hi floppy,

the more stages, the poorer the sound quality - in objective terms,
anyway. so you'll get a much smoother (=less grainy) flange effect
from a bbd with few stages.

when it comes to delays, you can radically reduce the clock time of
these modules to produce long delays, even with fewer stages, but the
trade-off here is that you have to filter out the highpitched whine of
the clock itself, giving you a sometimes drastically filtered delay.
with more stages, you can set the clock higher for any given delay
time, and so the filter can also be set higher. less quality, more
high frequency content.

the maximum time with 4096 stages is unusable in the sense of being an
echo - all you get is a few clicks a long time later, so bad is the
quality
:) so it would be interesting to hear from other users how that pans
out with the other bbd versions. however, we're talking here about
very long delays. for all your favourite robodub effects, lots of
stages = good.

i assume the longer delays are less suitable for karplus-strong
experiments, but again, others will be able to comment better on that.

and while we're discussing bbd's, has anyone found any good use for
all those phase switches at the bottom

stu