LiquidSonics Seventh Heaven and Seventh Heaven Professional

[ghettosynth]

For me, the main reason to own Reverberate is that it is a very flexible way to work with impulse response based reverb. I am hoping that eventually the tool to create your own Fusion IRs will become available. In the meantime, I don't have anything else that's quite as flexible for working with even standard IRs.

Granted, I picked it up on sale and I'd wait for another sale before I bought it for that reason if I already had 7HP.

So do you think it will give me more than SIR2 and Altiverb in terms of flexibility? That's something.

Rev2 license gives additional £20 discount on 7HP, so I'm kind of thinking aloud about that option.

It will give you flexibility that you don't have, whether it's more or not is debatable. In some senses it is less flexible than either. I would not buy it just to get the discount, the discount when it was on sale was more than that. Of course that is no guarantee that it will ever be that cheap again.

[plexuss]

deleted

[Beatworld]

Here's another comparison video: H-Reverb vs Pro-R vs 7th Heaven Pro

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dtzAs1tDvqE

And the winner is SHP !!

Would have been a nice extra if you had the advance settings drop down menu and/or EQ drop down menu open to show what is going on there. Mind you by the look they might be off and you are just using a factory pre-set un-tweaked.

Second best for me is Pro-R.
As for H-Reverb, didn't like it much, kind of gurgling sound.
I don't have that. Maybe it is the Echos settings ??

Thanks for that.

[plexuss]

deleted

[Beatworld]

That's my take. We all hear differently.

Thanks, I appreciate your take.

[liquidsonics]

Here's another comparison video: H-Reverb vs Pro-R vs 7th Heaven Pro

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dtzAs1tDvqE

And the winner is SHP !!

Would have been a nice extra if you had the advance settings drop down menu and/or EQ drop down menu open to show what is going on there. Mind you by the look they might be off and you are just using a factory pre-set un-tweaked.

Second best for me is Pro-R.
As for H-Reverb, didn't like it much, kind of gurgling sound.
I don't have that. Maybe it is the Echos settings ??

Thanks for that.

Some pretty varied reverbs on test there. H-Reverb's engine uses static convolution tech I believe, so if you like the feel of Seventh Heaven, well let's just say this is going to be different. I like the sound of Pro-R, to me it has a bit of a Lex vibe to it. So again, a really different flavour.

[Vortifex]

..

[jens]

H-Reverb's engine uses static convolution tech I believe, so if you like the feel of Seventh Heaven, well let's just say this is going to be different.

Could you explain this a bit? What means "static" vs. non-static, as you seem to use for 7th Heaven?

[liquidsonics]

What's up with that first note on the Seventh Heaven? Sounds kind of chorusy, or is it a different round robin on the piano to the previous tests? Reverb sounds nice though, very smooth.

Agreed I'd like to know what happened there, I've not heard this sort of thing caused before by Seventh Heaven and it shouldn't be possible for it to cause any chorusing.

H-Reverb's engine uses static convolution tech I believe, so if you like the feel of Seventh Heaven, well let's just say this is going to be different.

Could you explain this a bit? What means "static" vs. non-static, as you seem to use for 7th Heaven?

Algorithmic reverbs often (not always but often) modulate their looped delay lines to avoid metallic ringing, and a nice side effect is that it makes reverbs sound alive, more musical. Regular convolution cannot reproduce any of this modulation, you get a single static version of the sound, and it sounds pretty dead. It's one of the big reasons people complained about convolution for a lot of years, whilst it was very accurate, it sounded cold and clinical, not very musical all that often. Getting it to blend convincingly with the source was a big problem. Fusion-IR uses multi-sampling (a bit like the more expensive instrument libraries in a sampler) to capture a reverb multiple times and it reproduces a lot of the liveliness of a sampled reverb using some proprietary sampling and modulation techniques. So if you compare a static convolver with a modulated one the difference is immediately clear to hear.

So that is Fusion-IR, and what's in Seventh Heaven is even more multi-sampling to capture a preset in numerous positions plus various other DSP tricks to reproduce how many of the parameters in an M7 change the sound of a preset so your edits are way more authentic sounding. All adds up to a much more faithful reproduction of a piece of reverb gear rather than some samples that sound ok (static) or good (Fusion-IR) but then go off in their own acoustic direction as soon as you start to edit them.

[Michael L]

So are you saying that Reverberate 2 is like 7HP, until we edit it?

[liquidsonics]

So are you saying that Reverberate 2 us like 7HP, until you edit it?

Unmodified preset vs unmodified preset, they are similar. The original Fusion-IRs got really close. The new plugins have a few little extra tricks that edge themselves out slightly in front (dedicated convolvers tuned to each of the 3 reverb component's individual modulation and structural needs that it's not quite possible to do in a general purpose product).

The major differences come into play when you start looking at making the edits necessary to sit the presets in your mix in a way somebody with an actual M7 would be able to do. In some cases, like with the behaviour of the VLF reverb when you make changes to the decay time, or if you edit the pre-delay and listen to the early reflections, these things make a subtle but actually very important structural difference to the sound. They don't respond like they would in Reverberate because that plugin doesn't understand how the M7 processes those changes in a very specific way (e.g. a decay time edit does not linearly change the low reverb time so on short decays you actually get a very deep low reverb that can be controlled in level independently, and the early reflections are never affected by pre-delay and any casual attempt to do so dramatically unglues the sound from the reflections). It's the sort of thing that if you don't study the M7 you'd never notice or expect, but it sure makes a big difference to how the reverb places with its source even to the casual listener.

This was actually highlighted on another forum when a user realised the issue with early reflections in the M7 not being affected by pre-delay. He wanted to change the pre-delay, but didn't like what was happening to the sound. So it was clear to him he needed to go and separate out the early and late components in Reverberate 2 using IR1 and IR2 for his Fusion-IRs, and make his edits to pre-delay independently that way leaving the earlies alone. So he got a more realistic M7 response that sounded better with the source. Well this was good, but also the VLF reverb is affected by pre-delay in its own way too so was an incomplete solution (VLF is not sampled independently in the original Fusion-IRs). So the need for a dedicated reverb to hide all this complication from the user is clear, plus that brings opportunities to add extra facilities.

So things like if you've found a great preset, but you want it brighter, that's impossible in any other convolution reverb because you've literally not got the data available (it's been rolled off, maybe you can fake then filter some in in Reverberate 2 with the sheen control, but it won't sound very authentic and most people don't even know about the feature because the plugin has to much to learn). Also if you just want to make a small tweak to the filtering, well Seventh Heaven has got the matched filters and knows just how much to add or remove using the right shapes so it's a way more natural and much easier edit to make.

Not to mention the fact that as you change the length of a reverb its internal composure changes due to size/density/diffusion, and this can be much better represented by Seventh Heaven behind the scenes so the user can hear that and not be bothered by complicated details they don't need to think about. It automatically just sounds 'right'. If you use the length control in a regular sampled reverb, if you have a large space and dramatically shorten it, that's ok at end because you can fade it away and it will sound alright, but the early portion (how the reverb blooms and swells into its crescendo) should also change but it won't and you get a room that sounds huge initially but then unnaturally dies off in a way that's quite unlike any algorithmic reverb would. So just another example of how you have an option now to get a reverb that behaves in a way that is, I would argue, more musically useful and realistic.

So somebody that only ever fires up a preset and leaves it as it is, or only makes minor tweaks, or makes major tweaks and doesn't care (or prefers) that it's not sounding very authentically M7 anymore - they're going to be pretty well served with Reverberate 2. For anybody that felt before they weren't getting the editing potential from convolution and were going for algorithmic reverbs as a result, well now they can get close to that M7 sound in the box and have the best of both.

[Michael L]

Thank you! I really like R2, so your thorough answer will help me listen more closely.

[jens]

Algorithmic reverbs often (not always but often) modulate their looped delay lines to avoid metallic ringing, and a nice side effect is that it makes reverbs sound alive, more musical. Regular convolution cannot reproduce any of this modulation, you get a single static version of the sound, and it sounds pretty dead. It's one of the big reasons people complained about convolution for a lot of years, whilst it was very accurate, it sounded cold and clinical, not very musical all that often. Getting it to blend convincingly with the source was a big problem. Fusion-IR uses multi-sampling (a bit like the more expensive instrument libraries in a sampler) to capture a reverb multiple times and it reproduces a lot of the liveliness of a sampled reverb using some proprietary sampling and modulation techniques. So if you compare a static convolver with a modulated one the difference is immediately clear to hear.

So that is Fusion-IR, and what's in Seventh Heaven is even more multi-sampling to capture a preset in numerous positions plus various other DSP tricks to reproduce how many of the parameters in an M7 change the sound of a preset so your edits are way more authentic sounding. All adds up to a much more faithful reproduction of a piece of reverb gear rather than some samples that sound ok (static) or good (Fusion-IR) but then go off in their own acoustic direction as soon as you start to edit them.

Thanks for that explanation. I was always wondering what Fusion-IRs actually really are (as the exlanation on the website is a bit vague) - that sounds really smart, neat&interesting - does it use a lot of memory?

[plexuss]

deleted

[hoth]

Wow! Now that was an explanation. I think that also accounts for my earlier post mentioning that 7HP is the first reverb that I have been able to satisfactorily use 100% wet as I am better able to deal with early reflections. Even reverbs that I thoroughly enjoy such as MIR Pro I believe don't quite properly deal with the early reflections.