My Soviet flangers have arrived! I just got an Электроника ФЛ-01, and an Электроника ПЭ-11 (Elektronika FL-01 and Elektronika PE-11, for those not versed in Cyrillic.).
They’re pretty weird, and for a variety of reasons. The most obvious thing about them is that they’re huge compared to Western pedals, and they have chintzy (though nicely retro) plastic housings.
Second, they have strange Soviet components. The integrated circuits looks basically the same, but everything else looks like Western stuff, but from 20 years prior, except the resistors, which are little pink and grey cylinders with numerical resistance values printed directly on them.
Third, the language barrier: the PE-11 has English language controls, but the FL-01 doesn’t. Instead, it has wacky Russian all over it:
Main controls
фильтр - filter?
глубина - depth
скорость - rate
яркость - tone (literally, “brightness”)
эффект - effect
Inputs and outputs
вход - in
оригинал - original
выход - out
эффект - effect
сеть - network ??? No clue.
Fourth, and most importantly, they use 5-DIN cables. Imagine a regular old five pin MIDI cable. Then imagine that’s what you use to plug your guitar into your amp and effects. I opened them up, and the FL-01 is a straight-up mono input, mono output affair. Pins 1 and 5 of the 5-DIN connector are hot, pin 3 is ground, and pins 2 and 4 are not used. Luckily for me, a standard MIDI cable can be altered to work with these jacks. Sometimes you see cables wired up for this setup with three just pins, aka 3-DIN.
I have no clue what pins 2 and 4 are for on the PE-11, since they’re wired up inside the pedal, but the pedal works when you just use the same 3-DIN cables. I suspect that this is a stereo flanger, and that the extra pins carry the other channel’s output. Both channels would share a ground.
Incidentally the PE-11 sounds pretty much like a modern Western flanger, but the FL-01 sounds like crazy, washy reverb mixed with flanging. It’s, uh… like a flanger.
More pics soon!
