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  • Impulses, Early Reflections and Reverb Tails

    Hi all!

    2004 will definitely be the year in which convolution reverbs will really take off. I have started out with impulses a few years ago using Acoustic Mirror, using it offline on submixes. Recently I have started to use Pristine Space, with 1 or 2 instances "live" in my Logic mixer, or even remotely via FX-Teleport.

    It is definitely a big improvement over the standard reverb plugins that I have: TrueVerb, RealVerb and Timeworks 4080L (the last one is still my favorite, if you use it for a dark reverb tail).

    Still, I have not yet abandoned my approach to first add Early Reflections and then to add a reverb tail (now with the impulses). So, I still use Cakewalk Soundstage for woodwinds and dry brass, some subtle Trueverb to merge the narrowed string sections and a delay sidechain for the brass sections.

    My question is about this:

    Reverb is generally explained as having two major components: the early reflections, with a deterministic character (bunch of short echos based on a limited set of delay values and some feedback) and the reverb tail, which is more a wash of sound, only vaguely ressembling the original acoustic content.

    My gut feeling says that impulses are very good for the second part, the reverb tail, but less appropriate for the shorter early reflections. This is partly intuitive, and partly based on my conception that convolution has no cross channel processing, at least not with the "single" stereo impulses. So, there is no algorithm that specifies how sounds bounce between the channels, based on their position in the stereo field.

    I still have not found any true stereo impulse sets (= quad channel); maybe this will open a new world of ambience for me [[[;)]]]

    I am very eager to hear the opinions of more educated people on this topic. Are impulses actually also good for the early reflections stage?

    With a typical hall RT60 of say 2 - 2,5 sec, how long is the ER stage? 40-80 msec?

    With my approach for creating my own early reflections, I would need to add longer predelays than normal, to avoid too much clutter in the ER component. True? Would it help to create a smooth curve ("attack/release") in Pristine Space instead of using a simple predelay?

    Thanks for any reflections [[[;)]]]

    Cheers,

    Peter
    www.PeterRoos.com

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    @Another User said:

    2004 will definitely be the year in which convolution reverbs will really take off.
    You said it! I sat for hours yesterday looking for a good reverb for orchestral strings. I have UAD1 so I tweaked RealVerbPro and Dreamverb ´till I was blue in the face. Then I decided to look elsewhere, and after trying SIR I knew that I was on the right track. (I wanted soemthing realtime though). The Waves IR seemed interesting, but the price was not. Then I happened to find Pristine Spaces, and that made my day! I am getting Giga3 (with their convolution reverb) when it comes, but I just could not wait to get some "real space" sound. It is really amazing what a convolution with a good impulse does for an orchestral recording. A must.

  • Peter, Altiverb has quad impulses. I've made custom hall samples myself using their utility, and you sample each speaker in stereo. Is that what you mean?

  • This may be old news, but there's a new-ish product called RayVerb which sounds quite amazing -- the imaging and spatialization is the most convincing I've yet heard. The other very cool thing is that they offer an "LE" version that's FREE!!! Yup, free.

    free is good.

    J.

  • hey you got a download link for that LE version ? i can't seem to find it

  • Gulp!

    I guess I'm in big trouble... I read somewhere that it had been released (I think it was at kvr-vst.com), so I just looked it up on Acquisition (gnutella). Anyway, I did find it out there, and it was free. I just checked on google and it turns out that it had been released by a German magazine called "Keys" -- I guess on a "free" software cd. It was probably just a promotion at the time, but it was definitely free, so it shouldn't be a huge deal downloading it. Dunno. Anyway, the tweaking abiility is low on the LE version, and the full version is reasonably priced, so you could just track down LE as a sort of demo... Also, it looks like there's a demo at their site - prosoniq.com. Either way, it seems like a quick and convincing way to locate the musicians in a 3D space -- particularly good at simulating distance, IMO.

    J.

  • Peter, with the ambiences I found in Samplitude I´m very happy. Actually more happy than the reverb tail. I actually see it the other way round: For me the most significant difference convolution makes in the short reverbs and ambiences. These were always the most difficult parts of synthetic reverbs. The delays easily introduced the metallic sound noone likes. Long reverb tails were quite good always, seen in comparison.

  • Peter, what´s up with your website? I remember that you had written your setup there and I wanted to investigate how much RAM you use with your win98 giga machines. There are Ram limitations, right?

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    @mathis said:

    Peter, with the ambiences I found in Samplitude I´m very happy. Actually more happy than the reverb tail. I actually see it the other way round: For me the most significant difference convolution makes in the short reverbs and ambiences. These were always the most difficult parts of synthetic reverbs. The delays easily introduced the metallic sound noone likes. Long reverb tails were quite good always, seen in comparison.



    Matt,
    Which version of Samp are you using?

    "The delays easily introduced the metallic sound noone likes."
    Do you mean the Samp delays?


    How is the MIDI?
    I'm thinking of using Sequoia.
    Thanx.

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    @GTBannah said:

    [Which version of Samp are you using?

    "The delays easily introduced the metallic sound noone likes."
    Do you mean the Samp delays?


    How is the MIDI?
    I'm thinking of using Sequoia.
    Thanx.


    Samp 7 pro

    No, the synthtic reverb engines use more or less complex delays for replicating early reflections. Only rarely they´re convincing because of lack of complexity.

    I don´t use the midi-part of samp. I once tried but quickly went back to cubase, mostly because of convinience. Version 8 will bring significant improvements on the midi side. I guess I´ll give it another try then. B.t.w., the midi part is supposed to be the same in samp and sequoia.

    Bests,
    - M

  • is this the right time to beg/plead for MIR? [:D]

    I experimented a bit with IR reverbs, but unfortunatly there aren't many good options out there that are affordable for us PC users(especially us poor ones). I mostly used SIR on cubase, (which sounds amazing) but the latency drove me bonkers. It just wasn't practical for use in real-time(or more than likely I just don't know how to adjust everything to compensate for the latency). I did find, however that with the right impulse and enough tweaking I could get richer versions of just about any sound I wanted (compared to non-IR reverbs) including both early reflections and tails.

    Of course, the only way to really tell is to listen and decide for yourself. And since I'm no pro, these other guys probably have better ideas than me ^^