Unfortunately, we've been sitting on two Electra EP 350 tape echoes as well as two Roland RE-201's as we're down to two people, one who is traveling abroad (thank god for Internet cafes in every country now) and another who is very sick. It's put a big dent on our hopes to restore the tape echoes we have and sell them.
We won't be putting the Roland RE-201's up on this site nor Ebay, since people do not seem to know a good deal when they see one. Once we get them working as best as possible for NM- condition (they're definitely not mint) we'll sell them locally as fortunately Portland has enough bands that have "made it big" (aka signed to major labels) that they'll pay top $$$ for one they see in a local shop and can play with.
But the Electra EP 350, which we want to talk about here, the local shop won't even carry. Turns out that a decade or more ago (we haven't pinned down an exact year yet) the Electra company was bought out by "Krate" (spelling?) who makes cheap, rip-off junk and has a bad reputation even amongst bad musicians (of which we count ourselves, so no insult intended.)
That said, we have no less than 10 people who're interested in buying the EP 350 tape echoes once one of us can get the time or energy to finish fixing them up. Minimum offer so far has been $600 for a fully-restored one. We noted one up for auction on Ebay that quoted from a piece we wrote about them, comparing them to the Roland RE-301 and RE-501 tape echoes, and we wanted to instead do a comparison, since we believe that if you're into tape echoes for more than the RE-201 "Stray Cats / Brian Setzer / Scotty Moore" slapback echo sound, all three have their own unique reasons for being amazing, and our hope is to sell off our extras but still have one of each (EP 350, RE-301, and RE-501) in our studio when we're done.
[More to come...]