# Do I need a Spatial Audio Processor when I have Altiverb Positioner?



## Teldex (Oct 23, 2020)

I have come to the mixing stage of a symphonic work using various sample libraries—some wet/prepositioned, some dry/panned center, and I’m looking to use the best Placement reverb software for the job of creating authentic stage depth.

I own Altiverb which has the Positioner feature, but in the threads I have read in this forum about room placement software, Altiverb seldom gets a mention.

So I am wondering why, and wondering if I should invest in one of the products that are most often mentioned on this forum. I can’t afford the Ircam Spat, but I could go either Precedence (with or without Breeze), Eareverb, or the VirtualSoundStage if I knew which was the best of these.

Does anyone have an opinion as to the quality of Altiverb’s Positioner feature? Which of the alternatives (apart from Ircam Spat) would give the most professional result?


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## Beat Kaufmann (Oct 24, 2020)

Unfortunately I cannot give you the answer you expect. With all of the many possibilities you can make a mix that sounds good. Unfortunately it does not only depend on the product. They all have their advantages and disadvantages. That's why it's actually crucial how you can best deal with the disadvantages: 
The pair "Precedence-Breeze" likes to produce negative correlation values in stereo samples (just applied), Altiverb, MIR, VSS and other convolution systems tend to produce discolorations of the music via the used IRs - especially when many instruments are involved. And if on the one hand you have samples with and without an integrated room component, everything gets a bit more complicated. If you don't already have some experience, it will be difficult to achieve a professional result. 

In general I would start with a stage plan where you want to have the instruments on the virtual stage and then try to achieve the sketched result with what you have (Altiverb). I don't know whether you want to achieve this by pushing in the Altiverb position field or by using a basic stereo depth and moving to the left or right with the balance control. 

Again, whether a good mix is created or not depends mainly on how well you can overcome the weaknesses that every system has.

Beat


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## Joël Dollié (Oct 24, 2020)

Beat Kaufmann said:


> Unfortunately I cannot give you the answer you expect. With all of the many possibilities you can make a mix that sounds good. Unfortunately it does not only depend on the product. They all have their advantages and disadvantages. That's why it's actually crucial how you can best deal with the disadvantages:
> The pair "Precedence-Breeze" likes to produce negative correlation values in stereo samples (just applied), Altiverb, MIR, VSS and other convolution systems tend to produce discolorations of the music via the used IRs - especially when many instruments are involved. And if on the one hand you have samples with and without an integrated room component, everything gets a bit more complicated. If you don't already have some experience, it will be difficult to achieve a professional result.
> 
> In general I would start with a stage plan where you want to have the instruments on the virtual stage and then try to achieve the sketched result with what you have (Altiverb). I don't know whether you want to achieve this by pushing in the Altiverb position field or by using a basic stereo depth and moving to the left or right with the balance control.
> ...



This is exactly right. 

Personally I prefer to use something like precedence, which with the right settings can be extremely close to balance panning and very non intrusive, as other systems like VSS can quickly create a mess. The combination of precedence, eventide rooms and various amounts of hall reverbs allows me to get a coherent sound even when combining various sources.


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## re-peat (Oct 24, 2020)

Perfectly possible to do all that you want (or need) to do with just Altiverb, T., but you do need to keep a few things in mind:

(1) when you’re working with libraries which already have space and placement baked into the samples, don’t use Altiverb’s positioner. In these cases, you can use Altiverb as a send effect should you want to add some additional glueing tail across your tracks, but do stay away from the positioner as it will mess with the spatial imprint of the samples, and that’s a recipe for _very_ bad sound. (The same thing applies, to varying degrees, to all spatializers, so it's not an Altiverb-exclusive limitation.)

(2) when you’re working with libraries that offer multiple mic perspectives, exploit these to their fullest potential first, before thinking about adding artificial space. Even the most advanced spatialization software isn’t quite capable yet of simulating the sound of long-distance miking entirely convincingly, especially when it comes to instruments from the brass and percussion families. (Strings and woodwinds are more forgiving in this respect.) Depth created with knowledgeable and musical use of the different mic perspectives included with your libraries, is always effortlessly convincing and, 9 times out of 10, much superior to artificially suggested depth.

(3) if you do use Altiverb’s positioner, I would recommend doing some testing first — brass staccatos, double reeds, snaredrums and pitched percussion are excellent source sounds to test spatializing processing with — in order to be able to select which IR’s give the best results (in the context of the sound and illusion of space you’re after). A satisfying result is not a given with each and every one of Altiverb's IR's and especially with the older IR’s, you need to be very careful. Quite a few of those old ones are, I find, prone to produce a somewhat problematic sound — phase issues and such — when used in ‘positioning’ mode.

(4) I would also advice, for instruments like solo woodwinds and solo brass, to use a stereo processor before entering Altiverb in order to narrow the stereo image of the source sounds. (In some cases, you can even narrow it all the way down to pure mono.) The narrower the stereo image of the source, the less risk of phase problems in the spatialized sound. (By the way, also always check the type of IR you intend to use. Not all of them are ‘stereo in’.)

And, finally, one more suggestion: when using Altiverb, don’t *ever* let yourself be seduced and side-tracked by the legend or mythical aura of some of the places where AudioEase recorded their IR’s. It’s not because an IR’s was captured in a legendary place, that it automatically will sound great or enhance your music. Far from it, in fact. It may be tempting to use, say, the ToddAO IR, thinking that this will give your music some aroma of timeless greatness, but trust me: it doesn’t. In fact, ToddAO is in my opinion among Altiverb’s less appealing IR’s, one that is much more likely to inject your mix with difficult-to-cure problems than with anything suggestive of timeless greatness. So, ignore all that 'legendary venue' nonsense completely, I would suggest, and simply use your ears and intelligence to determine which IR’s work best for the piece you’re working on. You might find, more often than not, that IR’s recorded in some hall, theatre or church you’ve never heard of, work much better for your mix than any from those celebrated places. Seriously.

I’ve never done an entire mix with Altiverb all on its own in charge of all the spatializing and placement duties, but while preparing this post, I did try a few things and was pleasantly surprised to find that nothing surfaced to make me doubt that the software isn’t up to the job. Sure, it may not be MIR or SPAT, but Altiverb — when used well — is fully capable of very solid and musical sounding spatial illusions. Be prepared though for the fact that your initial attempts might not give you the results that you hoped for. These things take a bit of time and it’ll require some focused testing, IR-checking, and perhaps several sessions of rigorous excercises to discover the best that Altiverb has to offer and to fully master the technique of bringing that into your productions.

But of one thing you can already be sure: you do not need to buy anything else. Good news, or what?

_


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## Teldex (Oct 24, 2020)

Thank you Beat, Joel and Re-Peat for your very informative responses. I really appreciate the time and effort gone into explaining some important points.

Re-Peat, you were saying that some of Altiverb’s older IRs may be problematic in Positioner mode. Even though I have had Altiverb since version 6 and have downloaded newer IRs over the years, I can’t always be sure which are the old and which are the new. It doesn’t appear to be stated in the IR description in the GUI, and the website page that lists all the IRs does not date them, as far as I can tell.

Whether I stick with the Altiverb Positioner, or go with Joel’s recommendation of Precedence, it looks like I may be using Placement software mainly for my VSL instruments (original versions, NOT synchron-ized), as they are dry and center panned, with no microphone options. I mainly use VSL for woodwinds, quite a few of which are solo instruments. I might be assuming incorrectly that the VSL solo woodwinds would require a mono sourced IR in the Altiverb Positioner, and that the VSL ensembles would require a stereo source?


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## re-peat (Oct 25, 2020)

The VSL woodwinds are stereo, but none of them suffer noticeably when reducing their width to mono. I would also recommend adding a DynamicEQ to their channel strip, because they all have rather pronounced activity in and around the 400-500Hz range, I find, which happens to be a frequency range that, when spatialized or reverbed, causes a sort of dense midrange blurryness that’s difficult to get rid off without doing other damage to the sound. Best to address the matter *before* the instrument enters Altiverb, I feel. And I suggest a DynamicEQ, rather than a static one, because that allows you to set a threshold in a specific frequency range which, when crossed, triggers the EQ into action. Notes which don’t have excessive activity in that specific range, and thus don’t come anywhere near that threshold, will pass through unprocessed. Like the penitent man.

If it were me, I’d proceed as follows for spatializing solo woodwinds: insert VIPro in a channel strip (inevitably a stereo strip because there’s no mono version of the VIPro plugin). In the next slots of that channel strip, insert a stereo tool (to monofy VIPro’s output) and a DynamicEQ (to do the thing described in the previous paragraph).
Route the VIPro channel strip to a mono bus where you insert a mono>stereo instance of Altiverb.
The advantages of this method are:
(1) spatialized sound that is entirely free from phase issues,
(2) you only have to move one speaker around on Altiverb’s positioning platform, which is much more convenient than having to place two speakers in the desired position,
(3) being instantiated in a mono channel, Altiverb only presents you with mono>stereo IR’s.

The above routine strictly for solo woodwinds though. For woodwind ensembles or anything else that you feel benefits from having some width in its stereo image, simply send VIPro into a stereo instance of Altiverb. (And don’t forget: there’s also the option of using Altiverb’s positioner strictly for depth, and do the left-right positioning, or panning, with a stereo tool *before* the instrument enters Altiverb.)

If you’re fond of rather extreme pannings, best to put Altiverb’s speaker(s) not too far back, because the further back, the more the stereo image diffuses into a centre-based cloud with very little left-right distinction. (As occurs in real life too.)
And if you find that the positioner muffles the source sound too much — some IR’s do this —, use the ‘Bright’ dial (under the big ‘Reverb Time’ dial) to restore some clarity. Works well.

You’re right about it being impossible to date the included IR’s. I checked my Altiverb purchase invoice and it appears I bought it in 2005. At that time there were still several IR’s included which, to my ears, didn’t work very well with the positioner. Or maybe the positioner algorithm itself wasn’t all it became in later versions, I don’t know. Anyway, I wasn’t very impressed with the feature at first. And I didn’t much like the sound of quite a few of those old IR’s either.
But anything you downloaded since you bought v6, and several of the ones released earlier, shouldn’t give any problem. Just listen attentively to what Altiverb delivers and if, for whatever reason, you don’t like it, simply change IR’s.

__


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## Teldex (Oct 26, 2020)

Thank you again, Re-peat, for taking the time to share some good advice.

I had the feeling I had assumed incorrectly about the VSL solo instruments being mono. I’ve never tried routing a stereo track to a mono bus before, though I do own a couple of plugins that can narrow the stereo field as you recommend.

Will consider the dynamic EQ at the frequency you suggest.

Pity the Altiverb IRs are not dated. I will do some trials and see which IRs respond best to the Positioner.


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## Beat Kaufmann (Oct 26, 2020)

Teldex said:


> ... Pity the Altiverb IRs are not dated. I will do some trials and see which IRs respond best to the Positioner.



Yeah, do that. In Altiverb 6 (around 2010), for example, ToddAO IR didn't even have the balance right, so after the reverb one channel was always louder. I never understood why especially that IR was so well received. But there are always many uncritical followers on the internet.

If you go through all the IRs, why not send a pinknoise signal through Altiverb? With this signal you will quickly hear how much more colored many of the IRs sound. To a certain degree, such discolorations belong to a locality. But if you send 20 instruments through Altiverb one by one, then you have 20 x those discolorations in your mix. This leads to the unpleasant discolorations I mentioned above. I recommend to compensate the biggest discolorations with the internal EQ. Here I published an article about how you could do that (36.). By the way, this applies to all reverbs that use IRs.

At the end you will probably find some IRs that are well suited for small and large orchestra mixes. 

All the best
Beat


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## Teldex (Oct 28, 2020)

Thank you Beat Kaufmann. That is a good suggestion, to use pink noise to see where a plugin is coloring the sound. In the past I have used Omnisphere’s pink noise sample which I think I can trust to be pretty flat across the important frequencies. Pity that the EQ in Altiverb is quite basic, with very limited bands. 

In my tests I was surprised how much just the early reflections of Altiverb, without the tail, did color the sound.

I followed the link to your tutorial website and spent quite a bit of time there. You have achieved very impressive results with your methods. (Of course much of this is owing to your skill in utilizing these methods.)


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## Beat Kaufmann (Oct 28, 2020)

Teldex said:


> ...Pity that the EQ in Altiverb is quite basic, with very limited bands.
> 
> In my tests I was surprised how much just the early reflections of Altiverb, without the tail, did color the sound.


Because Altiverb (6) had relatively few "sound-neutral IRs" many years ago, I was looking for other plug-ins with more neutral sounding IRs and ...never returned to Altiverb. Yes, the EQ at Altiverb is quite simple. Unfortunately many reverbs have such simple EQs.

Beat


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## Teldex (Nov 6, 2020)

Beat Kaufmann said:


> In Altiverb 6 (around 2010), for example, ToddAO IR didn't even have the balance right, so after the reverb one channel was always louder.



I’m glad you pointed this out, Beat. Yesterday I did a check on the half a dozen or so Altiverb Halls that I had short-listed for use on my latest project—including Todd-AO. One or two of them had a bias more pronounced than the Todd-AO. Most halls varied in balance from one microphone distance to another (i.e. the microphone distance from the stage where the Altiverb technicians set up to record the hall IRs). Finding the hall on my short-list that had the best left-right channel balance actually became the deciding factor in my final choice.

I don’t know the reason for the variation. Could it be the natural acoustic character of the hall itself?


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## Beat Kaufmann (Nov 7, 2020)

Teldex said:


> ... Most halls varied in balance from one microphone distance to another (i.e. the microphone distance from the stage where the Altiverb technicians set up to record the hall IRs). Finding the hall on my short-list that had the best left-right channel balance actually became the deciding factor in my final choice.
> 
> I don’t know the reason for the variation. Could it be the natural acoustic character of the hall itself?



The first IRs were simply not very carefully done - well understood from today's point of view. Maybe the technology was missing. Today we are of course very spoiled with all the possibilities that were simply not available back then. Altiverb obviously never remastered the older IRs. I think "Todd-AO" also sounded very "bloated" in the lower frequencies to me. Also I didn't really like the much praised concert hall of Holland, the "Concertgebouw". Then the version Altiverb 7 was released - but first only for MAC. Even after a year, version 7 for Windows was still not available, so I went looking for a plug-in with IRs that I liked more. Since then I never used Altiverb anymore. Recently I even uninstalled the plugin to gain space.
Since I started mixing with samples in 2002, I had countless reverbs. And I have to say that I haven't found THE REVERBPLUGIN until now. But a lot of today's plug-ins do one or the other thing very well. Unfortunately there are always disadvantages to be accepted.

All the best 
Beat


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## krismiller1982 (Jan 23, 2021)

Beat Kaufmann said:


> The first IRs were simply not very carefully done - well understood from today's point of view. Maybe the technology was missing. Today we are of course very spoiled with all the possibilities that were simply not available back then. Altiverb obviously never remastered the older IRs. I think "Todd-AO" also sounded very "bloated" in the lower frequencies to me. Also I didn't really like the much praised concert hall of Holland, the "Concertgebouw". Then the version Altiverb 7 was released - but first only for MAC. Even after a year, version 7 for Windows was still not available, so I went looking for a plug-in with IRs that I liked more. Since then I never used Altiverb anymore. Recently I even uninstalled the plugin to gain space.
> Since I started mixing with samples in 2002, I had countless reverbs. And I have to say that I haven't found THE REVERBPLUGIN until now. But a lot of today's plug-ins do one or the other thing very well. Unfortunately there are always disadvantages to be accepted.
> 
> All the best
> Beat


So what reverb have you been using since uninstalling Altiverb?


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## Beat Kaufmann (Jan 26, 2021)

krismiller1982 said:


> So what reverb have you been using since uninstalling Altiverb?



Actually all the notable convolution reverbs that were around initially....
- Magix Samplitude
- Gigapulse (Tascam)
- SIR
- MELDA
- VSL
- Cubase REVerence
- etc. ...
---------------------------------------------
As tail I often used...
- Phoenix
- TSAR
- Fabfilter R
- EARecon
- Breeze
- B2
- Lexons...

... etc.
----------------------------------------------
In the past I tried almost everything that came on the market. Today it is different. Probably it is a difference if you use such tools professionally or not. Since I almost daily have to "help" some sound recordings with a little tail or an instrument should "give" some additional depth, then you stay at some time with a tool that does good service. It is crucial that you know the tools well so that you can use them appropriately and that you get good results in a short time. 

With the Convolution Reverbs *the IRs are crucial* and not the tool itself. So over the years, I have created a few IRs that I use again and again, because for me, time usually means money.Especially with the Convolution Reverbs the IRs are crucial and not the tool itself. Over the years, I have created a few IRs that I use again and again, because for me, time usually means money. Hours of tinkering are not possible. Everything simply has to work right away. In this respect, as a professional, you usually make a commitment once and then stick with it for a long time. I think many of my colleagues do the same.

I've been in the business now since about 1980. Even though new reverbs, EQs, libraries, etc. come out every day, really big steps have rarely been made, although such were announced again and again. The only thing that has really changed pleasantly is the performance. The computer no longer buckles when you use a good plug-in. That is pleasing. Great!

Beat


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## Leonaar (Nov 18, 2021)

Beat Kaufmann said:


> Actually all the notable convolution reverbs that were around initially....
> - Magix Samplitude
> - Gigapulse (Tascam)
> - SIR
> ...


Any thoughts on Hofa IQ-reverb?


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## Beat Kaufmann (Nov 19, 2021)

Leonaar said:


> Any thoughts on Hofa IQ-reverb?


It is an unversial Reverbtool with a lot of IRs

See...

_Unfortunately in German but with subtitles in English_
Have fun
Beat


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## Leonaar (Nov 19, 2021)

die Sprache ist kein Problem 
What I like most about this tutorial is that you teach beside panning-depth mostly how to use and make sound well ANY reverb! 
People can spend a lot of money in buying “good sounding” reverbs, but you show how to make the best of any. Most valuable your teachings, and many thanks for that. 

I wanted to ask you, what are you to go to reverbs on classical music in audio recordings and on virtual libraries, so different worlds of same genre. Also the why. I guess maybe cpu friendliness, transparency, …?

Again, thank you so much for sharing your knowledge


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