The phrase "a distant echo of" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used to describe something that is a faint reminder or trace of something that once was or has been experienced.
Example: "The melody was a distant echo of the song we used to sing together in our youth."
Alternatives: "a faint reminder of" or "a vague trace of".
Nicastro, F., Senatore, F., Krongold, Y., Mathur, S. & Elvis, M. A distant echo of Milky Way central activity closes the Galaxy's baryon census.
The key is a distant echo of the Paris captured in the books of Hemingway.
Even their style seems to be a distant echo of the old.
One of cosmology's most important tools is a distant echo of the Big Bang, extremely faint background radiation called the cosmic microwave background (CMB).
The middle of the pizza is a quagmire of buffalo mozzarella that, while serviceable, offers only a distant echo of the milky freshness you expect.
He's an equally straightforward songwriter, with a mildly depressive outlook and a grainy, sustained voice that holds a distant echo of Jackson Browne.
If Robbins is gone before they arrive, he'll become a former member of the board, his voice and vote but a distant echo as two years of his work becomes null and void.
A distant echo cut through the melancholia of the wedding night "Whoo, whoo... .. "It is Frantz," Le Grand Meaulnes whispered.
There's nothing for fans of the Charlatans' trademark surging anthems, but the strangely beautiful Ocean Terminus, a seven-minute, distant echo of Eno's Julie With …, wherein Burgess sings of the joys of being "carried away by the sea", is a treasure.
But some, remarkably a quarter-century later, are still technically refugees fleeing the distant echo of a war.
He directed the third "Mission: Impossible," which had its own distant echo of the small screen, before producing "Cloverfield," a monster-eats-Manhattan flick weakened only by our reluctance to care about, or even notice, which of its appetizing youngsters had become an entrée.
