Lexicon
The Massachusetts company that sold some of the first digital delays and then defined what digital reverb sounded like for two decades.
Lexicon was founded in 1971 with roots at MIT. Early on came the Delta-T 101, one of the first commercial digital delays, at a time when an echo otherwise meant a tape loop. In 1978 came the Lexicon 224, a digital reverb whose algorithms by David Griesinger sounded warmer and more animated than any plate.
The 480L of 1986 became a fixture in nearly every serious studio, and the sweeping reverb on countless records of the 1980s and 1990s comes from it. Harman bought the company in 1993, and the PCM range carried on at lower price points. Today the sound lives on mostly as plug-in emulations — fitting, for a technology that was always a program running on special-purpose hardware.