The Space Station being offered here comes out of a smoke free immaculate home studio and is in perfect working condition. It has just been completely overhauled, cleaned and checked by the legendary techs at Advanced Musical Electronics in Los Angeles and given a perfect bill of health.

The Ursa Major Space Station SST282 was launched in 1978 as one of the first generation of digital reverbs, competing directly with the classic EMT 250. The Space Station is a multitap delay-based device providing echo, ambience, and reverb effects, and it remained on sale for the better part of a decade. It is still a quintessential and sought after guitar and vocal effect.

One unique feature offered here is the exceptionally rare original laminated "cheat sheet" supplied by Ursa Major as a quick reference card for available programs on one side and an explanation of the controls on the other. The program side is exceptionally useful for jotting down china marker notes and knob settings when setting up effects. The laminated Quick Reference Guide was printed in November '82.

The Space Station is a signal processor that uses time delay techniques. It’s different than just a plain digital delay in that those usually have one or two taps. The Space Station has eight taps just for listening: These are called Audition Delay Taps. There are a number of others used to synthesize reverb and echo.

You can think of the Space Station like a multi-head tape recorder, operating with a loop of tape 255 milliseconds long. The tape is like the Space Station audio memory and the multiple playback heads are akin to the Space Station’s multiple taps.

The eight Audition Delay Taps are placed along this imaginary piece of tape with a resolution of 1 millisecond and can be repositioned at will to any of 16 pre-programmed patterns.

You also have continuous control over another tap, the Echo tap (active in Echo mode), which can be set from 1 to 255 milliseconds and can be fed back to the input to create the traditional effects of tape loops.

A Reverb mode is also available. Proprietary internal programming randomizes these taps so that they can be stably fed back to produce reverberation. The equalized sum of these taps appears at a pot (Reverb/Echo Feedback) where the level of this sum can be adjusted to create any decay time from zero to about 3.5 seconds.

Features

You’ll find that you will be able to create a wide variety of effects on a wide range of input sources with the Space Station.

• An important part of the Space Station’s fundamental concept is contained in two groups of delay taps, one for auditioning (output) and the other for reverberation. They operate independently of each other; that is, the Audition Delay Taps set up a way of hearing the contents of memory, while the Reverberation or Echo taps, when fed back, determine the type of reverberant sound existing in the memory. Each acts independently so that endless varieties of sound can be created. For example, a sound approximating normal room reverberation may be set up by feedback, and then auditioned with any of the 16 programs to sound like rooms, like a slap, an echo, or even a reverberating comb filter. Or, a comb-like reverberation effect can be set up by feedback and then auditioned in a room, another comb, or as echo, slap, etc.
• Even more versatility derives from the built-in mixer, where Audition Taps may be mixed in any desired ratio to emphasize earlier reflections, to delay the onset of reverb, etc. The possibilities are endless yet the front panel is intuitive, due in part to the flow chart displayed on the background graphic of the front plate.