Anasounds utopia

The Anasounds Utopia is an analog-voiced delay pedal from the French builder Anasounds, designed to emulate a warm, vintage tape echo with modulation on the repeats. Anasounds describes it as a "warm and vintage tape echo delay enhanced by a deep modulation made to magnify your sound from atmospheric soundscapes to the craziest driving solo"¹. It is built on the PT2399 delay chip rather than a digital signal processor or a bucket-brigade (BBD) circuit, a choice Anasounds says came directly from the design goal: "Going back to Utopia, the idea was to emulate an analog tape delay. So we naturally chose an analog-voiced delay technology"²³.

The pedal was Anasounds' best-selling unit to date, according to Delicious Audio⁴, and it went on to spawn a whole family: the Utopia Deluxe, the limited-edition Dystopia, and the compact Utopia Mk2 released for the line's tenth anniversary.

What it does to your sound

The Utopia is a tape-style echo with a modulation section that adds depth and wobble to the repeats, in the spirit of a worn tape machine. Delicious Audio called it "a simple yet interesting take on the tape echo with modulation effect"⁶, and Pedal of the Day described it in 2016 as "a sweet, short-style delay/echo with some modulation for added depth"⁷. Because the repeats come from a PT2399 chip pushed through analog filtering, the pedal behaves like an analog delay at the extremes: the Mk2 manual notes that, like any good analog-style delay, the family lets you dive into self-oscillation when the feedback is pushed⁵.

Anasounds positions one of its factory sounds as a "beautiful californian slapback," and the pedal covers everything from that short slapback echo to longer, modulated soundscapes².

The controls, including the internal trimmers

On the outside, the original Utopia keeps things simple with four knobs and one toggle¹⁵⁷:

The real depth is inside the enclosure. Anasounds lists five internal controls: light, lofi_mode, mod_depth, mod_rate and voicing¹. Pedal of the Day's 2016 review highlighted these hidden controls, noting that "the Utopia offers a few surprises under the hood as well, for more in-depth control of the overall sound it produces"⁷. Among them, the internal More control switches the maximum delay time from 400ms to 600ms⁷, and the internal Tone control brightens or darkens the repeats⁷. The Rate trimmer sets the modulation speed, from a slow, liquid modulation to a small vibrato².

Power and connections

The Utopia runs on an external 9V DC supply with center-negative polarity, drawing 34 mA, with a hum and noise filter inside the pedal¹. There is no battery option: the Mk2 manual states the circuit is powered through the mono jacks, so the pedal must be used with mono jack cables⁵. The original is a mono pedal with an input impedance of 185 kΩ and an output impedance of 260 Ω¹.

History: from the Retarded to the Utopia Mk2

The Utopia's lineage goes back to 2014, when Anasounds' first study of the PT2399 produced a pedal called the Retarded². The first Utopia followed, built around the same PT2399 chip, and the Mk2 returns to the simplicity of the compact format compared with the Utopia Deluxe⁸⁵. The Mk2 is offered in two versions, Bamboo and a White limited edition⁹.

That work surfaced in November 2023 as the Utopia Deluxe, a ground-up redesign of the original circuit that added tap tempo, three subdivision options, a Tone control, a preamp and a single Bliss modulation knob¹⁰¹¹⁴. Alongside it came the limited-edition Dystopia, built on the same PT2399 chip but with a dirty voicing and a noisier, crunchier preamp placed after the delay repeats¹²¹³. Pedal of the Day's review of the Deluxe found it "keeps building and building on that original design, improving it in every aspect along the way"⁸.

In September 2025, ten years after the first Utopia, Anasounds released the compact Utopia Mk2⁹. It carries the original's spirit with some of the Deluxe's improvements, but with one PT2399 chip instead of two, which Anasounds says gives it incredibly low background noise compared with the Deluxe⁹¹⁴. It adds a Tilt EQ that cuts treble and boosts bass on one side or the reverse on the other, and a three-way modulation switch with a vintage tape echo mode⁹. Unlike the Deluxe, it has no tap tempo or preamp⁵. Guitar Pedal X's Stefan Karlsson judged that "the MK2 Editions are very obviously improved over the MK1, but you will likely get the maximum benefit if you go for the Deluxe overall value"¹⁵.

What reviewers said

Early coverage was positive. Pedal of the Day's 2016 review praised the hidden internal controls and the 600ms maximum delay time⁷. Delicious Audio covered the pedal in 2018 as a take on the tape echo with modulation from a "stylish builder"⁶. On That Pedal Show, the hosts tried the Utopia and Dan said "it sounds fantastic," doing a good old-fashioned slapback, with the hosts suspecting the internal modulation depth could go deeper still¹⁶.

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Anasounds also ran a b-stock version of the pedal, sold at a 20% discount with the same audio guarantee but some aesthetic defects from manufacturing¹⁷¹⁸, and a custom-shop artist series edition designed by Robin from Saturax¹⁷.

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