedals. It is not trying to be the best delay on your board; it is trying to be the only thing on your board that sounds like it. Torres called it her most-used pedal. Idles filed it under “standard.” Fontaines D.C. bought one and then bought two more delays to do the jobs it refuses to do.
That is the correct way to understand it. Buy a Dispatch Master for delay. Buy an Echo Dream 2 because you want a pedal that argues with you.