Virtual sound stage 2.0

[Armadillo]

http://www.parallax-audio.com/

This was released a couple of months ago, but I can't for the life of me find anything about it on KVR.
With the lite version selling for $129+vat, surely it's not pricier than a lot of reverb plugins. And considering this does the whole sound stage thing, it should be a bit of a bargain - if the quality is there of course.

I've only tried it briefly and it did make it a lot easier to place instruments around in a room than your usual reverb + panning method, but I'll need to test it a bit more to get a better idea. I guess if you want to use it for Pop/Rock/Hip hop etc. you'll need the full version as the lite one only provides a 'concert hall' sound stage.

Anyone else tried this?

[valerian_777]

http://www.kvraudio.com/product/virtual ... llax-audio

You can use it also without any reverb as replacement for the pan of your DAW. Anyway, i think it's worth if you working with orchestra libraries but not for pop or hip-hop.

[Tapehead]

Very, very, very…..INTERESTING! Any reviews of this tool? I’ll definitely be trying it tonight and hope it sounds convincing.

[bharris22]

Would be nice if there was a Black Friday sale on this .

[Armadillo]

Valerian_777 - yeah, I know it's listed on kvr but I meant there has been no discussion about it whatsoever.
You mean, it's not good for Pop/Hip hop because those styles don't require much reverb? Or the fact that perhaps only the 'studio' sound stage would be appropriate?

Tapehead: only review I could find is this one, and that's of v1, which is supposedly much worse than v2.
http://soundbytesmag.net/parallax-audio ... oundstage/

[RunBeerRun]

That looks cool, I'm going to see if there's a demo. I'm not interested in reverb, but the room aspects could work well.

[secretkillerofnames]

Can the position of each sound source be moved via automation? That could be interesting for acousmatic effects.

[RunBeerRun]

Wow the demo is really large, I wonder what this is made of.

[Breval]

I had both versions, V2 is greatly improved over v1 but one still has to be cautious using it.

I use it in VEPro5 along with MIR, algo verb on the mains with various libs with baked reverb.

Getting good results. SPAT also works great (if not better)

[nbd]

Now that time has passed, are there any more owners of this lurking around to give comments?

[jamcat]

Now that time has passed, are there any more owners of this lurking around to give comments?

I have Virtual Sound Stage 2, and use it all the time for SWAM instruments. It’s truly phenomenal.

Be sure to try the different microphone configurations in the MIC SETUP panel. The stereo image is going to vary greatly, depending on the configuration. You get EBS, NOS, ORTF, GHS, various AB and XY configurations, Blumlein, and even Decca Tree!

You will need to use a separate reverb for the reverb tails, as Virtual Sound Stage 2 only does the stereo 3D placement and early reflections, since that is what contains all of the localization information. What Virtual Sound Stage 2 does, is it replaces the generic early reflections of your reverb with location specific early reflections that are unique for each instrument on the stage.

It wouldn’t make sense for Virtual Sound Stage 2 to do the reverb tail, since you need to use one VSS instance per instrument on the stage. So all VSS instances should be sent to a single group reverb to fill in the room’s non-directional late reflections.

Your reverb will need to be able to turn off early reflections, and it’s important to follow the guidelines for the Reverb Time, Pre-Delay, and Size for each modeled space in Virtual Sound Stage 2’s documentation.

I’ve tried a few different reverbs with Virtual Sound Stage 2, including PhoenixVerb and Verberate 2, but what I have found to work the best by far is actually Studio One’s Room Reverb. It is a mathematical room modeler that “adjusts its internal reverb parameters based on virtual-room models.”


Using Virtual Sound Stage 2 with Studio One's Room Reverb

When using Room Reverb, you should leave Length and Pre at 0.00 ms, because the correct pre-delay and reverb decay values are already calculated based on the dimensions and Room Type. (The Length and Pre settings are only for adding additional offsets to those calculations.) Set the reverb Mix (top left) to 1.0. This will remove the Early Reflections completely.

Dialing in the room size in Room Reverb is a little tricky because the way it works is unnecessarily convoluted and obscure. The room’s Size is based on the volume in cubic metres, so you need to take the cube root of the (Width * Length * Height) of the room. For example, the VSS Chamber is 19m x 27m x 10m, which is 5130m³. The cube root of 5130 is approximately 17.25. So 17.25m is the correct Size in Room Reverb for the VSS Chamber.

But we’re not done yet... now we have to get the right shape of the room in Room Reverb by adjusting the Width and Height settings, which are proportional to the Depth. (Depth in Room Reverb is the same as Length in Virtual Sound Stage.) All 3 dimensions will change based on the ratios you enter, but will always equal the (Room Size)³ when multiplied together. Got that? Didn't think so.

First, divide the Width of the VSS ROOM by its Length, which, for the VSS Chamber, is 19m / 27m, to get a .7 proportional Width. Next, divide the VSS ROOM Height by the Length, which (again for the VSS Chamber) is 10m / 27m, to get a proportional Height of .37. Put those into the Width and Height settings in Room Reverb, and it will now deliver the final Room dimensions of 18.94m x 27.06m x 10.01m, which is pretty close to the specified Chamber dimensions of 19m x 27m x 10m, found in VSS’s documentation.

Luckily, you only need to do this process once for each ROOM in Virtual Sound Stage 2, if you remember to save them as presets. But now you really get to hear the power of Virtual Sound Stage when you overlay it with these precise reverb settings. The sound stage suddenly comes into sharp focus as the room reverb and early reflections align, presenting a true, detailed 3D image of the concert space that you can practically see. It’s pretty breathtaking.

Maybe someone else knows of a reverb that lets your specify the precise dimensions of a room by width, length, height for people who don’t use Studio One?

[jamcat]

I never thought this day would come. But here we are...

Virtual Sound Stage has been updated!
Now it supports VST3 and Apple Silicon

And it's now FREE!

https://parallax-audio.com/

[Morty-C-137]

It's still a great tool to put things into a space together but this updated version still has its bugs. making the plugin crash.

[Danilo Villanova]

The "auto-detect" button is making it crash REAPER (Win 11) here. Some people reported the same on Cubase. Pretty repeatable crash too.

[jamcat]

It's still a great tool to put things into a space together but this updated version still has its bugs. making the plugin crash.

The "auto-detect" button is making it crash REAPER (Win 11) here. Some people reported the same on Cubase. Pretty repeatable crash too.

It was updated to 2.0.3 a couple days ago. There doesn’t seem to be a changelog or any indication from Gabriel of what’s new, but I suspect it is to address some of these crashes in 2.0.2.

See if the new version fixes the crashes.