Product Reviews by KVR Members

Used the time during this Covid crisis and compared some IR loaders on my system.

faIRmageddon is an IR loader/designer being able to mix up to 5 (4 main + 1 reference; consolidation makes this up to infinity) IRs simulatenously including phasealignment and sample rate conversion which makes it the fastest and stress-free to set up. Besides the sound shaping options per mono/stereo slot (like hp/lp filter, delay, panning, tilt) it offers even more for the complete IR, including eq matching. The factory content includes 2 of their own IR packs (modern rock, post grunge) and a collection of vallhallir files.

It runs rock solid on my windows system. The CPU consumption during playback is slightly higher than with other IR loaders, but you can decide to run in mono or stereo mode which can half the consumption. When tweaking its settings faIRmageddon can produce some additional overhead. It may also depend on your buffer size but I was able to record with it being on a track. The dev already wrote they're looking into it and will optimize it further.

Soundwise in default it produces the same sound as others. The frequency shaping options don't seem to mess up the phase either. I really dig the tilting feature, making it possible to quickly balance the IR in the context of others. Mixing IRs is so comfortable done via a x-y positioning grid, which they already used in their awesome faGuitarAlign plugin.

Bite, Resonance and Air are EQ settings in the final section, targeting certain useful and important parts of the spectrum. Cab size seems to do something similar to pitch shifting, mimiking different sized cabs. Eventually mix & stereo widening can be applied too.
Exporting the IR to a new file is as easy as clicking the export button. The other IR loaders were able to read those files. Though in between I forgot I had the stereo mode enabled resulting in a stereo IR and that lead to errors loading them in other products.

Only the automatic gain compensation is something that created trouble and artefacts here. Simply disabling it, resolved it. Please take a look into it again because I see why it is an important feature and faIRmageddon was the only one having it if I saw correctly.

The interface is fully resizable, thus I had no problems running it on my 4k display. Though I think it can be somewhat tiny when using it on laptops. I really like the visual feedback about what is going on. May it be panning, delaying, filtering and even the positioning of the individual IRs is shown in the output display.

I experienced the company to react quickly when requesting features, resolving bugs or needing support. Some of this plugins features were even based on the wishes of all participants during the early access phase.

In conclusion I do not think it replaces a simple straight forward one slot convolution plugin yet, but is a perfect addition for designing (even stereo) IRs. Please tweak some CPU consumption, add more stuff that makes an static IR come to life and I'm sure it will! Then it will also be a perfect 5/5 score, now it is a very good 4.

Keep up the good work.