Deltalab DL-4

Stewart Copeland owned a Deltalab DL-4 Performer Series digital delay unit (accompanied with an MB-4 memory module), which he used with The Police during the early 1980s.

With this delay, Stewart would create delay effects on various drums - particularly the Octobans, snare and hi-hat. He began to use it around the time of the Zenyatta Mondatta world tour in August 1980. One photo from that period showed him trying out the Deltalab DL-4 along with a Roland Chorus Echo tape delay on top of it, more or less seeing how the former compared to the latter. Eventually he decided to stick with the Deltalab DL-4 for the rest of The Police's tours, provided the Chorus Echo's limitations as a tape echo (mainly the poor sound reproduction due to tape degradation).

He had two Deltalab DL-4 units, one standard and one black. The latter was more or less a backup. But it is unusual to see a black DL-4; it might have come from sound engineer Kim Turner's audio company which was a conduit for the band's electronic requirements. Both DL-4 delay lines are owned by collector Craig Betts.

Quotes about the Deltalab DL4
"'Originally, [Stewart] played through a Roland Space Echo and the quality of that is good, but not when you're dealing with frequency ranges from cymbal to bass drum. The Roland Space Echo is fine in sort of a limited range and when I first suggested a digital delay, he said he'd check it out. He liked it because the digital delay reproduces your frequencies from your lowest to your highest. The Roland Space Echo had terrible top and there was no bottom because of the size of the tape, which was small. The digital delay has no tape change.' (Jeff Seitz, Stewart's drum tech in Modern Drummer, October 1982)"