Chase Bliss launched the Big Time on May 1, after weeks of cryptic teasers and what they say is six years of development. It is a stereo delay in the Automatone large-format chassis — the auto-slider format Chase Bliss has used for the Mood MKII and the CXM 1978 — built in collaboration with John Snyder of Electronic Audio Experiments.
The price is the first thing to address. At $999 in the US and €1,099 in Europe, this is the most expensive pedal Chase Bliss has ever shipped. That number is going to do most of the talking on forums for the next month, and it is worth addressing what that money is actually buying before getting into whether the pedal is good.
What "Hybrid" Actually Means Here
The Big Time is not a digital delay with an analog wet path bolted on. It is a digital delay with two distinct stages of analog circuitry built into specific points of the signal chain — and where those stages live is the design statement.
The first stage is an analog preamp at the very front of the circuit, before the input signal hits the digital delay engine. The second stage is a limiter sitting inside the feedback path, so every repeat passes through it on its way back around. The digital line in the middle handles the time, the mod, the looping, and the stereo imaging. The analog parts are doing what analog parts do well: shaping the harmonic envelope on the way in and softening the transient behavior of the repeats as they decay.
This is the architecture Snyder has used in EAE's own work for years. The collaboration with Chase Bliss is what made it possible to wrap that architecture in a digital brain that can do things a pure analog delay cannot — true stereo, 3.2 minutes of looping memory, and preset recall through the Automatone interface.
The PCM 70 and SDD-3000 Are the Real References
Chase Bliss is open about what the Big Time is referencing: early-'80s rack units like the Lexicon PCM 70 and the Korg SDD-3000. This is a specific tonal lineage and it is worth understanding why those two units in particular sound the way they do.
The PCM 70 and SDD-3000 came out of an era where digital delay was new and the converters were not yet good. The sample rates were lower than modern standards, the bit depth was limited, and the engineers had to do real analog signal conditioning around the digital core just to make the unit usable. The result was a sound that has a very particular character — slightly soft on the top end, a touch of harmonic thickness that pure-digital delays do not produce, and a way of decaying that sits between the smear of a tape echo and the clarity of a modern digital line.
That character is what makes The Edge's delay tone on War sound the way it does. It is what David Gilmour was using on The Final Cut. It is on every well-produced '80s record where you hear a delay that feels expensive.
The Big Time is not trying to be those units. It is trying to give a player access to the kind of harmonic shape those units produced, in a format that can sit on a pedalboard and recall presets.
Four Modes, One Architecture
The bottom-middle button on the Big Time selects between four modes: Mod, Short, Long, and Loop.
Mod is the chorus and slapback territory — short delay times with the modulation depth dialed in for that wobbly, slightly seasick character that the SDD-3000 in particular was famous for.
Short is the rhythmic delay range, where the timing is tight enough to function as part of the groove rather than as ambience.
Long stretches the delay times out into the ambient and dub territory — slow, drifting repeats that build clouds rather than echoes.
Loop turns the engine into a 3.2-minute looper, which is the kind of feature you do not realize you want in a stereo delay until you have it.
All four modes route through the same two-stage analog coloration. The character of the pedal does not change between modes — the time, feedback, and modulation behavior do.
Who Is Going to Buy a $999 Delay
This is the question that matters, and the honest answer is that this is not a pedal for most players. A Strymon TimeLine is $449. A Boss DD-500 is $349. A used Empress Echosystem will run you $400. All of those are good delays. None of them sound like a Chase Bliss / EAE collaboration that has been refined for six years.
What the Big Time is selling is a specific tonal target — the '80s rack character — delivered with the design care that Chase Bliss is known for and the analog signal architecture that John Snyder has spent his career on. If that target matters to you, $999 is reasonable for what is actually inside the box. If it does not, no amount of feature-set comparison will make this pedal worth it.
The presale is open now. First shipments are expected in June 2026. Chase Bliss has confirmed this is a regular production run, not a limited release.
That last detail matters, because Chase Bliss has historically shipped pedals in tight production windows that disappear from the secondary market for a year before reappearing at a markup. The Big Time is being built to stay available. That changes the buying decision — there is no urgency to grab one before they vanish.
Take your time. Listen to it. Decide whether the '80s rack thing is a tone you actually want, or whether you are about to spend a thousand dollars chasing a sound you will use on three songs a year.
Dig Deeper on Fader & Knob
- The Strymon Fairfax is the closest comparison point in 2026 boutique pedal land — their first all-analog pedal, with a similarly considered design philosophy.
- The Keeley RK2000 Funk Siren Delay is a $369 delay built around a different vintage rack reference (the Ibanez DM2000) — useful context for understanding what specific-sound delay pedals are doing right now.
- Our delay block guide for modelers covers how to approximate vintage rack delay character inside an HX Stomp or Quad Cortex if a $999 outboard pedal is not the move.
