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.