I need a reverb mainly for guitar leads, both distorted and soft bluesy material. Can't decide between these two - they're both very tweakable (I guess with the upper hand going to CSR in this regard), but I'm not really much of a tweaker. And they both sound pretty good. My budget is limited, hence these two.

I'd pick Valhalla because together with "clean" reverbs it also has coloured lo-fi algorithms which can add some darker character to a sound - it's more musical to me personally.

Valhalla is the better investment for your needs and eventually limited budget. Very easy to use, big support from the developer, not expensive. Sounds better.

There is also Breeze (the little brother of Aether from 2CAudio) with not so many controls and so it's easier to use. It's a bit cheaper than Aether with $149... Could be another option and there is also a demo version available (see Breeze Website)

What is really annoying about CSR is the need for separate plugins for different algorithms. Just imagine if there was 10 different VROOM plugins. One for each algorithm. I personally hate that sort of thing. I pretty much stopped using CSR when I bought VROOM.

+1 for Vroom (again)!

It's very fxelible, constantly gets updated, is compatible with almost all available formats (and 64bit), sounds simply amazing (!!!) and is really affordable

Cheers
Dennis

By saying 'VROOM' you mean ValhallaRoom right? There is no plugin called VROOM


I agree with you on the multiple plugins for different reverb algorithms. it could have been one plugin with a drop down or selector for each algorithm.

I'm now demoing ValhallaRoom and it does sound good.. but I'm not sure it sounds THAT much better than CSR to my ears.. guess I will continue to test for another week or so..

CSR macro ability is handy though for modulating multiple parameters.. just map them to the one slider and go.

decisions. hmmm hehe

VROOM

VRoom - sounds better to me than CSR. VRoom sounds like the real deal to me, whatever that means, CSR, to its credit, is a lot older. I think it was one of the first truly, 'newer' trend of soft reverbs out there to tackle such algo's - but still, like the old UA plug's, in this age, a couple years makes a difference in what is achievable in terms of realism and quality..

Personally, for guitar leads I would focus more on a quality delay unit first, and live w/ a decent freebie for the verb... like kjaerhus classic verb, voxengo oldskoolverb, etc.... I would do most of my coloration and "fill" w/ delay (chorus, ping pong, etc.), and use verb for some ambience at the end of the chain. Maybe check out UberMod? My $.02.

Valhalla Room, IMHO

also love "Shimmer"

Thanks for the input. Looks like Valhalla is where it's at.



Thanks, but I think I have my delay needs covered. I'm on Mac, so free algorithmic reverb plug-ins are not an option (unless there's some I don't know about?). Live's native reverb is horrible for anything natural-sounding, and the TC Fabrik R that I also have requires re-sampling anything that's going to be rendered, which is a bother. This is for low-latency recording/mixing, so convolution or Nebula (which I also own and love) is out of the question.

Vrooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooom  

Ah, ok then... Voxengo OldSkoolVerb supports mac VST and AU... but again, if you're really in the market for both high quality and ultimate flexibility then you're looking at vroom, etc. rather than your basic, decent quality freebie...

Yes I ment ValhallaRoom. CSR is also very nice
As a lazy guy I usually use CSR Plate snare preset for my clap sounds
I love reverbs and I have a very bad habit of overusing them. Each of them sound so different so I wan't to be using everthing I have