I realize the entire Giga line of products was discontinued, making this somewhat irrelevant at this point, but I thought this was worth telling.

I owned Gigapulse VST for a number of years, but didn't end up using it very much for various reasons; these days you can't even activate the VST, and the copy protection doesn't work on x64. The IR's themselves seemed quite good though, and I wanted to convert them to wav format for Pristine Space. Long story short, I got everything setup and found a way to rip the PCM data from the Giga presets.

Once I started using the now .wav IR's more, I noticed that some of the IR's sounded very similar, and the wave forms looked nearly identical as well. Once I looked into it further, I found that many of the IR's that were all presented to be unique real world measurements, were simply stretched or EQ'd versions of other presets. For example Small Room Studio C, was a time squished version of the Small Concert Hall preset.

Keep in mind that in Gigapule, 1 preset consists of 72 IR's, which makes up 18 positions in 7 channel surround, as it's presented as a true acoustics simulator of sorts. It appears more so however, that someone just got lazy half way through production, and decided to fib the remaining presets to fill out the library. I can only imagine what would happen if something like Altiverb or VSL was caught doing this now.

Even if it is irrelevant now, it shows a decent degree of underhandedness that I thought should be shared.

Maybe when it was being made their were already in dire straits as a company so needed to cut costs by cutting corners?

I remember, years ago, a product coming onto the market called "Nashville Straights". They were, without doubt, the brightest stings I'd ever heard and everybody was raving about them. One of the most fascinating details about their manufacture was the packaging. They came, uncoiled in very long boxes. The theory was that, since they were not coiled up for shipping, they kept their factory brightness.

People bought this idea for about two years until someone discovered that "Nashville Straights" was just a front and the company was getting it's string from an established manufacturer who delivered the string to them...coiled up!!! The Nashville people just uncoiled them and put them in the long boxes.

Not perfectly relevant but just goes to show you can't trust anybody.

I agree GigaPulse is frustrating. The theory and the marketing were great, but in practice any tweaks had to be quite minimal, or you ended up with distorted or metallic tails. As Cyrosis says, that's because there are too few independently recorded positions.

But maybe you can still activate GigaPulse, or at any rate I've not heard of activation requests being refused or ignored.

I still like one or two GigaPulse presets, but LiquidSonics' Reverberate is far superior when it comes to modifying the sense of distance associated with a single impulse.

Good to hear, I get asked this question a fair bit on my support form and the advice tends to be to play with the pre-delay, attack and filtering envelopes (since distance attenuates highs more than lows, so rolling down the highs initially and letting the filter dissipate towards the tail retains the tail sheen) - if you had any other techniques I'd be interested to hear about them.

I tried activating it online a few times, and it never connected to anything, the server just seems non existent these days. It's possible you could contact someone at Tascam for manual activation though. I just used the 7 day trial it gives you after installation to rip the PCM data out of the few unique presets and add WAV headers.I think you may have missed my point actually, it's not too few positions that I posted about. It's that many presets are duplicated, post processed with some EQ and time stretching, and renamed to be advertised as an entirely new and unique IR set.

Cyrosis, maybe if you generate the registration text file and E-mail it to custser@tascam.com with a short note, some kind person at Tascam might provide the registration key needed to complete activation. Tascam will not answer any questions about the software, but a registration request is still worth a try. The way to generate the text file is via the GigaPulse VST License Manager, accessible from the Start Menu. Choose the option to register off-line.

I didn't miss your point. I was simply extending it to explain my own observations: if all visible microphone positions represented a separate impulse (which they don't), you wouldn't, for example, get blurred sound from distant positions. That 'economy' of impulses, which you identified, is the chief failing of the program.

Matt, I can't add much to your summary of how to create distance. In general, increasing Pre-delay and the envelope Attack will move sounds closer to the listener. I wouldn't normally leave those parameters at zero. The Reverberate ER generator can bring sounds closer. For those who are not familiar with Reverberate, I should point out it has top-notch EQ sections.

In addition, I would suggest combining different rooms or impulses in the same mix, so in an orchestral example you could have violins in one hall and trombones in another (larger) one. Transient modifiers are also useful for altering distance. I use Flux's Bittersweet and Voxengo's TransGainer.

I find that the difficulty with distance is not in selecting techniques, but in making those techniques effective in practice. The quest for a formula or template, useful in all situations, is bound to be frustrated since every mix is different. There's no magic slider which will differentiate space without the need to tweak or listen.

The developer of EAReverb posted on KVR about distance a few weeks ago. He was inviting comment about the idea of a dedicated 'distance plug-in'. Like you, Matt, he said he had been besieged with questions from composers about how to do distance.

I've been thinking here of mock-ups done with sampled acoustic instruments. In the case of electronica, where one is not constrained by realism, the rules, if there are any, are more relaxed. In that genre one could, for example, use three different reverb plug-ins in a mix to create three different layers of depth.