This question in the music world is like talking about religion or politics anywhere else. We have debated this question a couple of times at Jax with neither argument winning out. I personally believe that they are all related with minor differences in timing.
Wikipedia defines reverb as “A reverberation, or reverb, is created when a sound is produced in an enclosed space causing a large number of echoes to build up and then slowly decay as the sound is absorbed by the walls and air”
Echoes are defined as “…echo (plural echoes) is a reflection of sound, arriving at the listener some time after the direct sound.”
Delay “…is an audio effect which records an input signal to an audio storage medium, and then plays it back after a period of time.[1] The delayed signal may either be played back multiple times, or played back into the recording again, to create the sound of a repeating, decaying echo.
I see a lot of similarities here. The words echo and decay are mentioned several times in the definitions. Looking at them, and thinking about how they each sound, I fervently believe they are all manifestations of the same phenomena. The only real difference is the timing of each effect.
Reverb, when listening, sounds to me like a lot of fast echoes with an accelerated decay time. You can debate the variances of how the echoes are produced (spring, plate, digital, etc.) but they all share the same features – high number of echoes and rapid decay. Echoes are reflected sound and play a role in reverb and delay. Delay (in an audio sense) is a reflected sound with time in between. Sounds (pun intended) a lot like reverb.
Why all the debate? They are the same thing. You can use a delay pedal as reverb by adjusting the number of echoes and decay time. You could also use a reverb pedal as a basic delay but usually you cannot adjust a reverb pedal’s speed enough to make a true delay sound. Can anyone really debate that echo, reverb, and delay are really different takes on the same thing?
Jack
Jax Music Supply
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