# Hearing reverb differences?



## jadedsean (Nov 30, 2020)

Hi guys, I am wondering if there is any information out there to help one hear the differences between reverbs. I should state I am not talking about plate reverbs vs spring reverbs or even Convolution. Hearing these differences is obvious to me. However where I struggled is hall reverbs. I have a lot of great reverbs and as I am building my template I want to be able to utilise the best verb for my needs.

I understand this can come down to personal taste for people but what would be cool to know is, what to listen out for. For example, say I use Seventh Heaven and Cinematic Rooms, both sound good but my ears can’t really hear the discrepancies or for that matter the consistency’s in the sound. I have seen Christian Henson videos about verbs and this also makes the case that a lot of people can’t hear the differences, the blindfold test proves this, if jake or Christian can’t hear the difference what hope have I got. Any advice as always is appreciated.


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## cloudbuster (Nov 30, 2020)

jadedsean said:


> ... if jake or Christian can’t hear the difference what hope have I got.



A bit of training can go a long way. Just set up a blind test or a series. There are many ways to do this, including add-ons to free software like foobar2000.

For a start:





foobar2000: Components Repository - ABX Comparator


foobar2000




www.foobar2000.org





Enjoy!


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## tf-drone (Nov 30, 2020)

Hi,

in another thread this vid was posted:


The differences are obvious even with the low YT quality. There are many aspects besides length, which are more descriptive than scientific: lush, silky, shiny, dense, unobtrusive... To my ears, one of those reverbs goes "fffff", another goes "phhhh", the next "shhhhhh", or "sssss", each evoking another emotion.
As he says, the "best" reverb depends on the source material.

In the blindfold test video, all sounded the same to me, but I listened to it on medium volume only, and YT quality is only 128k nowadays, which was probably not enough for that stuff.


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## telecode101 (Nov 30, 2020)

Good question. I guess you can load up some sort of analyzer and look at the differences visually. Not sure really. I am not a recording engineer. Someone at GS might know better.


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## Macrawn (Nov 30, 2020)

I don't know about telling the differences between different reverbs. If Jake a professional mixer can't tell that's all I need to know. I'm not wasting time on that. Isn't the important thing setting up the right reverb for the job with the right settings?

The thing that has helped me "hear" reverb (not really the types, the settings) is sound gym. They have a game on reverb. It gives you 3 reverbs you have to pick the one that sounds different. Sound easy? On the beginning levels yes. The reverb settings get closer it gets a lot harder and you really have to listen, and train your mind to focus in the right place. There was one where it has pretty much just early reflections and two of the reverbs were set up to position the sound slightly left. and the other center. Some are very similar but change the timber of the sound a little bit ie brighten, vs darken. I can definitely hear things now about the reverb settings that I couldn't before. 

If there are other training things like that I'd love to hear about them.


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## telecode101 (Nov 30, 2020)

i can tell the differnece between delays and compressors. some are really obvious. i heard on another thread the iZotope/Exponential R4 is a great revarb which is really easy to tell how much better it is compared to similar competing reverbs.


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## Artemi (Nov 30, 2020)

it's easier to hear the difference on the short-staccato sounds
and many reverb plugins have trial periods so you can record the music you planning to implement reverb on and try different reverbs for yourself
I found that by comparing few things you staring to hear what really suits you

here is video I recorded not long ago 
it uses several reverb plugins on the orchestral sounds


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## maestro2be (Nov 30, 2020)

It's definitely an interesting question, and I have a long answer. Get comfortable with some wine and let me walk you through my thoughts and experiences.

I have a hardware Bricasti M7 v2. I also have many/most of the popular software plugins. I have been playing around for a few days loading up several different great name brand reverbs and trying to mimic my hardware. I know I am probably going to possibly make things worse or confuse some people who are trying to decide whether a unit like this is worth it or not, but I will try anyway. I am nowhere ready to give a detailed finding but I will say this to all the requests I have received to go through this exercise.

There are 2 things that I cannot describe because I don't know what causes them with the Bricasti M7 hardware.

1. First off, the instrument presentation is larger. Against any reverb I throw on this machine, none of them can create the same size image of the instrument that it does all the while achieving the same room sound. The whole image and soundstage just sounds bigger and wider. The instrument seems to meld with the room in a magical way without pushing away the instruments natural qualities. It is instantly noticeable when doing an on/off scenario of each tested reverb I tried.

2. The ear fatigue is unbelievably better on the hardware unit. I am to stupid to tell you why. I just know for a fact, that when I play instruments in the hardware unit, my ears never tell me it hurts, or to stop. Every software I try eventually gives me that feeling. Some take much longer though. As soon as I get that feeling, I simply play the same instrument at the same volume in the Bricasti and it's absolutely smooth as butter to my ear. I know that the hardware unit goes through an AD/DA conversion so perhaps it has something to do with the convertors in the hardware unit. If you're wondering, I have an individual channel setup with the same instrument, exact settings for that instrument, with the only unique thing being a different single reverb on that channel.

I loaded up an analyzer and compared the sounds and they are almost 100% the same no matter what the results of my test/ears heard. I thought for sure I would see the peaks that are causing me fatigue. Nope, not there. And it's not in my head, the headache isn't an illusion or placebo. There's something else happening that I don't know the answer to so I can't provide that insight. Not to mention, once the instrument has been reduced in the soundstage you'd have to create a way to smooth it out a little and increase it's body size to compete. Maybe that's something you'd do just prior to sending it through a different reverb.

So what reverbs have I tested so far:

1. Seventh Heaven - I can see why so many people love this. The first thing that jumps out to me is it looks and feels very similar to my Bricasti so it's an immediate comfort with no learning curve to transfer. The basic room tone it has is right on queue. It cannot present the instrument in the same size as the real unit though. I am sure things could be done to help with this but just pointing out that doing a perfect 1:1 settings test, the Bricasti Hardware has a bigger presence and no ear fatigue. Interestingly, this also isn't consistent across the presets. My favorite of all presets is called Boston Hall A. What I described above happens. However, for my brass, I really enjoy the preset called Brass Hall. When I play a solo cornet from VSL through this setting and the hardware unit, I have to work hard to find the slightest difference. One of the only real differences I hear is the size of the soundstage. It's absolutely bigger on the hardware, but the room tone, etc. is very well done. My verdict on this plugin? It's absolutely awesome, makes me feel right at home and will help me save some money as I was debating buying 3 more hardware units. I am going to spend more time with this plugin and the rest below to finish all my testing first. This plugin is a home run. If you don't like it, you are probably not someone who prefers Bricasti Hardware either (perhaps Lexicon etc.).

2. Cinematic Rooms - This plugin has similar qualities to Seventh Heaven but offers surround capabilities. I can get very similar room sounds with it and it only took me about 5 minutes to get it to decently match my Bricasti in room tone. Again, the biggest different I felt was the instrument size and overall soundstage is not as big. This is one super cool plugin and allows true surround sound which was more cool than I though it would be. I think if you're trying to emulate a Bricasti sticking to Seventh Heaven is the easier path. If you want something that's not emulating the Bricasti this one becomes a consideration for you between these 2. It has a great sound and great tweaking ability. I feel it has more tweaking power than Seventh Heaven. I also love the purple interface . If I was doing multi-channel this would be my one and only choice and I would be very happy with it.

3. 2C Audio B2 - Of all the plugins I have tried, this one gets the closest to presenting the instrument the same size as the Bricasti while also coming incredibly close to the same room sound without any muddy buildup. I didn't expect it to beat the Seventh Heaven plugin for this job but it does. I own all of the preset packs and I found one "Boston Hall". When I loaded that up, the only thing I changed was the tail length to match my Bricasti to 2.10 seconds and wow. I can barely tell any difference. This one is almost indistinguishable from the real thing. It has the same non-muddy, smooth warm sound, huge instrument image but sweet baby jesus! This thing takes 15% of my CPU per instance! Dear god! I can run 15 instances of Cinematic Rooms and Seventh Heaven for the cost of ONE of these! I don't know what it's doing, but whatever it does with all that CPU works. I know I could fool easily 95 out of 100 of even the best ears with this one. They would be simply guessing and hoping they get it right with their 50/50 chances. I really failed purchasing this as a bundle (I just wanted precedence) and never gave it a try. Now that I have found this, I have to figure out if all the CPU hit is worth it or if I can just be happy with any of the other options I am testing, so let's keep going. This plugin? Incredible and highly recommended if you want world class reverb in a software version but you better bring a strong machine.

4. Lexicon MPX - I really don't know what to say here. I had zero intentions of trying this test because this came FREE with my Studio One purchase a while back. The dam thing costs like 29$ to buy. It's not even the upgraded father which is $99.00. It's the little redheaded step child version with zero tweakability. I absolutely am astounded at how awesome this thing sounds for the money. It uses almost no CPU and the sound is incredibly warm and smooth. It's not harsh and caused me no ear fatigue. It doesn't sound like my Bricasti in comparison to "room tone" however, it throws a huge instrument image and after dialing down the wetness to about 23% I was stunned at how comparable it became to my hardware unit from the perspective of beautiful sound and no fatigue. I seem to recall a while back we all did a huge test of like 10 reverbs and I believe this plugin almost came in first place. I totally understand why now. I can only imagine how great the 99$ version would have been where I could have changed the room size, tail etc. I could have gotten a very comparable sound that I could have been very happy to live with. I see why some of you love Lexicon Reverbs. I highly recommend anyone on a super budget to consider this reverb, it's truly stellar for the cost. **I see the full tweaking version is only 49.00 at Sweetwater right now.**


5. Vienna Suite & Vienna Suite Pro Reverbs (I have been using this for years) - None of these sound like my Bricasti but I have loved them and used them for many years because they sound different. It has allowed me to color the sound in endless ways because the colors are so different. These ones are dear to my heart and have been my most used reverbs. I am currently awaiting the updates that are going to be happening to MIR Pro and Miracle which I use frequently. I can't give you a comparison against the Bricasti because MIR Pro positions the instrument into a room and then I add tail with Miracle. I can just tell you it makes beautiful sounds but it does not sound like my Bricasti unit. It's great to have other options to you know .

I hope this helps but so much of it is personal preference of sound as well. Some people like lots of reverb, some people like dry in your face mixes (conductor style sound). Some people really focus on having many dimensions and some try to just get one single room sound. There's really no right way in my mind so all of these tools are useful and frankly, the differences between some of these plugins and my hardware unit? Is it worth it? Hmm. I don't know. Software is easier to work with, requires no fancy setups and allows you to bounce offline. You also don't have to worry about getting feedback loops or accidentally setting it up on 2 bus channels because you didn't pay attention and within 5 seconds your speakers are blowing up because of your stupidity and not paying attention. I have the money to buy these hardware units and even so, I am going to stick to just the 1 unit as my final melding reverb and use the ones listed above to do 99% of all the lifting and work. I don't think enough people that I deal with can hear the difference between say Seventh Heaven, Cinematic rooms or 2C B2 compared to my hardware unit. I think if they can, you've probably not done a good enough job on setting them up.

M


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## merty (Dec 1, 2020)

jadedsean said:


> ...



I made such test not long ago (wish I didn't delete the files). What I did was;

-Match every parameter a close as possible with was very hard but educating. You can't do this 100% as some reverbs are limited in control but can get close. 

-Choose 3 sources; drums, strum guitar and piano

-Some reverbs internal level may defer so be careful like say you adjusted all to have a 50% dry-wet balance, some may not match so listening and referencing each track is important.

-I normalized all of them to the same lufs (using an action in reaper) which made things so much easier to compare.

As I narrowed the list, the piano was the easiest. I figured delicate material (maybe we can include vocal) is much more picky when trying to develop a liking to a reverb. On the other hand drums for example, almost anything works.


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## merty (Dec 1, 2020)

maestro2be said:


> I loaded up an analyzer and compared the sounds and they are almost 100% the same no matter what the results of my test/ears heard.



I totally believe you with that comment. Aside ad/da's what I suspect are dither, extremely mild saturation and imager tricks as these may not be noticed with an analyzer.

Relab's lexicon has such options when you get into the settings.


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## ReleaseCandidate (Dec 1, 2020)

Most important: use a _single_ note of percussive sound containing many frequencies (no kick, no cymbal) like a snare. 

And don't forget that the people (we all) are so used to the Lexicon sound (well, depending of the genre) that a Lexicon Hall almost always sounds right, because we're so accustomized to it. 

But (normally) the most important thing is to get the reverb out of the way of the music. 



maestro2be said:


> 4. Lexicon MPX


Hmm, I had (guess still have) the hardware, and it's reverb was nowhere as good as the better Lexicons and nowadays the EA plugins are more or less exactly the samé.
So, if you like the MPX for reverb you can use one from EA (depending on the preset you like).


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## I like music (Dec 1, 2020)

maestro2be said:


> I hope this helps but so much of it is personal preference of sound as well.
> 
> M



Extremely helpful. Thanks for the massive amounts of detail. Have you ever tried Reverberate 2? It also has the Bricasti stuff, and I can't tell if anyone has tested them both and heard any differences...


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## el-bo (Dec 1, 2020)

maestro2be said:


> 2C Audio B2 - Of all the plugins I have tried, this one gets the closest to presenting the instrument the same size as the Bricasti while also coming incredibly close to the same room sound without any muddy buildup. I didn't expect it to beat the Seventh Heaven plugin for this job but it does. I own all of the preset packs and I found one "Boston Hall". When I loaded that up, the only thing I changed was the tail length to match my Bricasti to 2.10 seconds and wow. I can barely tell any difference. This one is almost indistinguishable from the real thing. It has the same non-muddy, smooth warm sound, huge instrument image but sweet baby jesus! This thing takes 15% of my CPU per instance! Dear god! I can run 15 instances of Cinematic Rooms and Seventh Heaven for the cost of ONE of these! I don't know what it's doing, but whatever it does with all that CPU works. I know I could fool easily 95 out of 100 of even the best ears with this one. They would be simply guessing and hoping they get it right with their 50/50 chances. I really failed purchasing this as a bundle (I just wanted precedence) and never gave it a try. Now that I have found this, I have to figure out if all the CPU hit is worth it or if I can just be happy with any of the other options I am testing, so let's keep going. This plugin? Incredible and highly recommended if you want world class reverb in a software version but you better bring a strong machine.



Interesting to read your thoughts on this reverb, and in comparison to such a lauded piece of hardware. 
It's a reverb that seems to only rarely get mentioned. Not sure why. Maybe in part due to the complexity, wealth of options or price. 

I'm no reverb specialist. I just use what sounds good. And while my main motivation for buying it was as a character and ambient/sound-design reverb, I just find that as a 'standard' reverb it just sounds great on everything I use it on. Since owning it, I sold both of the Valhalla plugs I'd previously used (No shade on VDSP, as their plugins are great). It's now the only 3rd-party 'verb I own. I still use my DAW stock 'verbs, but this is mainly because of B2's CPU hit, but also 'cause I sometimes prefer convolution and because Logic's Chromeverb is so quick to dial in.

Would love to see B2 get not just a facelift, but also perhaps an improved UIUX.

Which of the expansions do you recommend? I already have 'Imagination'

Cheers


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## jadedsean (Dec 1, 2020)

Hey guys, thank you for all the great responses, I enjoyed reading them all, most insightful. Currently I am working so can’t answer until later but I just want to say I appreciate the advice given so far.


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## Andrew Souter (Dec 1, 2020)

el-bo said:


> Would love to see B2 get not just a facelift, but also perhaps an improved UIUX.



...in the works. we will update all our plugs to use the new proceedural gui system we use in Breeeze 2.5, Precedence 1.5, and Vector. This allows extreme variation in gui prefs including, size, color, theme etc. and uses very low memory and disk space. We enhance this more and more with each new product.

CPU usage can also be expected to be lower compared to the same "work". 

Note however CPU is EXTREMELY varaible in B2 1.0 depending on settings. EXTREMELY. Something like 100x times more or less CPU depending on preset and settings. This won't change in a 2.0 version. We may even allow some settings that will use MORE CPU for computers than can handle it. The settings that effect CPU most in B2 1.0 are:

1) Quality: lo, mid, high, XTRM. each is about 4x as much CPU as the previous. XTRM uses a lot! i.e. 64x as much as lo! ). But damn, it's worth it, and I notice some of "famous" scoring presets people love generally are using the XTRM mode.  I have some new math that can reduce this some.

2) Oversampling. 2x = 2x cpu, 4x = 4x CPU and likely perceptually more bc it starts to stress memory/cache on the computer. The latest CPU gens handle this much better though.

3) Dual vs single engine. Dual can use 2x as much obviously if both engines are the same.

4) Some special Damp filter models such as the "Air" filters add some CPU.

5) other minor things.

6) "Force Offline" and the Interpolation settings. These should not be used for real-time in general. They are similar in effect to using 64x OS!! Use it only for final bounces if desired.



el-bo said:


> It's a reverb that seems to only rarely get mentioned. Not sure why. Maybe in part due to the complexity, wealth of options or price.



It just hasn't been updated in a while so it's just not as new and shiny as some others. but it's still widely loved in scoring. This is pretty cool recent interview for example:



2CAudio - VIP Client Story: Gareth Coker


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## el-bo (Dec 1, 2020)

Andrew Souter said:


> ...in the works. we will update all our plugs to use the new proceedural gui system we use in Breeeze 2.5, Precedence 1.5, and Vector. This allows extreme variation in gui prefs including, size, color, theme etc. and we enhance this more and more with each new product.
> 
> CPU usage can also be expected to be lower compared to the same "work".
> 
> ...




Thanks for the detailed reply 

The GUI/UI improvements will definitely be welcome. 

Currently, with an 2012 MBP I am pretty limited (Generally using Single Engine stuff as starting points), but I'll definitely do some more experimenting using the points you've given.

Do you have any ETA on the updates?


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## ReleaseCandidate (Dec 1, 2020)

el-bo said:


> It's a reverb that seems to only rarely get mentioned. Not sure why.



Well, if I'd enter 2C's website with some money, I'd certainly not leave with 'only' another reverb . They really have some really interesting stuff like Kaleidoscope (I didn't even know that they do a convolution reverb too .


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## pmcrockett (Dec 1, 2020)

I find that previewing reverbs at 100% wet makes the differences a lot more obvious.


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## el-bo (Dec 1, 2020)

pmcrockett said:


> I find that previewing reverbs at 100% wet makes the differences a lot more obvious.



Good tip!


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## wst3 (Dec 1, 2020)

I am nearly helpless when it comes to reverb and delay plugins (modulation plugins too, come to think of it.)

There are certain processors (hardware and software) that stand up and scream their identity. Reverbs are not in that category for me. Mostly.

I can usually pick out convolution plugins, but they are getting better and better all the time!

I can almost always pick out plates and spring reverb - hardware or plugin, almost.

I can pick out chamber reverb, especially the real thing.

Part of the reason, I think, that spring, plate, and chamber reverb are identifiable is because that's all we had when I was learning.

Aside - I can also pick out early digital reverb, but that's another topic<G>.

I think (sometimes) that with respect to modern algorithmic digital reverb it is more about settings, that the underlying architecture. A general observation for which I am certain there are exceptions.

By way of example, I have several modern algorithmic reverb plugins, and by several I actually counted them recently, and I have 38 reverb plugins, of which I use about half regularly. I would group them into three categories:

- Emulations
think Lexi 224 or 480, EMT 140 or 250, Capital Chambers, and the like, and these all have a signature, some more obvious than others, but I'll bet most here could spot them, even if they might not be able to name them.

- Algorithmic Digital Reverb
which in my case includes plugins from 2C-Audio, Exponential Audio, Eventide. In this category I think (and I haven't done exhaustive testing) that you can make any of them sound pretty much like any other, assuming all the controls you need are exposed. I think they too have signatures, but they are far too subtle for me. 
The bigger difference - for me - is the controls. If I am using Exponential R4 I will interact with it in one way and if I am using Breeze I will have an entirely different interaction. The results might be similar, but the path will be different. If that makes sense!
As with anything, there are exceptions. I love Valhalla VintageVerb, but I think he exagerates some of the characteristics of vintage reverbs. Which is the point really. Doesn't take anything away from the plugin, and it can still be used subtly, but it can also be used in a more exaggerated fashion.

- IR based reverb
I've been playing around with these since Voxengo released Pristine Space. (Disclaimer - in my "other" life I study acoustics, so impulse responses are just part of my life<G>) Reverberate 2 was the first one I found I could really use. And I am still learning. And because I'm still learning I still hear things that seem to stand out, and not always in a positive way. If that makes sense.

TL;DR - I think there are (not so easily) identifiable traits to some reverb plugins. I think plugins that emulate hardware (or physical spaces) are the easiest to spot. I think most algorithmic reverb plugins are so flexible these days that they are, or can be, much more difficult to pick out of a lineup. I am just not good enough with IR based reverb to make that call.

So why own more than one? The user interface, or the presets, or just the controls that are exposed, may take you down a different path. Ironically, you could tear your hair out trying to tweak plugin A, swap it out for plugin B, and find what you want in seconds. And tomorrow it could be the opposite.


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## Garlu (Dec 1, 2020)

maestro2be said:


> 1. Seventh Heaven - I can see why so many people love this. The first thing that jumps out to me is it looks and feels very similar to my Bricasti so it's an immediate comfort with no learning curve to transfer. The basic room tone it has is right on queue. It cannot present the instrument in the same size as the real unit though. I am sure things could be done to help with this but just pointing out that doing a perfect 1:1 settings test, the Bricasti Hardware has a bigger presence and no ear fatigue. Interestingly, this also isn't consistent across the presets. My favorite of all presets is called Boston Hall A. What I described above happens. However, for my brass, I really enjoy the preset called Brass Hall. When I play a solo cornet from VSL through this setting and the hardware unit, I have to work hard to find the slightest difference. One of the only real differences I hear is the size of the soundstage. It's absolutely bigger on the hardware, but the room tone, etc. is very well done. My verdict on this plugin? It's absolutely awesome, makes me feel right at home and will help me save some money as I was debating buying 3 more hardware units. I am going to spend more time with this plugin and the rest below to finish all my testing first. This plugin is a home run. If you don't like it, you are probably not someone who prefers Bricasti Hardware either (perhaps Lexicon etc.).



Have you tried 7th Heaven in conjunction with Nebula (from Acustica Audio) with Henry Olonga's freebie, sampling the AD-DA path of the hardware Bricasti?

From Henry: "_AD-DA of the M7 in analog mode. Available in 44.1k,96k and 192 kHz. I suggest you place these after your convolution reverb._"
Link to the ADDA:http://www.nebulapresets.com/Bricasti_A ... _44khz.zip

I think it can be used in the free version of nebula:





Nebula - Free - Acustica Audio


We develop the world’s most advanced audio plugins for professional mixing and mastering, based on sampling technology and Artificial Intelligence, trusted by Grammy® Artists and Sound Engineers.




www.acustica-audio.com





Good times and great info! Thank you for sharing it!


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## Tim_Wells (Dec 1, 2020)

I know this isn't exactly what the OP was getting at, but I just demoed several highly thought of reverb plugins. As a final test, I compared them to some of the stock Cubase reverbs. And you guessed it... I ended up preferring Roomworks to these plugins. (I was going for a very smooth sound). 

I'll be the first admit that I don't have golden ears... but, whatever. I saved myself some money.


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## maestro2be (Dec 1, 2020)

Garlu said:


> Have you tried 7th Heaven in conjunction with Nebula (from Acustica Audio) with Henry Olonga's freebie, sampling the AD-DA path of the hardware Bricasti?
> 
> From Henry: "_AD-DA of the M7 in analog mode. Available in 44.1k,96k and 192 kHz. I suggest you place these after your convolution reverb._"
> Link to the ADDA:http://www.nebulapresets.com/Bricasti_A ... _44khz.zip
> ...


You're welcome! I haven't tried that. Interestingly, he hears exactly what I hear if you read his entire thread about it. I am going to have to try this but this seems a bit more complicated than just loading a simple reverb lol.


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## maestro2be (Dec 1, 2020)

I like music said:


> Extremely helpful. Thanks for the massive amounts of detail. Have you ever tried Reverberate 2? It also has the Bricasti stuff, and I can't tell if anyone has tested them both and heard any differences...


I haven't tried that one but I do believe that I got Reverberate 3 with the complete bundle I bought. I will load it up tonight and let you know what I think of it.


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## I like music (Dec 1, 2020)

maestro2be said:


> I haven't tried that one but I do believe that I got Reverberate 3 with the complete bundle I bought. I will load it up tonight and let you know what I think of it.


Thanks for your generosity!


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## maestro2be (Dec 1, 2020)

Andrew Souter said:


> ...in the works. we will update all our plugs to use the new proceedural gui system we use in Breeeze 2.5, Precedence 1.5, and Vector. This allows extreme variation in gui prefs including, size, color, theme etc. and uses very low memory and disk space. We enhance this more and more with each new product.
> 
> CPU usage can also be expected to be lower compared to the same "work".
> 
> ...



I wanted to comment that I did in fact test this and it's true. My CPU usage goes high or low based on the preset I choose.

As an FYI, I have a very current AMD Threadripper 32 physical core 3970X processor. The Boston Hall sounds really great, but it's super CPU hungry. I will be doing more testing tonight with some other reverbs as well. I also have Breeze and Aether I will be testing.


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## gsilbers (Dec 1, 2020)

jadedsean said:


> Hi guys, I am wondering if there is any information out there to help one hear the differences between reverbs. I should state I am not talking about plate reverbs vs spring reverbs or even Convolution. Hearing these differences is obvious to me. However where I struggled is hall reverbs. I have a lot of great reverbs and as I am building my template I want to be able to utilise the best verb for my needs.
> 
> I understand this can come down to personal taste for people but what would be cool to know is, what to listen out for. For example, say I use Seventh Heaven and Cinematic Rooms, both sound good but my ears can’t really hear the discrepancies or for that matter the consistency’s in the sound. I have seen Christian Henson videos about verbs and this also makes the case that a lot of people can’t hear the differences, the blindfold test proves this, if jake or Christian can’t hear the difference what hope have I got. Any advice as always is appreciated.



Search for thread title reverb and author chillbot.
He does an excellent shootout with all types of reverbs, even the briscasti.


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## jadedsean (Dec 1, 2020)

gsilbers said:


> Search for thread title reverb and author chillbot.
> He does an excellent shootout with all types of reverbs, even the briscasti.


 Unfortunately the audio examples are no longer there.


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## jadedsean (Dec 1, 2020)

cloudbuster said:


> A bit of training can go a long way. Just set up a blind test or a series. There are many ways to do this, including add-ons to free software like foobar2000.
> 
> For a start:
> 
> ...


What is this?


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## cloudbuster (Dec 1, 2020)

jadedsean said:


> What is this?








ABX test - Wikipedia







en.m.wikipedia.org


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## jadedsean (Dec 1, 2020)

tf-drone said:


> Hi,
> 
> in another thread this vid was posted:
> 
> ...



This was very interesting, especially the the orchestral part, i would love to hear more from Marc, sounds like the guys really knows shit. Yeah when it comes to Hall reverb i think its not so easy to point out the differences, take for instance, Christian Henson said the the VSS3 reverb sounded kinda metallic. First of all i could hear this difference and what does that even mean. 

I have bought verbs in the past hoping for one to stand out but, when using large hall presets i can't for the life of me tell the difference. That is why i asked the question, because if i am not the only one with this issue are we all just buying verbs because of what other people say about them?


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## jadedsean (Dec 1, 2020)

telecode101 said:


> Good question. I guess you can load up some sort of analyzer and look at the differences visually. Not sure really. I am not a recording engineer. Someone at GS might know better.


Yep tried this to no avail.


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## jadedsean (Dec 1, 2020)

telecode101 said:


> i can tell the differnece between delays and compressors. some are really obvious. i heard on another thread the iZotope/Exponential R4 is a great revarb which is really easy to tell how much better it is compared to similar competing reverbs.


I actually have R4 and R2 and Phoenix all from Exponential, (i know i have a problem) however i don't really hear the difference with the hall presets. I should be clear though, when i fiddle about with presets i can definitely hear the difference, especially when adjusting pre-delay.


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## jadedsean (Dec 1, 2020)

Artemi said:


> it's easier to hear the difference on the short-staccato sounds
> and many reverb plugins have trial periods so you can record the music you planning to implement reverb on and try different reverbs for yourself
> I found that by comparing few things you staring to hear what really suits you
> 
> ...



This is really helpful Artemi thank you. Great video.


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## jadedsean (Dec 1, 2020)

maestro2be said:


> It's definitely an interesting question, and I have a long answer. Get comfortable with some wine and let me walk you through my thoughts and experiences.
> t channel.
> 
> 
> Wow this is an insane amount of detail, thanks so much but now i want a hardware Bricasti , i have most of what you mention besides the hardware but i would be really interested in seeing this comparison test. Are you currently working on it?


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## jadedsean (Dec 1, 2020)

merty said:


> I made such test not long ago (wish I didn't delete the files). What I did was;
> 
> -Match every parameter a close as possible with was very hard but educating. You can't do this 100% as some reverbs are limited in control but can get close.
> 
> ...


This is great info, i may try the same, i am also running Reaper, could you tell me how you can normalize everything to the same LUFS?


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## jadedsean (Dec 1, 2020)

ReleaseCandidate said:


> Most important: use a _single_ note of percussive sound containing many frequencies (no kick, no cymbal) like a snare.
> 
> Hmmm, i am not so sure, i am working with orchestral samples and therefore most if not the samples have room reverb baked in. For example i use Berlin percussion which was recorded in Teldex so when i use a snare its difficult for me to know where the room verbs ends and my algo begins. Dry samples may the way to hearing real differences.


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## jadedsean (Dec 1, 2020)

Andrew Souter said:


> ...in the works. we will update all our plugs to use the new proceedural gui system we use in Breeeze 2.5, Precedence 1.5, and Vector. unces if desired.
> 
> 
> 
> As a developer could you shine a light for those of us who struggle to hear hall verb differences? What should one listen out for as far a the sound quality, i find myself listening out for the tails because when the music stops this is the reverb naked.


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## jadedsean (Dec 1, 2020)

Andrew Souter said:


> ...in the works. we will update all our plugs to use the new proceedural gui system we use in Breeeze 2.5, Precedence 1.5, and Vector. This allows extreme variation in gui prefs including, size, color, theme etc. and uses very low memory and disk space. We enhance this more and more with each new product.
> 
> I often hear people state you can feel the verb engulf the audio played through it. Is this a thing because when i use verb yes i hear the verb, sometime very washy sounding even when blending between dry and wet, also i hear a kind of smearing effect. Surely when using reverb you you want to enhance the audio not take away.


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## José Herring (Dec 1, 2020)

I made it through this video recently and it was an eye opener.


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## merty (Dec 1, 2020)

jadedsean said:


> This is great info, i may try the same, i am also running Reaper, could you tell me how you can normalize everything to the same LUFS?



Sure, open actions and on search bar type normalize. The actions name is SWS/BR: Normalize loudness of selected items to -23 LUFS

I freeze the reverb, click the track wave (item) to select and activate the action.


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## jadedsean (Dec 1, 2020)

José Herring said:


> I made it through this video recently and it was an eye opener.



Hey José check out my initial text, i mention this video and how i find it hard to tell the difference, much like Jake and Christian. When someone invests in a bracasti or the TC 6000 i would hope you can tell the difference between a 200 euro and plugin and the hardware which runs into the thousands, shockingly a very well known engineer and composer couldn't, and this is my point, who can really hear this differences? I have no doubt they are there but my ears are not honed to these differences. Its like when you start playing an instrument and you begin learning by reading music until the day you can transcribe with just your ears. I am sure this is the same but you have to put the time in to hear these differences, i created the thread so people in the know may point reverb novices like myself in the right direction.


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## José Herring (Dec 1, 2020)

jadedsean said:


> Hey José check out my initial text, i mention this video and how i find it hard to tell the difference, much like Jake and Christian. When someone invests in a bracasti or the TC 6000 i would hope you can tell the difference between a 200 euro and plugin and the hardware which runs into the thousands, shockingly a very well known engineer and composer couldn't, and this is my point, who can really hear this differences? I have no doubt they are there but my ears are not honed to these differences. Its like when you start playing an instrument and you begin learning by reading music until the day you can transcribe with just your ears. I am sure this is the same but you have to put the time in to hear these differences, i created the thread so people in the know may point reverb novices like myself in the right direction.


Sorry didn't catch that in your original post.

What was illuminating to me is that very thing. The Bricasti, Lexicon and TC 6000 being digital reverbs are of course going to be well duplicated if not bettered by software. There really should be no difference. Personally though nothing sounds more artificial to me than the Bricasti. I know it's suppose to be the best but I never got on with it. It came as no surprise to me that in a blind test it got eliminated fairly early on. I just don't hear what others hear in it. 

I don't think there is a difference between software and digital hardware reverb. It's psychological imo. Which plays a big roll. If you have 100-200 mil dollar film to score it's going to be hard to trust your entire score to a $50-$200 or even $500 reverb plugin. I don't care how good your ears are. You're going to make up the difference. That's why blind test are so important. I did it blindly too by just listening and not watching the video and to my ears Lexicon's plugin was #1, Exponential Audio was 2 and Valhalla was number 3. It was all based on aesthetics and nothing to do with the quality of each which was equal to me. 

So for me it was an eye opener that you don't need a $5000 reverb hardware box.


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## Dewdman42 (Dec 1, 2020)

Impressed by R2 here... I haven't been paying attention to that one... But they are ALL good... and there are others they didn't test like 2C stuff or Liquidsonics, for example...


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## ReleaseCandidate (Dec 1, 2020)

José Herring said:


> I don't think there is a difference between software and digital hardware reverb.



There isn't, if it's the same algorithm, except for errors in the AD and DA stages of the hardware 
But for the Bricasti exist convolution reverbs only (from many different IRs), not a plugin with the same algorithm.

Interesting nowadays are real analog reverbs (plates, springs) or digital with tube reverbs (if that sounds really better than a 'normal' algorithm with a saturator/distortion afterwards ...) like the Raumzeitmaschine: https://www.tegeler-audio-manufaktur.de/Raumzeitmaschine_Tube_Reverb/Index


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## maestro2be (Dec 1, 2020)

Garlu said:


> Have you tried 7th Heaven in conjunction with Nebula (from Acustica Audio) with Henry Olonga's freebie, sampling the AD-DA path of the hardware Bricasti?
> 
> From Henry: "_AD-DA of the M7 in analog mode. Available in 44.1k,96k and 192 kHz. I suggest you place these after your convolution reverb._"
> Link to the ADDA:http://www.nebulapresets.com/Bricasti_A ... _44khz.zip
> ...



Unfortunately this appears to require the full version to load. The free player only let's me install and use some of the trial packs from the actual store using the approved application installer. It doesn't appear to let me browse to these presets and open them. If I am doing something wrong and it actually does work I haven't found the way to do that yet.


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## maestro2be (Dec 1, 2020)

José Herring said:


> Sorry didn't catch that in your original post.
> 
> What was illuminating to me is that very thing. The Bricasti, Lexicon and TC 6000 being digital reverbs are of course going to be well duplicated if not bettered by software. There really should be no difference. Personally though nothing sounds more artificial to me than the Bricasti. I know it's suppose to be the best but I never got on with it. It came as no surprise to me that in a blind test it got eliminated fairly early on. I just don't hear what others hear in it.
> 
> ...


Do you own or ever owned a Bricasti M7? How many years did you work with it to master it before parting ways with it?


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## maestro2be (Dec 1, 2020)

I like music said:


> Extremely helpful. Thanks for the massive amounts of detail. Have you ever tried Reverberate 2? It also has the Bricasti stuff, and I can't tell if anyone has tested them both and heard any differences...


So I have been playing with Reverberate and honestly, the Bricasti M7 emulation is just bad. It's not even close. The amount of enormous reverb room and tail put on this is so high that I can't even get close when I turn it down to like 20% wet and 80% dry and shrink the room and remove most of the tail. i can see uses for this reverb, but for me, emulating a Bricasti will never be one of them.

One last tidbit. I loaded up the non-Bricasti emulation presets and it was exponentially better sounding to me. I am not one of those people who loves instruments in a mile deep swimming pool that echoes for days (unless it's an effect) and even though it says 2 seconds, seems to last 15 seconds on tail. The Bricasti emulation completely swallows the instruments and buries it in gobs of reverb. The standard Halls-1 presets it comes with and then bright hall is a much closer place to start for an emulation of the M7.


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## Dewdman42 (Dec 1, 2020)

I was able to improve the Bricasti presets a lot by tweaking some things in Rev3. I agree that the factory presets seem to be particularly bad... I called up, for example, the Boston B hall in both 7H and Reverberate. at first I was like wow, the rev3 preset of BostonB is really bad! My impression is that they made the Fusion IR's, but didn't spend that much time dialing in awesome presets with them. They could have gone a lot further. Instead they moved on to develop 7H and other plugins. 

But one of the things that is cool about Rev3 is that there is a lot of room to experiment, but you have to think about things a different way, that is perhaps less intuitive then using the controls of say 7H, but still you can make things sound a lot better...

Here are some things I did to get the BostonB preset in Rev3 to sound a ton better and much much closer to what I hear in 7H for the BostonB.


Turn down or off the Fusion Mod rate.


add some HF and LF rolloff....similar as the 7H preset. The Rev3 factory preset has no EQ curve at all applied.


Adjust the Shape Stretch parameter in Rev3 to get the decay time to match what you hear in 7H. 


Regarding ER vs Tail..the way to handle that is to load another instance of the BostonB IR until IR slot#2. The factory preset is only using one IR slot. Load the same IR into the other slot as well...then you can play with the envelope parameters of the two different IR...where one accentuates the ER section of the IR and the other accentuates the tail. Then you can simply use the cross-fading knob to control how much of each one you want, thereby adjusting the balance of ER to tail. 


You can accomplish other kinds of fine tuning by using the two-IR trick...have one be lower frequency content vs the other with higher frequency content, etc.. 


7H does have the VLF knob, which is replicating something that is in the Bricasti...a special feature if you know what to do with it...and I doubt this can really be replicated with Rev3. But maybe..
Anyway, I got it a lot closer after some tweaking like that.

But anyway, the point of Reverberate3 is really not to emulate the Bracasti. Its more of a creative IR player...you can put any IR's you want in there and then get creative with it. On one hand that is powerful and cool, but on the other hand, its not going to automatically sound good and can easily be made to sound bad. And you have to know how to use it as a tool to accomplish some of these things...rather then simply twisting the "decay" knob in 7H, for example.

And I think the IR sampling is a little deeper with 7H but I could be wrong, I think almost for certain it adds the VLP related IR's, for example. But still, the Rev3 versions can be made to sound substantially better then the factory presets. and if you start combining with other IR's from other places, you can start to do all kinds of interesting things that are totally outside the realm of possibility in 7H.

I believe 7H has been hugely popular mainly because its just dead simple to use and sounds good without messing the details too much.


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## José Herring (Dec 1, 2020)

On last thing is that I'm fairly familiar with the Lexicon hardware and I think it would have fair fairly well.


maestro2be said:


> Do you own or ever owned a Bricasti M7? How many years did you work with it to master it before parting ways with it?


Never owned it. Extensively demoed it. Had people demo it for me while I was in the room. Had my mixes mixed with it. I don't like it. Sure if ALL the studio has is a Bricasti and they didn't have a Lexicon 480 or 960 then MAYBE I might tolerate it. it's not like it's a bad thing, but I just remember a guy saying "Ohhhh, the Boston Hall sounds just like the real hall in Boston".... I'm like, I've heard the real hall in Boston, that hollow sound coming from the box isn't even close. 

What is good about the Bricasti though is that it doesn't suffer from the digital noise as the tail decays. Even Lexicon has that weird white noise at the very bottom of the decay. Bricasti doesn't have that so the converters must be really good. But, I'm not a fan of at least the algos I heard.

To me the Bricasti box just has a very distinct sonic foot print that doesn't blend that well with the source material being run through it. Sure, if it's your thing then I respect that. I really do. If it's what you like then, it's what you like. I just don't and I'm not the only one. The overpriced black box didn't fair too well even against plugins costing 1/15th the price of the Bricasti. 

Like I said if you like it you like it. I love Lexicon reverbs, the old 300 the 480 and the 960l are my jam, and I've been told by many that Lexicon is overpriced crap and I should like the TC 6000 or Bricasti better. I don't care. Lexicon works better for what I do.

Now if Bricasti packaged their algorithms in a Plugin and sold it for $500. I'd be all over it. It's just not worth much more than that to me.


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## maestro2be (Dec 1, 2020)

Dewdman42 said:


> I was able to improve the Bricasti presets a lot by tweaking some things in Rev3. I agree that the factory presets seem to be particularly bad... I called up, for example, the Boston B hall in both 7H and Reverberate. at first I was like wow, the rev3 preset of BostonB is really bad! My impression is that they made the Fusion IR's, but didn't spend that much time dialing in awesome presets with them. They could have gone a lot further. Instead they moved on to develop 7H and other plugins.
> 
> But one of the things that is cool about Rev3 is that there is a lot of room to experiment, but you have to think about things a different way, that is perhaps less intuitive then using the controls of say 7H, but still you can make things sound a lot better...
> 
> ...


I definitely agree with that. It's an instant nice Bricasti emulation that requires absolutely minimal to no adjustments at all. I did find a few presets were incorrect from what my real Bricasti has. It was minor but it did absolutely affect making it sound closer to the real thing once I made them 1:1 accurate.

A great takeaway from all of this is that if you're willing to put it in effort, you can get great results from most of the name brand plugins we all talk about every day. Even more so the more comfortable you become with what every knob and adjustment does.


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## maestro2be (Dec 1, 2020)

José Herring said:


> On last thing is that I'm fairly familiar with the Lexicon hardware and I think it would have fair fairly well.
> Never owned it. Extensively demoed it. Had people demo it for me while I was in the room. Had my mixes mixed with it. I don't like it. Sure if ALL the studio has is a Bricasti and they didn't have a Lexicon 480 or 960 then MAYBE I might tolerate it. it's not like it's a bad thing, but I just remember a guy saying "Ohhhh, the Boston Hall sounds just like the real hall in Boston".... I'm like, I've heard the real hall in Boston, that hollow sound coming from the box isn't even close.
> 
> What is good about the Bricasti though is that it doesn't suffer from the digital noise as the tail decays. Even Lexicon has that weird white noise at the very bottom of the decay. Bricasti doesn't have that so the converters must be really good. But, I'm not a fan of at least the algos I heard.
> ...


This is a perfect example of why there's so many different pieces of gear and software lol. I absolutely love mine and I know more people who love it, than who don't. You don't feel it melds to the instrument, as I feel it perfectly does it with such an illusion I can't even hear it happening, but it does.

In my studio I can absolutely hear the difference between it and the software. It's not a psychological thing when I actually own the unit and put a plugin directly side by side with it. It's definitely much more suspect, when you toss up blind tests on YouTube and or Soundcloud with their reduced sound quality.

Not to mention that depending on the material chosen or just how you personally connect with a sound can immediately make you think you hear what you don't hear. I personally found in the demo we all did a while back that the Lexicon sounded awesome for that demo. To me the Bricasti doesn't add as much change to the instrument or color and sometimes that color change is very appealing and draws me in because it fit the part and mood (that's when I used Vienna reverbs because they changed the sound in completely different way).

You're also at the mercy of the person doing the demo and their influence on the final sound being dependent on their ability to use the tool and how much time they have invested in it to get the results they want. Finally, in my mind it wasn't an exercise in making them all sound exactly like the Bricasti and then choose the real one. We were to simply pick the ones we loved the most. There's no guarantee that the results would have been the same if another person did the mixes using their own skills with those reverbs. We very well may have picked entirely different winners.

Another thing is how it will perform once it has 50-100 tracks going through it and it's affect on the entire mix.

I honestly have no idea what the real Boston Hall sounds like. I just know that I love it on the hardware unit, even if it's not a real representation of the real room. It's real to me .

All in all, I love mine and am looking for the ultimate software package to compliment it so I can use software on all instruments and use this on the master bus for the final mixdown. I think that these tests and all the things I have quantified suggest and potentially prove that it's completely possible to come really close to the real thing. Certainly to a point that pretty much no one is going to be able to tell the difference . I even almost have myself fooled at this point. I am only down to 1-2 remaining things that help me identify it. The most important is the lack of fatigue. I really want to eventually try this Nebula ADDA configuration as the creator had the same issue as me and could hear the same things I describe and claims his preset closes the gap. We will see.

One last thought on everything I found doing these tests was that what we have is most likely already good enough. New things spark inspiration. Inspiration sparks creation. I do see the purchase of something new as a positive if you get that from it and you don't go overboard and get lost in just sitting at your keybaord all day every day testing sounds and never actually putting anything into music. Testing violins from all 500 companies or sitting there for 3 weeks going stir crazy over which reverb to use is counter productive. For me, the inspiration from purchasing Cinematic Rooms and Seventh Heaven had me go back to the drawing board of what I already owned. Seventh Heaven taught me that comparing it to the Bricasti is something I should have simply done a long time ago for my ultimate goal. Near perfect Bricasti Emulation. Seventh Heaven taught me that I already had the ability long before I purchased it.


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## vitocorleone123 (Dec 1, 2020)

Yeah. I’m with Jose - I just don’t prefer the Bricasti sound for music. Maybe everything I listened to growing up was Lex. Who knows. That said, I’ve never heard the hardware in person. Given various implementations and different IRs and YT videos etc.... I have zero interest. It’s probably been used in movies I’ve watched etc to good effect. It’s just not one I’d choose when comparing against others. 

Interestingly but not surprising, I also don’t really like 2C reverbs. Also not my thing. Perhaps it’s because they’re closer to the Bricasti?

Comparing: I use short notes (plucks or piano etc), listen to the early reflections and the tail. I try different “sizes” to see how metallic


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## I like music (Dec 2, 2020)

maestro2be said:


> So I have been playing with Reverberate and honestly, the Bricasti M7 emulation is just bad. It's not even close. The amount of enormous reverb room and tail put on this is so high that I can't even get close when I turn it down to like 20% wet and 80% dry and shrink the room and remove most of the tail. i can see uses for this reverb, but for me, emulating a Bricasti will never be one of them.
> 
> One last tidbit. I loaded up the non-Bricasti emulation presets and it was exponentially better sounding to me. I am not one of those people who loves instruments in a mile deep swimming pool that echoes for days (unless it's an effect) and even though it says 2 seconds, seems to last 15 seconds on tail. The Bricasti emulation completely swallows the instruments and buries it in gobs of reverb. The standard Halls-1 presets it comes with and then bright hall is a much closer place to start for an emulation of the M7.



Thank you so much for this. I barely touched the Bricasti emulation in Rev2 because when I turned it on, it was SO reverberant that I was like 'nah, thanks!'

Same goes for a lot of other IRs in Rev2. I feel like I need to dial 90% of it back in order to get a non space-chamber echoey sound. To the point that I was wondering 'if I've changed the settings so much just to have it not swimming in reverb soup, then why am I even using this?'

I'm absolutely clueless about this stuff, so ideally was looking for a plug-and-play solution (of course, familiarising myself with the knobs is something I always try to do, but Reverberate has SO much stuff in it that I can't keep up. I wonder if 7H might simplify things for me.


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## Garlu (Dec 2, 2020)

maestro2be said:


> Unfortunately this appears to require the full version to load. The free player only let's me install and use some of the trial packs from the actual store using the approved application installer. It doesn't appear to let me browse to these presets and open them. If I am doing something wrong and it actually does work I haven't found the way to do that yet.


Sorry to hear. I thought it'd work with the free version. I own the commercial version of Nebula 4, so, I didn't go through that route. 

Glad to A/B some audio through it, with/without the tweak. I'll PM you.


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## Andrew Souter (Dec 2, 2020)

maestro2be said:


> I wanted to comment that I did in fact test this and it's true. My CPU usage goes high or low based on the preset I choose.
> 
> As an FYI, I have a very current AMD Threadripper 32 physical core 3970X processor. The Boston Hall sounds really great, but it's super CPU hungry. I will be doing more testing tonight with some other reverbs as well. I also have Breeze and Aether I will be testing.



"Boston Hall" uses the "XTRM" mode, yes? Yup XTRM is well, extreme. Esp if you combine it with Oversampling.

Note Breeze 2.5 is MUCH more efficient. It's one of the lightest on the market. I did some tests in 2017 when we released 2.0 (from the web listing) (2.5 is even faster/lighter):







...it also is able to suspend it's processing when there is no input signal, so its the perfect thing to use directly on track inserts such as advocated by us in the "PBJ workflow"... I can run 1000 instances of Breeze 2.5 (all processing) on a 2017 18-core Skylake-X i9 for example. In any sane scoring template even if you have 1000 tracks I bet less than easily 100 are playing/processing simultaneously. You can see B2 is last in this list when using some of its more extreme settings.

We will bring this knowlege and optimization from Breeze to B2, but we will continue to allow extreme things in it as well, and indeed add even more extreme things that can OPTIONALLY be used. I imagine B2 being used on things like Batman, Superman, Interstellar etc. (and if I can hope Dune 2021, since I am a big Dune nerd  ). i.e. extreme epic-scope projects -- so we have to allow extreme things even when they are a little ahead of their time and are resource intensive. This terriotry of "the edge of what is possible" is what is really exciting to me personally... I'm a bit of an extremist.


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## maestro2be (Dec 2, 2020)

I like music said:


> Thank you so much for this. I barely touched the Bricasti emulation in Rev2 because when I turned it on, it was SO reverberant that I was like 'nah, thanks!'
> 
> Same goes for a lot of other IRs in Rev2. I feel like I need to dial 90% of it back in order to get a non space-chamber echoey sound. To the point that I was wondering 'if I've changed the settings so much just to have it not swimming in reverb soup, then why am I even using this?'
> 
> I'm absolutely clueless about this stuff, so ideally was looking for a plug-and-play solution (of course, familiarising myself with the knobs is something I always try to do, but Reverberate has SO much stuff in it that I can't keep up. I wonder if 7H might simplify things for me.


I assure you that I feel exactly the same way about Reverberate as you do and really any other plugin that has that behavior. It's an instant turn off because 95% of what I like and do doesn't need that level of reverb unless it's an effect and even then, it's to much. That one reverb level would destroy the whole mix for me.

Could I "eventually" get it to sort of emulate the my Bricasti hardware? Yup, sure could I bet. Problem is, every time I change rooms or want another preset I have to spend endless time figuring out how to remove 90% of the sound to get it to match the hardware. No way, no thanks. In my opinion, 7H is instant gratification for people who hate drowning levels of reverb and prefer a "clear" sounding reverb versus a very colored reverb. To me, a Bricasti leaves the instruments almost in their naturally recorded dry tone sense (think of VSL) but gives them magic without sucking the life out of it (please don't start a war that VSL sounds lifeless) lol. That's not some peoples preference but it's mine.

I think it would be beneficial for you to demo 7H while it's still on amazing sale. It is a potential game changing experience for anyone who's a Bricasti lover and can't afford one. It's really good in my opinion.


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## merty (Dec 2, 2020)

jadedsean said:


> ...



I made a topic giving examples with lufs match, might help on identifying differences; https://vi-control.net/community/threads/sharing-reverb-examples.102297/


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## maestro2be (Dec 2, 2020)

Andrew Souter said:


> "Boston Hall" uses the "XTRM" mode, yes? Yup XTRM is well, extreme. Esp if you combine it with Oversampling.
> 
> Note Breeze 2.5 is MUCH more efficient. It's one of the lightest on the market. I did some tests in 2017 when we released 2.0 (from the web listing) (2.5 is even faster/lighter):
> 
> ...


Thanks so much for the response. I played with Breeze and Aether last night and of the two, Aether wasn't quite what I was looking for at the moment but Breeze is fantastic. As you stated it used significantly less CPU than B2 does. The other thing interesting that you pointed out, I did notice. It used it's processing power when I hit play and was almost invisible when the song was stopped. So I can confirm that behavior happened for me in Studio One v5 which is good. I find I was able to get really good results in Breeze and also in LiquidSonics Illusion. I was comparing those ones last night and they seem really similar from the perspective of easy to use, light on CPU and having a decent amount of tweakability without being overwhelming as B2 can certainly be. I really liked the Breeze clear hall a. That one was a nice sound to me.

I am all for having the extreme as well as it's very necessary. As you can imagine with someone who does similar to what you posted (1500 track template), B2 isn't an option for me which was what the initial shock was. I am one of those people who really like to have a reverb insert right on the instrument track and then have a final send to a bus channel for the final glue/mix. That's an impossible task for me with B2 however, B2 being on the final bus send is more realistic and a Breeze on the actual track is an option.

I am still playing with all of these combinations but I find some of the Den presets from B2 are really nice.


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## maestro2be (Dec 2, 2020)

Garlu said:


> Sorry to hear. I thought it'd work with the free version. I own the commercial version of Nebula 4, so, I didn't go through that route.
> 
> Glad to A/B some audio through it, with/without the tweak. I'll PM you.


Thanks, I responded to your message and happy to work with you to get some audio demos. Thanks for offering! I have a ticket in the meantime open with Nebula support team to sort this out if it's possible or not.


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## I like music (Dec 2, 2020)

maestro2be said:


> I assure you that I feel exactly the same way about Reverberate as you do and really any other plugin that has that behavior. It's an instant turn off because 95% of what I like and do doesn't need that level of reverb unless it's an effect and even then, it's to much. That one reverb level would destroy the whole mix for me.
> 
> Could I "eventually" get it to sort of emulate the my Bricasti hardware? Yup, sure could I bet. Problem is, every time I change rooms or want another preset I have to spend endless time figuring out how to remove 90% of the sound to get it to match the hardware. No way, no thanks. In my opinion, 7H is instant gratification for people who hate drowning levels of reverb and prefer a "clear" sounding reverb versus a very colored reverb. To me, a Bricasti leaves the instruments almost in their naturally recorded dry tone sense (think of VSL) but gives them magic without sucking the life out of it (please don't start a war that VSL sounds lifeless) lol. That's not some peoples preference but it's mine.
> 
> I think it would be beneficial for you to demo 7H while it's still on amazing sale. It is a potential game changing experience for anyone who's a Bricasti lover and can't afford one. It's really good in my opinion.



Yep, that's exactly it. I think I'll try the 7H trial see how it goes! Once again, thanks for helping me think through this stuff. Much appreciated!


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## storyteller (Dec 2, 2020)

Dewdman42 said:


> I was able to improve the Bricasti presets a lot by tweaking some things in Rev3. I agree that the factory presets seem to be particularly bad... I called up, for example, the Boston B hall in both 7H and Reverberate. at first I was like wow, the rev3 preset of BostonB is really bad! My impression is that they made the Fusion IR's, but didn't spend that much time dialing in awesome presets with them. They could have gone a lot further. Instead they moved on to develop 7H and other plugins.
> 
> But one of the things that is cool about Rev3 is that there is a lot of room to experiment, but you have to think about things a different way, that is perhaps less intuitive then using the controls of say 7H, but still you can make things sound a lot better...
> 
> ...


In another thread, I wrote about something similar using the Samplicity IRs in Waves IR1. Using 3 to 4 instances of IR1, you can achieve a sound that is almost exact to the 7th Heaven sound. It involved a similar concept... having one instance for early reflections, one for the tail, one for the sub emulation, and using the same eq parameters, etc. You then adjust each instance and volumes according to the Bricasti presets. Since I use Reaper, I just grouped all of those instances within a parent track which handled the routing, etc.

7th Heaven's IR sampling is definitely deeper though. They sampled nearly every knob combination for ERs and Tails rather than relying on stretching the IRs out by retiming the decay. So that is a difference. Plus, the GUI in 7th heaven just makes it so dang easy to use. But - the point here is that it is possible to have a much better emulation of a Bricasti with the IRs if you set it up like this rather than just "playing back a single IR inside a plugin."

Bricasti is not my personal preference for reverb, but it is definitely a beautiful verb! Michael Carnes certainly knows what he is doing!

-J


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## jadedsean (Dec 2, 2020)

merty said:


> I made a topic giving examples with lufs match, might help on identifying differences; https://vi-control.net/community/threads/sharing-reverb-examples.102297/


Great cheers dude. Appreciate it.


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## synergy543 (Dec 3, 2020)

maestro2be said:


> 1. First off, the instrument presentation is larger. Against any reverb I throw on this machine, none of them can create the same size image of the instrument that it does all the while achieving the same room sound. The whole image and soundstage just sounds bigger and wider. The instrument seems to meld with the room in a magical way without pushing away the instruments natural qualities. It is instantly noticeable when doing an on/off scenario of each tested reverb I tried.



Maestro, thank you for your extensive insight into the differences you hear between the hardware Bricasti and the various plugins. You speak of the instrument presentation as being "larger". Is there any chance you might be able to provide even a short snippet audio .wav file of your choice that demonstrates this? Also, it would be great to also hear the dry unprocessed sound so that the rest of us might be able to compare with our plugins and possibly learn exactly what you mean by "larger" presentation by the Bricasti? And if it's not too much trouble, could you also use a dry woodblock and a short snare hit (just single hits) as well, as this is the best way I personally can hear the detailed differences between reverb settings (even though it's not a typical musical context). I hope this is not too much to ask, and I hope you find this of possible interest as well, as I certainly realize you probably have limited time and many other things to do. If possible though, I'd really appreciate hearing this as I'd like to learn about what you are describing. And if not, I certainly understand. This is purely out of my interest and desire to learn more as I am a certified reverb fanatic (I've owned many hardware Lexicons, Quantecs, and many others which is why I'm curious). Thanks. Cheers, Greg


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## maestro2be (Dec 3, 2020)

synergy543 said:


> Maestro, thank you for your extensive insight into the differences you hear between the hardware Bricasti and the various plugins. You speak of the instrument presentation as being "larger". Is there any chance you might be able to provide even a short snippet audio .wav file of your choice that demonstrates this? Also, it would be great to also hear the dry unprocessed sound so that the rest of us might be able to compare with our plugins and possibly learn exactly what you mean by "larger" presentation by the Bricasti? And if it's not too much trouble, could you also use a dry woodblock and a short snare hit (just single hits) as well, as this is the best way I personally can hear the detailed differences between reverb settings (even though it's not a typical musical context). I hope this is not too much to ask, and I hope you find this of possible interest as well, as I certainly realize you probably have limited time and many other things to do. If possible though, I'd really appreciate hearing this as I'd like to learn about what you are describing. And if not, I certainly understand. This is purely out of my interest and desire to learn more as I am a certified reverb fanatic (I've owned many hardware Lexicons, Quantecs, and many others which is why I'm curious). Thanks. Cheers, Greg


I will see what I can do. I don't have time this week though as things came up. I do have a few additional things that have raised their heads that I believe have closed the gap even more. I will update as soon as I can test this weekend but the difference could be something more simple than I expected.


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## AnhrithmonGelasma (Dec 3, 2020)

el-bo said:


> Interesting to read your thoughts on this reverb, and in comparison to such a lauded piece of hardware.
> It's a reverb that seems to only rarely get mentioned. Not sure why. Maybe in part due to the complexity, wealth of options or price.
> 
> I'm no reverb specialist. I just use what sounds good. And while my main motivation for buying it was as a character and ambient/sound-design reverb, I just find that as a 'standard' reverb it just sounds great on everything I use it on. Since owning it, I sold both of the Valhalla plugs I'd previously used (No shade on VDSP, as their plugins are great). It's now the only 3rd-party 'verb I own. I still use my DAW stock 'verbs, but this is mainly because of B2's CPU hit, but also 'cause I sometimes prefer convolution and because Logic's Chromeverb is so quick to dial in.
> ...



I was extremely tempted by the recent Liquidsonics sales, but I ended up buying B2 instead. On x4 oversampling it's amazing.

I wonder how Adaptiverb would compare with the Bricasti M7. Adaptiverb's been my go-to "effect" reverb---I love the sound almost as much as B2, but I can also use it heavily without adding mud. Huge CPU hit when not in "preview" mode but I can combine Adaptiverb in "preview" and B2 on x1 oversampling without major cpu issues.


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## synergy543 (Dec 3, 2020)

maestro2be said:


> I will see what I can do. I don't have time this week though as things came up. I do have a few additional things that have raised their heads that I believe have closed the gap even more. I will update as soon as I can test this weekend but the difference could be something more simple than I expected.


Thanks Maestro. I appreciate your considering doing this when you get a chance. Nothing complicated or fancy needed and I'm not trying to prove a point or challenge your opinion. I owned the Lexicon224XL and Quantec and I know that software plugins don't quite have the same feel or spaciousness and that these subtle characteristics are not easy to define or explain. And I also realize the nuances can sometimes hard to hear if you're not tuned into a specific aspect to listen to, which is particularly why I'm interested in hearing this! And its not about golden ears, but rather learning and knowing what to listen to. Cheers.

btw, one thing I like to do with plugins that you might try is to run the VSL Imager (Waves C1 also works) after the reverb return (but only on the reverb, not the instrument). Try a subtle setting such as 1.37 or so, as its very easy to over-do this and end up with something not tasteful. It does help with the spaciousness on a reverb plugin if done properly.


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## maestro2be (Dec 4, 2020)

synergy543 said:


> Thanks Maestro. I appreciate your considering doing this when you get a chance. Nothing complicated or fancy needed and I'm not trying to prove a point or challenge your opinion. I owned the Lexicon224XL and Quantec and I know that software plugins don't quite have the same feel or spaciousness and that these subtle characteristics are not easy to define or explain. And I also realize the nuances can sometimes hard to hear if you're not tuned into a specific aspect to listen to, which is particularly why I'm interested in hearing this! And its not about golden ears, but rather learning and knowing what to listen to. Cheers.
> 
> btw, one thing I like to do with plugins that you might try is to run the VSL Imager (Waves C1 also works) after the reverb return (but only on the reverb, not the instrument). Try a subtle setting such as 1.37 or so, as its very easy to over-do this and end up with something not tasteful. It does help with the spaciousness on a reverb plugin if done properly.


You're very welcome. I will get us all something to hear as soon as I can. I couldn't have described it better than you did. I hear it, I know it's there, but it's so hard to explain. Especially if you're not sitting here in front of my studio hearing what's there and being shown what to look/listen for. Amazingly, my wife has way better ears than me and she hears it much more than me and I can clearly hear it. I read once in the past that women can hear distortion and compression more than male ears. I have no idea if that's bullocks or not but she can hear the change more than me.

It's much harder to notice sometimes in a quick 5-10 second clip comparison, but one major issue I find between the software and the hardware is as stated by me above, the fatigue and pain. It's completely non-existent when using the hardware in my studio and immediately noticeable every time I switch to the software. As I was mentioning my wife can hear it more than me, once I showed her what to listen for, I was no longer able to fool her in blind tests. I tried to play her the same software reverb 5 times in a row thinking she would absolutely choose wrong but she never waivered. If I can adjust that image a little and smooth out that fatiguing affect I think I can fool her too.

So yea, that's really about the last remaining 2 items to figure out. Interestingly, I thought of the imager idea and planned to try that so thank you very much for giving me a starting point. I will try that this weekend. I am hoping I can post some examples this weekend. I have never done these reverb tests so the whole snare drum and woodblock, is that something where you want to hear the 100% wet signal or do you want to hear the 50/50 that I use?


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## maestro2be (Dec 4, 2020)

AnhrithmonGelasma said:


> I was extremely tempted by the recent Liquidsonics sales, but I ended up buying B2 instead. On x4 oversampling it's amazing.
> 
> I wonder how Adaptiverb would compare with the Bricasti M7. Adaptiverb's been my go-to "effect" reverb---I love the sound almost as much as B2, but I can also use it heavily without adding mud. Huge CPU hit when not in "preview" mode but I can combine Adaptiverb in "preview" and B2 on x1 oversampling without major cpu issues.


If you start with the Boston Hall from one of the add-on packs, with minimal adjusting you will have a nice Bricasti emulation to my ears. I did change the reverb tail to match the hardware (2.1 seconds). That preset really gets you a nice starting point of emulation if you can get past the high CPU hit.


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## synergy543 (Dec 4, 2020)

maestro2be said:


> So yea, that's really about the last remaining 2 items to figure out. Interestingly, I thought of the imager idea and planned to try that so thank you very much for giving me a starting point. I will try that this weekend. I am hoping I can post some examples this weekend. I have never done these reverb tests so the whole snare drum and woodblock, is that something where you want to hear the 100% wet signal or do you want to hear the 50/50 that I use?


Mixed 50/50 would be great. You mention fatigue with the emulations and I remember how much headroom the 224XL had in comparison to my Lexicon PCM91 (LXP series is far worse). The 224XL was just so much smoother and this was likely due to the extra headroom and less distortion. All of the old pro gear had amazing headroom compared to semi-pro gear (Tascam range). Audio engineers really went out of their way to avoid the saturation that everyone tries to emulate today!

Also, you mention your wife hearing things you don't. LOL, I've had this same experience with my wife. But it's not because she has better hearing (although she went to Juilliard and I didn't), but she'll notice something that I overlooked or wasn't focused on. Once I focus on that detail, then it's much easier to notice and hear. It's like seeing a bird far away in a tree that others don't see. But then you point it out, and then everyone can see it.

I'm surprised about your comment on the CPU hit though as the Seventh Heaven is quite low on my system compared with other plugins.


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## jaketanner (Dec 4, 2020)

jadedsean said:


> Hi guys, I am wondering if there is any information out there to help one hear the differences between reverbs. I should state I am not talking about plate reverbs vs spring reverbs or even Convolution. Hearing these differences is obvious to me. However where I struggled is hall reverbs. I have a lot of great reverbs and as I am building my template I want to be able to utilise the best verb for my needs.
> 
> I understand this can come down to personal taste for people but what would be cool to know is, what to listen out for. For example, say I use Seventh Heaven and Cinematic Rooms, both sound good but my ears can’t really hear the discrepancies or for that matter the consistency’s in the sound. I have seen Christian Henson videos about verbs and this also makes the case that a lot of people can’t hear the differences, the blindfold test proves this, if jake or Christian can’t hear the difference what hope have I got. Any advice as always is appreciated.



Try this: when you are auditioning the reverbs to use, play a section and stop it abruptly in the middle of the phrase...listen to the tail...what happens AFTER the music stops? This will give you an indication of what it sounds like within. The other trick to hearing what a reverb is doing, is to make the send PRE fader...pull the track volume down and listen to ONLY the reverb...no direct signal.

Hearing the difference between reverbs once they are in the track is hard as a whole...but the simple thing to remember is really just this simple: if it works, it works. If it adds the ambience you want in the track then it works. You mentioned you had CR and 7th Heaven...select a patch from each reverb and tweak it so that it sounds good to you. Then mute that reverb, and do the same with the other...NOT trying to match one against the other, but just trying to make it sound good...Then play the track, and now you can A/B between each reverb (mute one in real time) and see exactly what the effects are of each. There should be a very clear difference...IF there isn't, then it doesn't matter which you use, OR you have chosen patches that are similar...but in time, you will see that different reverb units have their own characteristics. It's NOT the patch alone that makes the sound...it's the engine of the plugin and the converters of the hardware.

As a side note: patch names can be deceiving. Don't discount a patch just because it has a name that says "room" when you want a hall...try them all so you can clearly see/hear the differences...

Plates, springs..etc..as you mentioned are not real spaces. A Hall reverb is a natural space...as is a bathroom, a studio, a cave for that matter But as mentioned above, if you want a cave sound, and the patch name says large hall...that might also work. 

Ultimately, you need to listen to the reverb in context (this is all that matters in the end)...is it muddy? Does it build up too much before the next notes? Does it sound natural? constantly mute the reverb throughout and see what the difference are...does the reverb add depth? Does the mix sound flat without it or better (more clear)? If it's the latter, then you need to try tweaks or change the reverb altogether.


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## el-bo (Dec 4, 2020)

AnhrithmonGelasma said:


> I was extremely tempted by the recent Liquidsonics sales, but I ended up buying B2 instead. On x4 oversampling it's amazing.
> 
> I wonder how Adaptiverb would compare with the Bricasti M7. Adaptiverb's been my go-to "effect" reverb---I love the sound almost as much as B2, but I can also use it heavily without adding mud. Huge CPU hit when not in "preview" mode but I can combine Adaptiverb in "preview" and B2 on x1 oversampling without major cpu issues.




I also tried the LiquidSonics stuff, recently. Can't say I was unimpressed, as i'm pretty sure i don't know exactly what i'm listening out for (Horrid, jarring and metallic mess notwithstanding). In the right environment, and with a huge effort to make similar presets, across all plugins, I'd likely be able to discern differences. But otherwise I'm just a pretty simple guy - I needs a space, I puts a space 
My choice to go for B2 was initially due to it's sound-design potential. but over time, I just found myself liking it for everything. 

Have Adaptiverb, also. Unfortunately, my computer ain't really up to really digging too far into that. But I can still experiment, and I do enjoy it.


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## Akarin (Dec 4, 2020)

jadedsean said:


> Hi guys, I am wondering if there is any information out there to help one hear the differences between reverbs. I should state I am not talking about plate reverbs vs spring reverbs or even Convolution. Hearing these differences is obvious to me. However where I struggled is hall reverbs. I have a lot of great reverbs and as I am building my template I want to be able to utilise the best verb for my needs.
> 
> I understand this can come down to personal taste for people but what would be cool to know is, what to listen out for. For example, say I use Seventh Heaven and Cinematic Rooms, both sound good but my ears can’t really hear the discrepancies or for that matter the consistency’s in the sound. I have seen Christian Henson videos about verbs and this also makes the case that a lot of people can’t hear the differences, the blindfold test proves this, if jake or Christian can’t hear the difference what hope have I got. Any advice as always is appreciated.



Try to solo-defeat your reverb bus only and switch between the different reverb inserts on it to hear them in isolation. You'll notice the tails, the artifacts (or lack thereof), which one is warmer/brighter, etc.


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## Dewdman42 (Dec 5, 2020)

I also get the ear fatigue that Maestro mentioned. I hear it as plainly as RoundRobin annoyances.


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## maestro2be (Dec 5, 2020)

synergy543 said:


> Mixed 50/50 would be great. You mention fatigue with the emulations and I remember how much headroom the 224XL had in comparison to my Lexicon PCM91 (LXP series is far worse). The 224XL was just so much smoother and this was likely due to the extra headroom and less distortion. All of the old pro gear had amazing headroom compared to semi-pro gear (Tascam range). Audio engineers really went out of their way to avoid the saturation that everyone tries to emulate today!
> 
> Also, you mention your wife hearing things you don't. LOL, I've had this same experience with my wife. But it's not because she has better hearing (although she went to Juilliard and I didn't), but she'll notice something that I overlooked or wasn't focused on. Once I focus on that detail, then it's much easier to notice and hear. It's like seeing a bird far away in a tree that others don't see. But then you point it out, and then everyone can see it.
> 
> I'm surprised about your comment on the CPU hit though as the Seventh Heaven is quite low on my system compared with other plugins.


The CPU hit I was discussing above is for 2CAudio B2, not Seventh Heaven. Seventh Heaven has really good CPU Usage.

I also wonder if part of my wife hearing it much better than me, is that she doesn't sit there for hours/all day fatiguing her ears like I do. I only call her over once a week maybe when I want her to hear something and perhaps her solid fresh ears is why she hears it so much more clearly and instantly.


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## AnhrithmonGelasma (Dec 24, 2020)

maestro2be said:


> If you start with the Boston Hall from one of the add-on packs, with minimal adjusting you will have a nice Bricasti emulation to my ears. I did change the reverb tail to match the hardware (2.1 seconds). That preset really gets you a nice starting point of emulation if you can get past the high CPU hit.


It's in the Duo Den pack.


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## Russell Anderson (Feb 25, 2021)

maestro2be said:


> It's definitely an interesting question, and I have a long answer. Get comfortable with some wine and let me walk you through my thoughts and experiences.
> 
> So what reverbs have I tested so far:


Thanks for this post. Have you tried Sonsig, R4 or Nimbus? I own these three and am wondering how they compare in terms of fatigue and tail quality, to your ear, if you've used them.

I like them a lot, but am considering selling them when I buy B2 and probably Breeze, which so far I am liking demoing _a lot_; LiquidSonics CRP + 7H I won't be testing until I'm at least within a few months of being able to buy, though, so I don't know yet how they are with regard to tail/dampening/ERs and workflow. Can't wait to test CRP/7H and be done thinking about it. They sound like great reverbs, in theory, but nothing beats having it in your hands.

Breeze seems like a perfectly suitable workhorse; the Exponential Audio reverbs let me split ER and tail at the touch of a knob, which is a very useful feature, as well as work on the envelopes for each independently, while the interface for Breeze makes it much easier to work with quickly on those parameters (though not in isolation, which may be fine aside from needing to easily pull up a tail-only reverb) and they all, so far, sound great, barring more dedicated deep testing of my taste of each of their tails. I am hoping Cinematic Rooms does all of the above, and I can simply buy it + B2 and call it a day lol

The one weird thing I notice about Nimbus and R4 is that when set to larger "size" values independent of any other settings, both have very noticeable and probably intentional delays/reflections that create little peaks of volume/clarity within the tails, something that I sometimes like, and sometimes don't like, as you can never get a larger-sounding, smooth tail without them poking through every few fractions of a second. Michael Carnes may have added those for realism or...? There does not appear to be a way to get rid of them at larger room/algorithm sizes.


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## vitocorleone123 (Feb 25, 2021)

There's a reason there's a lot of great reverbs: there's typically no one solution.

My ears found Breeze to be bright and plastic in a way I didn't like. I'd never buy it. On the flip side, my ears found Seventh Heaven, and even Rooms to some extent, thick, cloying, and dark in a way I didn't like, and I'd not buy them. I'm sure lack of personal skill at shaping the sound using advanced features plays into it and could overcome some or much of these things - but that's part of the choice, as well: how quickly and easily can you dial in a sound you like?

I love the Exponential reverbs, which are more in the middle ground, but they're not without flaws. Nimbus is great to add a little "air" between and around notes in a subtle way. R4 can add liveliness. I've found that I do like Reverberate 3, despite not liking the other Liquidsonics products - likely because I can use IRs from other sources. SonsigA is a great and bright reverb (even on darkest settings), but I'll likely be selling it because between reverbs I have plus the Meris Mercury 7 pedal (also brighter even when darkened) I bought for my hardware synths and can send my software through as well, it's a bit redundant. My ears seem to like Relab, but I've held off so far on VSR and the Lex ones.

There's no good way to find the reverb(s) best for you without trying them. There's so many more I'm not going into detail on (e.g., D16 Spacerek, Acon Verberate, Valhalla reverbs, Fabfilter, the new iZotope one blending together the Exponential reverbs, and dozens of more excellent options).


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## AnhrithmonGelasma (Feb 25, 2021)

Russell Anderson said:


> Breeze seems like a perfectly suitable workhorse; the Exponential Audio reverbs let me split ER and tail at the touch of a knob, which is a very useful feature, as well as work on the envelopes for each independently, while the interface for Breeze makes it much easier to work with quickly on those parameters (though not in isolation, which may be fine aside from needing to easily pull up a tail-only reverb) and they all, so far, sound great, barring more dedicated deep testing of my taste of each of their tails.



Another consideration: Breeze is apparently about tied with VVV and VSM for lowest cpu usage (among high quality reverbs), so it can easily be combined with more cpu-intensive reverbs like B2 (on 4x quality setting, divine...). 



Russell Anderson said:


> The one weird thing I notice about Nimbus and R4 is that when set to larger "size" values independent of any other settings, both have very noticeable and probably intentional delays/reflections that create little peaks of volume/clarity within the tails, something that I sometimes like, and sometimes don't like, as you can never get a larger-sounding, smooth tail without them poking through every few fractions of a second. Michael Carnes may have added those for realism or...? There does not appear to be a way to get rid of them at larger room/algorithm sizes.


I think Neoverb might take care of this by using AI to locate and EQ the main peaks, which of course you can then adjust. The reverbs are very similar to Nimbus (Neoverb "realistic") and R4 (Neoverb "dramatic" I think) and almost certainly use variations on the same algorithms. Hopefully there will be a better sale on Neoverb this year.


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## Russell Anderson (Feb 26, 2021)

AnhrithmonGelasma said:


> I think Neoverb might take care of this by using AI to locate and EQ the main peaks, which of course you can then adjust. The reverbs are very similar to Nimbus (Neoverb "realistic") and R4 (Neoverb "dramatic" I think) and almost certainly use variations on the same algorithms. Hopefully there will be a better sale on Neoverb this year.


yeah, I'm pretty into the way B2 sounds.

Honestly, I think I was mostly wrong before. Nimbus/R4, there isn't much you can do about the "slapback delays" that surface in larger size values, they're just sort of there. They're less present in Sonsig but are explosively obvious at some settings in 2cAudio reverbs, the parameters let you smooth things out a lot though. I've just been using a lot of Sonsig recently, so I wasn't as aware that that's just kind of how it goes *when you increase the size on any reverb, it's not a unique characteristic of EA reverbs.

Neoverb won't do anything about the reflections as it's not EQ related, but I did demo it tonight and can say that I'm happy it exists. I won't buy it, as it's not adding anything new besides better UI (largely in the XY controller which I can setup in patcher + more, though, it was cool to use and looks pretty).



vitocorleone123 said:


> There's a reason there's a lot of great reverbs: there's typically no one solution.


Agreed. At the same time, there probably is... I think I enjoy thinking too much about technical stuff; "too much" could fit a lot of places in that statement. At the rate I'm writing music, Jacob Collier will have 30 grammies by the time I release an album, lol 

I am basically in agreement with you with regard to workflow and trying them out. I have a few demos I've not tried, which I certainly will (Acon/Pro-R/LiquidSonics, not to mention IR), but... For now, I'm pretty much covered. The differences in sound are interesting but often very small after getting your hands dirty. Or at least, small enough on my budget + priorities that I need to be putting more focus into writing music, not buying reverbs right now nor crafting some lengthy list of adjectives about how each reverb compares to each other, because they are indeed all interesting and unique. After hours spent going through 5 reverbs and trying to get them to sound the same/different to identify their minute differences I can with confidence conclude that I like them.

Precedence is still really interesting, but I'll probably try to mock that up in Patcher, too, before deciding whether to buy it or not. I might already have everything I besides a good UI to bring it together.


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## AudioLoco (Feb 26, 2021)

I used to be hardware reverb only guy... until a few years ago. 
At least all vocals, snare, classical instruments and other important stuff would go thorough hardware, mainly Lexicon stuff. It killed any plugin hands down.
Plugins started slowly moving forward with the first serious, non sub-par reverb plugin, which was on the TC Powercore platform, then Altiverb, then the Lexicon PCM collection came out and now Exponential Audio and Liquidsonics are just running havoc.

It would be unthinkable for me to use multiple hardware devices for my auxes/sends as it would make my process infinitely longer and non practical.

On important, and NOT show/advert related mixes where speed (and stem delivery) is paramount, I still use an analog summing box, analog 2bus processors chain etc and often would pass stuff through analog delays, weird spring reverbs, guitar pedals etc. (which I print, not keep in real time)

But having auxes/sends set to multiple external reverb in real time (and having to save/load the relevant presets etc everytime I'm opening/closing a session..) is too much of a workflow killer and honestly, if there is a difference in quality, it is too small for me to trade in. Also because I continue to tweak reverb parameters during the mix process more then other processors.

In the case of a Bricasti...the price tag of a Bricasti doesn't make sense personally to ME. 
It might be great sounding (subject to taste, not even everybody is into it) but I honestly manage to reach my objectives with what I got.
Also, in my view, it is going to be pretty worthless as soon as someone copies/ports the code, or just creates a better one in plugin form.
Could be in a month, a year or two, but it WILL happen.

As a clear example, the prices of amazing used hardware units went down by a lot, and good luck getting spare parts. Nobody is investing in 480Ls, for example, for a reason.

Anyhow to answer the OP... in my opinion, it's just about practice, practice. The more you use reverbs, in general, the more your ear becomes sensible to single traits of each reverb type/setting.


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## Russell Anderson (Apr 2, 2021)

vitocorleone123 said:


> I love the Exponential reverbs, which are more in the middle ground, but they're not without flaws.


Since leaving my prior comments, I don't know what I was doing but the delay taps are much less of an issue. So evidently, somehow, I was overlooking something in a big way before. Nimbus in particular is quite dense.

For kicks and possibly educational value I'll be organizing a somewhat broad shootout video featuring a bunch of algorithmic reverbs in a few settings, but after doing a plethora of research (and some light soulsearching) I'm probably not going to do anything with 2cAudio besides _possibly_ Precedence later on, as much as their sound is very intriguing. EA reverbs sound great to me, have great control over depth and sound, I'm comfortable with them and getting results I'm happy with, so only an absolute excess of money or some unforeseen issue would cause me to want to replace them.

The only conceivable way I'd end up replacing them is if CRP somehow ends up blowing Nimbus clear out of the water to my ears, but for $200 minimum (sale/2nd hand) it would need to. Barring that, and (probably) as no replacement, I'll probably be looking at buying MTurboReverb sometime soon. There may be one or two esoteric things CRP can do that MTR can't (such as CRP's frequency-specific control of the rate of reflection dispersion across the stereo/surround fields), barring my guess that CRP's beautifully polished algorithms might sound often more immediately glorious; but MTR is dummy-deep, flexible, and I'm going to have a lot of fun with it, I think, and if there's anything on the wild side to pair with some easy-to-use bread-and-butter reverbs like Exponential Audio's, for someone who loves diving a little deeper than may be necessary sometimes, I think that's a good one.


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