2CAudio Breeze | 2.5 | Simple. Light. Pristine. Intelligently Adaptive.

[Andrew Souter]

Most important… I, too, am looking forward having Precedence coupled with the incredible quality of Aether: after so many years (and so many other reverbs tested), it's still my favourite reverb!

Thanks for the compliments. Yes, Aether still has some unique tricks after all this time and remains quite popular...

It's funny bc from the design/DSP perspective various techniques we use in B2 and Breeze are more "choose-your-own-superlative" on paper if only bc they came later, but many people do indeed still love the character specific to Aether.

It's funny because reverb design if often concerned more about "verisimilitude" than "truth". It's all an illusion of space and perception of what is real and what is not real is very blurred. Often exaggerated things become much loved that diverge a decent amount from any kind of objectively measured "truth". They tend to help construct more potent creative narratives and inspire musicians to be creative.

anyway, end introspection...

[XComposer]

The very strange thing is that I see Aether reviewed in some web pages as a reverb for sound design, for non-realistic effects, while, on the contrary, it seems the most realistic one to me (while, among yours, I would use B2 for sound design, for example). It's probably because I'm in classical music, so my idea of "realistic" is, for instance, a solo piano or a solo cello in an auditorium – maybe others have different ideas of a "realistic" situation.

[Andrew Souter]

Aether 1.0 was released originally in 2009, 10 years ago. At the time convolution verbs were still king. Aether was, IMHO, the first algorithmic verb to really compete with and some may say beat the current convolution verbs. It also proved definitively it was possible for a plug-in to match the best hardware legends. Since convolution is obviously good at "real" a lot of the original focus of Aether was on its more creative applications, which are just not practical with convolution, and I myself tended to make a lot of very large ambient presets bc I was working in electronic/dance music and scoring at the time where creativity and a "futurism" aesthetic was the key. And I grew up listening to ambient music, so this stuff is in my DNA and so I just can't resist making 100second presets with bizarre damping filter etc. And well, I made most of the original factory presets, so the initial launch had a rather "creative" sound to it bc of this.

The preset designer and producer Den, made an awesome set of more traditional/"real"/acoustic presets shortly after that, that proved Aether does "real" extremely well also.

I would agree that B2 goes even further into sound-design territory, and that is where we wanted to position it. That was the design intent. It's a "spatial sound design playground". Ironically it also because very popular in the scoring community for "normal"/"real" presets, largely do to its incredible sense of depth.

The combination of Precedence and Breeze is most "real" at the moment I would say, particularly if you are using many linked instances as we advocate. Simon's expansion gets pretty creative though.

So things get blurry somewhat, and yes, different people have different perspectives on what "real" is. If you come from a purely electronic music background your perspective may be quite different than say as classical or jazz musician with performance experience.

I am still not convinced that "exactly real" is what is the platonic ideal for reverb. Most real spaces are imperfect. It's a simple thought experiment to realize that concert halls are built to attempt to reach some specific acoustic/mathematical goals for aesthetic reasons. But these goals may not be obtainable with reasonable constructions methods, materials, and needs of having human beings somewhere in the space. So I would say the "design ambitions" for concert halls are better to emulate than the concert halls themselves. But it is good to be aware of the general physics of acoustics etc.

In Breeze 2 and precedence I did study such "real" topics significantly more than in the past and they are definitely more "physically informed" than say B2. B2 was never trying to be "real". It does not really care about real. It cares only about sounding great/interesting and inspiring creativity. Aether's design philosophy does care about real, at least based on our early 2000s understanding of what "real" is/was. Future Aether versions will care even more about real as well, and we have of course not stopped learning...

Building things is fun. It's always humbling to discover how much you don't know. Even when you are an "expert"... That's the cool part. it'd be no fun if there was not something new to learn.

[Andrew Souter]

Speaking of "real"

Regarding setup/tutorials/etc. check this out:


Full res 4K:

https://2caudio.com/sitecontent/product ... i_Aida.png

Rendered Example Mix:

https://2caudio.com/sitecontent/product ... pleMix.wav


Cubase Project (~600MB):

https://2caudio.com/sitecontent/product ... dioPBJ.zip

Dry Orchestral Stems created by Beat Kaufmann as part of his "Mixing an Orchestra" tutorial.

https://www.beat-kaufmann.com/files/index.php

MIDI Performance/Arrangement/Editing by Beat Kaufmann.

Rendered using VSL original series with no additional reverb -- a very dry library.

Spatial Mixing example using 2CAudio Precedence 1.5 and Breeze 2.5 by Andrew Souter.

Very basic/limited other mixing is applied. Additional EQ, compression, gain automation and general mixing would normally be done as well but the purpose here is to show the 2CAudio PBJ Workflow in a real project and focus on the quality of the spatialization.

Note the extreme positioning of "Fanfare" brass elements as to emulate the practice of sometimes putting such elements offstage in the balcony etc.

If you have Cubase you can download this project and solo/mute tracks and experiment with your mix etc.

This requires the full version though as the demo version is limited to 8 instnaces of P and B, and will not load preset data. So you need the full versions to explore the project file effectively.

I am preparing many other examples and will make videos from them as well.

[Ploki]

I love aether on rooms tho.
My use for 2C Audio is like this usually:
B2: short ambiences, Halls, FX
Breeze2: Plates, wooshines
Aether: Rooms, soft ambiences

[XComposer]

Yes, the spatialization in the above example is extremely realistic! Wow… (There are still some minor flaws in the strings, in my opinion, but, anyway, very good example!)
I don't have Cubase – Logic as main DAW and Reaper as secondary DAW, here.
My use for your reverbs is usually Aether for medium and large halls with instrumental music; B2 for electronic music (I mean, contemporary classical electronic music); Breeze when I need precise spatialization.

[Andrew Souter]

Or something completely different, a sparse 4-track pop vocal ballad:



Full Res 4K:
https://2caudio.com/sitecontent/product ... BJ-Mix.png

Exported Wav:
https://2caudio.com/sitecontent/product ... BJ-Mix.wav

[Cinebient]

Not sure if its related to Breeze or Precedence but sometimes when i save an instrument in Logic and reload it Breeze and Precedence are back to the default 50% wet. But mostly just happens with the second (or more) connected instances (f.e. inside a stacked track).
I also would like that it not always jump to this default value if i connect a Breeze instance with Precedence (this seems to happen sometimes too indeed if i reload a Logic patch and all is back to 50% like it does not save the state correct).
Is there a way that i just could stay at the settings from the preset (or that Precedence get the value from Breeze 2 and not vice versa).
Edit: It seems Breeze 2 is the one. When i unlink them Precedence reload with the correct state but Breeze 2 jumps back to 50% default wet.

[Iva]

second - dropdown menus are not in place
https://www.dropbox.com/s/ufc4c451bj23d ... 6.png?dl=0
system in use:
macbook pro 2015 late 2016 - OSX Mojave 10.14.6 - DAW Cubase 10.0.50

This is known, and it is host specific and specific to Retina displays. In Logic the menu is more or less in the correct place. In Cubase OSX it is not as you see. we will replace this system menu with a custom menu tree-browser in a future update and then it will be in exactly as we spec it.

...actually we were able to adjust this also for Cubase, so the system menus are in the correct location on Cubase OSX/retina now as well.

Regarding the GUI window size not auto updating in cubase after GUI size pref change, that remains, as it seems to be a Cubase issue. But all you must do is close and reopen the GUI window after a GUI-size change (which is likely an infrequent event for most users), so it's a rather minor issue, except perhaps when dragging between screens with different GUI scalings as you pointed out. We will try to get more info from Stienberg for the future. And who knows, maybe it is good already in Cubase 10.5 that just came out yesterday(?). Did't try yet.

Hi Andrew. Any news on further updates? At the moment Breeze2 looks a little unfinished. Some menus are still with the old design and are not in place. GUI resize bug mentioned above seems not to be host specific, but in my opinion rather needs fixing from your side. I think so because Waves 10 under Cubase 10.5 had the same windows resizing bug but they fixed it with waves 11 so now from all of my plugins only breeze 2 has this problem. Also i'd like to know if you're planing to implement gui proportions saving while switching between screens with different resolutions. Latest 4k plugins from arturia already save gui proportions somehow, so it can be done i think.

[4damind]

I like to use the Eventide Ultraverb if it should be a bit more transparent. ValhallaVintage has a very strong coloration and a lot of modulation. Where can you classify Breeze 2? Is it rather "transparent" or rather "coloring"? Modulating or transparent (an example for a very transparent reverb would be for me e.g. EA Phoenix).

[Boone777]

I own BlackHole,VVV and Breeze. Breeze is my go to for clean verb with pinch of sparkle that makes it sound a bit unreal, out of this world but still not overboard,in a very good way. VVV is a go to also when I want more tone from the verb.

You can still go wild with Breeze a bit, but I prefer other for this task.

[4damind]

I own BlackHole,VVV and Breeze. Breeze is my go to for clean verb with pinch of sparkle that makes it sound a bit unreal, out of this world but still not overboard,in a very good way. VVV is a go to also when I want more tone from the verb.

You can still go wild with Breeze a bit, but I prefer other for this task.

Ok, it does seem to overlap with my Ultraverb a bit. I also use the Artsacoustic Reverb which is also rather transparent.
But Breeze is not comparable to Lexicon PCM or Exponential Audio R4?

I had already tested Breeze 1 or 2 years ago and was absolutely unsure at that time. The demo time was unfortunately very short with 30min (I mean it was changed to 120 min).
Maybe I should have a look at it again

[jens]

Breeze is very flexible, even without considering the 12 partly vastly different algos. (For instance you can use each of those algorithms for a constant density reverb (something you'd have with e. g. Valhalla Vintage to switch to a certain algo for).

So it can be very transparent and clean and modern or be a lot more on the vintage side of things.

Considering in addition the grouping feature, I think no other reverb is better equipped to be your standard reverb you put on more or less every channel (then perhaps end up dialing it a bit back here and there to add something like e. g. a spring reverb for a bit of a special color - that's how I do it (I use both Precedence and Breeze together on every channel).)

[4damind]

This grouping allows to edit different instances of the reverb (Breeze, B2, Aether) with one editor?

If I understand this correctly, this "link" between Breeze and Presedence will internally "synchronize" the pre-delay, so that the reverb and the width/depth created with Precedence work correctly?

To be honest, I have tested some of these spatiality plugins in the past, and the results have been terrible, that's why I'm a bit biased about that...

[XComposer]

It already does so with regard to Breeze 2 and, in my opinion, works well. My impression is very good. You can listen to some audio examples here in this discussion.
The developer says that this feature will be added to the future versions of Aether and B2.