What are your favorite non-Valhalla reverbs, and why?

[Sequent]

That's really great! So, in a way... the legacy of Spin Audio is alive and well and I can only imagine that there are any number of directions that you guys might explore in the future!

But, back on topic...

Do you have any personal reverb experiences you would care to share?

This has been a very interesting thread so far.

Thanks. Denis, (half of 2CAudio) was formerly half of Spin Audio, and is the main designer of M2 and all other Spin Audio reverbs. Not sure exactly how widely known that is...

Anyway, we have some exciting stuff for you all quite soon...

Back to work now.

[Bronto Scorpio]

This has been a very interesting thread so far.

Indeed

Cheers
Dennis

[valhallasound]

what i love about the 224 is that it is uplifting and exciting - which i guess i what makes it perfect for pop.
most of the rooms and reverbs mentioned here are defeently clener and maybe more natural but most of them give me a sense of being oppressed and costrained in a small dense room....depressing almost. that super dense feel i don't like much. some sparkling noise and grain make it more alive.
u slap on the 224 and u feel like u r being cheered on and feel larger than life and airy and spacy...not a defined space...u don't even know where u are..apart that it feels good.

The 224 algorithms are WEIRD. Lexicon started moving away from them by the time of the 224XL (the "Rich" algorithms in the 224XL were the first versions of the more "modern" Lexicon algorithms). The 224 Room algorithm is fairly close to the 224 Concert Hall, and seems like it would be grainy as all get out. But it sits in the mix nicely.

The RMX16 I tried recently has some very similar characteristics. I would go so far as to say *suspiciously* close characteristics. The RMX16 algorithms are definitely not cloning the 224 algorithms, but there are some similarities that go beyond what I can chalk up to coincidence. Keith Barr has described how he came up with the original ideas for his reverb topologies by playing with the 224 for a little bit and hearing how things worked, and I wouldn't be surprised if a similar thing happened at AMS in the very early 80s.

Anyway, the 224 and RMX16 are both good examples of grainy older verbs that sound a little weird in isolation, but work like magic in a mix. I have a pretty good idea about how they work, but I am still trying to figure out why they work. Is it the spatial impression generated by the widely spaced reflections (which are heard as "grain" in isolation)? Or is it the case that the grain is lost within the depths of a mix, and is masked by other instruments? Someone suggested this earlier, and it is an interesting idea - that a full mix will "mask" discrete reflections, in a similar way as to how signals in a given frequency area will mask neighboring frequencies.

Then again, maybe it is the opposite - that grainy reverbs have reflections that DON'T get masked in the mix, and therefore help the sound being reverbed to stand out more. I don't know if anyone has done research on this sort of "spatial masking."

Sean Costello

[michu]

Sean, maybe it's worth taking into equation that grainy reverbs in question not only have low tail density and slow density build-up, but also run quite low samplerates and use noisy, by today's standards at least, interpolators and AD/DA converters

[valhallasound]

Sean, maybe it's worth taking into equation that grainy reverbs in question not only have low tail density and slow density build-up, but also run quite low samplerates and use noisy, by today's standards at least, interpolators and AD/DA converters

I could get into my take on this stuff, but I don't want to violate my own non-Valhalla rules for this thread.

Keeping things general: Many of the "classic" reverbs had NO energy above 8 kHz or so (I think that the Quantec QRS had a cutoff at 10 KHz). The interpolation used was almost always linear interpolation, with highly quantized coefficients - this generated lowpass filtering and noise.

The AD/DA convertors probably generated their own noise, but I think that this noise is probably less important, compared to the effects of the anti-aliasing filters and crappy interpolation. Most of the early reverbs used 12-bit convertors, but used floating point tricks to get 15 bits of accuracy.

Sean Costello

[Shy]

olikana, I completely agree with your description of the 224. It's just something else. The uplifting feeling it can create is unsurpassed. Listening to Mask, Blade Runner or other things by Vangelis, you can understand that without this fantastic reverb, the music, no matter how good, would never have worked so well. It's amazing.

I use KSP8 for reverbs and it also has that thing that makes you feel "unconfined", it sounds excellent, airy and nice, never too "diffused" in a harsh way, and often works excellently with hardly any diffusion. I believe the Panaural Room algorithm for example has very minimal diffusion, and yet it works perfectly and is super smooth. You just don't feel "confined", it's spacey and nice as well as very "natural". It's no 224 (I wish I had one), it's better in many ways (can give much more dense and less grainy early reflections for example) but it definitely doesn't have that extra "uplifting" factor in the 224. So, when is someone going to properly reverse engineer that beauty?

[michu]

I could get into my take on this stuff, but I don't want to violate my own non-Valhalla rules for this thread.

damn
at least i tried
i would just like to add, that in my own tinkering with Ariesverb i found out there is such thing as too much density and too fast build-up. with 16x16 FDN matrix maximum scattering Householder style was among first things i tried just to realize quickly that i prefer to wind scattering down quite a bit.

[valhallasound]

I could get into my take on this stuff, but I don't want to violate my own non-Valhalla rules for this thread.

damn
at least i tried

Trust me, I could talk about my own stuff all day. I just felt that it was a good idea to keep my own plugins out of the mix, in order to keep this becoming an x vs y thread, or to have this becoming another place for developers to hawk their own wares (*cough*).

i would just like to add, that in my own tinkering with Ariesverb i found out there is such thing as too much density and too fast build-up. with 16x16 FDN matrix maximum scattering Householder style was among first things i tried just to realize quickly that i prefer to wind scattering down quite a bit.

See, this is interesting to me. WHY does the lowered scattering sound better to you? Is it because of metallic coloration, or is it because you like the texture better with less scattering? Also, what sorts of sounds are you running through there?

I was going to suggest that Vangelis lowered the Diffusion parameter on the 224 for some of the sounds in Blade Runner, but I don't think the Diffusion parameter was introduced to the 224 until a later revision of the OS. The 224 algorithms were just that grainy.

Sean Costello

[xiphiuz]

Blueverb 2080 (pcm91 clone?) - great on drums
Yamaha SPX990 - great on drums
Sony DPS V77 and/or 55. - great for big huge spaces
Ensoniq DP4 verbs. - great for al sort of things
Quantum Yardstick - just great

About reverb in tracks - Very nice mood in track: maybe not the most natural verb, but the sound is very sweet

I don't know what Jack Johnson uses, but in general those verbs (or "rooms") are great too.

[JJBiener]

This is indeed an interesting thread. This is my most profound reverb moment.

I was in London is May of 1994. I was wandering around the streets when I found myself if front of Westminster Abbey. If you've ever been to Westminster, you know what an imposing edifice it is. The door was open so I walked inside. Looking around at the art and architecture, there is no question of care and reverence of the people who built it. Every detail no matter how small or large is there for glory of God, or at least God as they saw him.

I was fortunate that I arrived just as a service was starting. The choir began to sing and sound simply filled the place. Sitting there listening, the voices surrounded me and enfolded me to the point where they seemed to be a physical presence in the room. It was as if not just the choir was singing, but the stones of the Abbey itself were singing. My body resonated with music down to the very core. I have no doubt that to a believer, it would be a transformative if not divine experience. As a non-believer, I found the experience truly moving both physically and spiritually.

If you think about the technical challenges in creating such a structure, it would be a complicated undertaking even today with all of the design tools at our disposal. It is a massive stone and glass building. It has thousands of surfaces reflecting the sound in a variety of was from the stained glass windows to the huge stone columns. Under such conditions, it would be easy for all these reflecting surfaces to turn the sound to an incoherent mush. But they don't. As the choir sings, each note is distinct and clear. The words can be heard and understood throughout the room. It is an amazing engineering feat made even more so by the fact that it was done over 750 years ago.

[antithesist]

Regarding masking: there may have been other mentions here, but I wrote the following and then edited the post a little later to be more thread compliant. It's a little pretentious upon rereading, like most of my writing... well, the non-stupid parts anyway:

"I have learned, forgotten and relearned many times that individual track and group treatments in a mix are often counterintuitive. I guess that would be due to masking effects?"

Reverb thought: there's something about the 224 where the sound seems to disintegrate over time. I don't think I've heard that quality in any modern hardware or plug-ins.

[olikana]

i have no technical knowledge of how such reverbs are made so can't make any technical comment.
on the 224 my ears tell me that there's some white noise in there...filterd maybe ...and that resonance never builds up in middle bass frequencies (so it never sounds muddy)...and always sounding pleasent...dunno...
the 224 gives me the feeling a nice large room with some open windows .

but there is an album where a very exciting -airy -uplifting reverb was heard and without actually using any reverb....but miccing up a custom built room ( so i read). a kind of cleaned up 224.
in metallica's black album : the reverb in that album is very uplifting and seems to have pretty much the same exciting airy charachteristics of the 224 hall/room. i read that it was actually a rooom micced all over (15 mics) and panelled to please all over for lively reflections (and even with different material panels for variety of flvours mixed together). it was one of the most expensive albums ever made so they didn't have to cut any corners so to speak and they had the cream of the room acoutics enjeneers setting it up.

apparently that room looked something like this:

might help

if u listen to metallica - sad but true , nothing else matters, wherever i may roam, friend of misery you hear almost an improved 224....same airy liveliness...cleaner and denser ...but still exciting and uplifting....retaining that airy exciting but not invasive reflections...ambience.


i also read that the SPX90 from yamaha can achieve similar results to the 224 but never heard a real one...tried a few impulses and they sounded ok-ish. a bit dark.

[olikana]

Or is it the case that the grain is lost within the depths of a mix, and is masked by other instruments? Someone suggested this earlier, and it is an interesting idea - that a full mix will "mask" discrete reflections, in a similar way as to how signals in a given frequency area will mask neighboring frequencies.

Then again, maybe it is the opposite - that grainy reverbs have reflections that DON'T get masked in the mix, and therefore help the sound being reverbed to stand out more. I don't know if anyone has done research on this sort of "spatial masking."

i think it's n.2
the 224 u slap it on the master and it seems it doesn't conflict with any of the important frequencies in a song. especially the midlle/low frequencies where the kick and bass sit (reverbs should never be muddy or interfere in those frequnecies). and it adds some fizz to snares and high hats (only on high hats must be careful to eq any conflict)....it seems to fill in those gaps between the main instruments frequencies.
many italo dance hit produtions were made with the 224 slapped on the master. they didn't even have time to do things the proper way with 2-3 songs per day to be printed out.

[antithesist]

That's an interesting take about the Metallica room, but to speak of the SPX90 and 224 in the same breath is like... well, something really bad. Seriously though, I worked at a studio with a 224, but my first personally owned reverbs were an Alesis midiverb II and an SPX90. Even upgraded to the MKII, which I seem to recall was in part supposed to make the actual reverb algo better, I'd say the 90 was one of the crappiest reverbs I've ever owned.

It was also the greatest chorus. Mine stayed in Symphonic mode almost constantly until I traded it and a bunch of other stuff, and cash, for an Otari 1" 8 track that is nearly the size of an over/under washer and dryer. I often regret getting rid of the Yamaha. Hmm, I wonder if UberMod can do the Symphonic sound? The MVII on the other hand, was decent, but still no 224. Nothing is, yet anyway.

The midiverb eventually lead me to the quadraverb, which in my opinion, is as close as gets. I did do some cool stuff with the 90 and MVII combined, using the 90 in either Symphonic or one of the ER modes (which are actually pretty good, maybe that's what people are referring to) in series/parallel, both with external feedback paths, etc. The midiverb II is still a unique box. I especially like the reverse/bloom programs.

[Andrew Souter]

That's really great! So, in a way... the legacy of Spin Audio is alive and well and I can only imagine that there are any number of directions that you guys might explore in the future!

But, back on topic...

Do you have any personal reverb experiences you would care to share?

Well my favorite is the one we have just completed... does that count?