What's the best reverb plugin, and do I own one that's any good?

method1 said:

People get put off stratus & symphony by the GUI, but they're excellent reverbs created by Michael Carnes, maybe dig into those a bit more before adding more stuff to the plugin folder.

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Here's my problem with those two:

Tiny hard to read font that is much smaller than all the other text in the GUI (I added green rectangles to highlight them, those are not part of the GUI):



And this is just a horrible mess. Too many presets on screen with little space between them, so they're hard to read even with larger font.



Any software, plugin or not, has to have a clear interface, and preferably one that is nice to look at.

For example, look at the Liquid Sonic plugins (thanks Trash Panda for the tip). Those are beautiful GUIs. Not that I'm going to spend a lot of money just because of a nice GUI, but it helps when considering among several choices of something that I'll probably use a lot.

And what's the difference between Stratus and Symphony?

jcrosby said:

Considering you have a bunch of solid reverbs but you're asking about buying more, this is an indication that your time would be better spent learning how to set your reverbs.

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Well, it's not that exactly. My goal was to find out from those who know much better than me if I have anything decent, and if not, what can I get for a price that doesn't break the bank.

I see what you mean about learning how to set my reverbs, but I'd rather find something that is ideal, and then learning that one. It's more efficient than learning one reverb, then another and so on.

Well if it bothers you that much then don't use them, like the massenburg plugins they're designed by engineers and aren't very pretty, but they are extremely good & powerful reverbs coded by a reverb legend.

Symphony is vintage-y (think lexicon) while stratus aims to be more more natural.

General_Disarray said:

Well, it's not that exactly. My goal was to find out from those who know much better than me if I have anything decent, and if not, what can I get for a price that doesn't break the bank.

I see what you mean about learning how to set my reverbs, but I'd rather find something that is ideal, and then learning that one. It's more efficient than learning one reverb, then another and so on.

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If you have a bunch of great reverbs already, (which you do), isn't the better approach to learn how to use what you already have? How are you supposed to make of judgement about about what "ideal" is if you don't know how to use what you already own? As several people have already pointed out, what is "ideal" to one person is not necessarily ideal to someone else.

General_Disarray said:

Any software, plugin or not, has to have a clear interface, and preferably one that is nice to look at.

For example, look at the Liquid Sonic plugins (thanks Trash Panda for the tip). Those are beautiful GUIs.

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Oh, you should check Waves IRL so butt ugly.

That's why I said Reverberate 3 (Liquidsonics), has scalable UI.

And what's the difference between Stratus and Symphony?

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Ex Phoenixverb (Stratus) and R2 (Symphony) on steroids.

Stratus 3D is the clearer, more open sounding reverb. Very natural. It works great on dialog, foley, fx, making those ridiculously big "dream verb" reverb effects, etc. It also works incredibly well on music, having great Hall, Church, Room and even Plate presets. I have literally been very hard pressed to find a sound that Stratus cannot create.

Symphony 3D is very similar sounding, but it does have additional chorus effects on the reverb tail, which make it a bit thicker and a bit better suited for music. Sort of like the Lexicon reverbs. It is really great for thickening up and blending music together, and I would say is almost as flexible as Stratus 3D.

Just like Comps, EQ's, Tape Saturation; it's just a matter of flavors/taste.

For orchestral music I like dark and dense verbs. I still think the old IK classic verbs are one of the best, because they have a way of “tucking” around the notes so it sounds very natural. Especially on a verb bus with eq and compression.

Audiority Xenoverb also has this quality, and is a highly underrated verb plug.

.. but I like delay better, so I will echo what others have said.. you can do everything with wht’u have. A lot of verbs seem to have overly complicated and messy gui’s, and I find myself gravitating to the simple ones, regardless of sound, as I always process my verbs anyway and can tweak to what I like.

GtrString said:

Audiority Xenoverb also has this quality, and is a highly underrated verb plug.

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Great reverb. But would you use a shimmer / pitch shifting verb on an orchestral bus? I’ve never tried that before.

doctoremmet said:

Great reverb. But would you use a shimmer / pitch shifting verb on an orchestral bus? I’ve never tried that before.

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No, but that’s not all it does.

I think I'm pretty much the happiest camper with the Liquidsonics suite of reverbs, but find myself mostly drawn to Seventh Heaven and Tai Chi for synth-stuff, and Cinematic Rooms for orchestral. There's always opportunity to throw in some Black Hole or Supermassive, and I can't even begin to tell you how many other reverb plugins I have on my system that don't see much use, but when I bought them, I "needed" them! I do like using Baby Audio's Crystalline and Spaced Out, too. It's cool to see what other folks are using, though.

For endless/super long reverbs, besides Blackhole, Valhalla Supermassive is REALLY good (and free!)

I'd experiment with that first, it also has more creative stuff like delays and such so you can go a long way with it but I mainly use it as a Blackhole alternative since I don't have it

General_Disarray said:

Well, it's not that exactly. My goal was to find out from those who know much better than me if I have anything decent, and if not, what can I get for a price that doesn't break the bank.

I see what you mean about learning how to set my reverbs, but I'd rather find something that is ideal, and then learning that one. It's more efficient than learning one reverb, then another and so on.

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You can do almost anything you would ever need to do with Valhalla Room + Vintage Verb. That’s a hundred bucks. Throw in Valhalla Shimmer if you want a cheap alternative to Eventide Blackhole. So between that and Raum and the built in convolution you already have you’re well covered for anything you would ever want to do.

That said the Izotope verbs you already have are top notch and sold for hundreds of dollars not long ago, so you don’t really need to buy anything. Save it for an interesting sample library. I have advice for that too, but I’m obviously biased

If you want a reverb for orchestral music that sounds good and is really easy to use, try East West Spaces II.

Here’s the default GUI:


There are just the most needed controls plus a picture of the acoustic space to give you a sense of the sound.

The browser is logical in layout and quick to understand and use:




Then if you want to tweak things a little, there‘s a separate page for that:



A major thing about this reverb is that they captured impulse responses from specific positions within some of these spaces:


I have had other reverbs, Liquidsonics Seventh Heaven Pro, now sold, for example, but it’s just so easy for me to get the sound I want in a particular situation from Spaces II that I more or less always end up using that.

They also captured the sound of some high quality hardware units which are available as well and which sound amazing, i.e. Digital Hollywood Hall or whatever that preset is called in Spaces II.

I love this plug-in as you can probably tell

PS. It’s often on 50% sale because East West has a policy of having sales all the time. So don’t buy it for full price. I think you can even test it with 1 month of their subscription service so if that sounds interesting then read up on it.

The Relab 480L is shockingly good.

General_Disarray said:

I'd rather find something that is ideal, and then learning that one

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For the most part, screwdrivers are a suitable analogy for plugins (or maybe more specifically, plugin functionalities/parameters). Once you learn one... Plugins are a little different, but close enough.

The pre+post processing on the signal or send, and how you handle reflections vs tail if you need to go that far are more important than which plugin. I hope you can take my word for it, as selling a lot of secondhand licenses for reverbs can take awhile - I am happy I got to use so many, but the discovery was clear: pick favorites, sell the rest, write music. I could be getting on with almost any of them but some of them were just slower to use.

General_Disarray said:

And what's the difference between Stratus and Symphony?

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If you are wondering why the interfaces look like trash, that is just how they looked after having a template applied to the UI with no changes. It is likely they will be discontinued and the algos (hopefully effectively?) packaged up in a Neoverb-adjacent; the skin template is just there to give the impression of permanence while Izotope works on their next reverb plugin using the same algorithms which they will sell as a new product to people who bought these reverbs before they were discontinued.

To actually answer your question, the stereo counterparts of those two reverbs had one key difference, which was modulation in the feedback path. One was the "transparent" reverb (Nimbus/Stratus) and the other was the "lush modulated Lexicon-esque" reverb (R4/Symphony)

Thundercat said:

The Relab 480L is shockingly good.

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And with a shockingly sub-par user interface for people who aren't already familiar with the hardware in order to transfer their learning. The interface is the #1 reason I didn't buy it. At least it can be resized now - it had been awful to even try to use at all.

If someone is looking for something simpler, an interface mimicking old Lexicon hardware is not it.

The old Exponential interfaces were actually decent because they were logically laid out and most things you'd commonly need were in the main view. The preset browser was actually pretty easy to use, as well, because of how it was organized and easy to filter it down. It didn't look pretty, and the text was too small, but, as a UX designer, I can say it was still a reasonably solid interface.

I have Nimbus and R4, but long since deleted from my computer due to audio glitches. Otherwise I'd still be using them.

General_Disarray said:

Here's my problem with those two:

Tiny hard to read font that is much smaller than all the other text in the GUI (I added green rectangles to highlight them, those are not part of the GUI):

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It looks like you’re on a Mac. For what it’s worth, you can easily zoom in for hard to read text:


That said, if your current tools throw a wrench in your workflow, there’s something to be said for exploring other options, even if your current plugins sound great.

Best,

Geoff

I’ll add that while I have a ton of reverb plugins, I use Altiverb and Cinematic Rooms Professional on almost everything I do. (I like both convolution and algorithmic reverbs, and I often combine them.)

I also frequently use plugins with a Lexicon sound, including Lexicon’s own plugins.

Good luck.

Best,

Geoff

General_Disarray said:

Stratus 3D and Symphony 3D seem OK, but the interface is kind of a mess.

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Oh no no no, I don't agree at all. They have well laid out controls of a feature-rich professional reverb.
And the opposite for Neoverb, which is a disgrace and really offending to any mixing engineer.

If you want an easy to dial reverb that never sounds bad, get Relab Sonsig Rev-A.

Symphony has replaced R4 as my Aux 1. Kilohearts Convolver for IR on Aux 2.

LinusW said:

Oh no no no, I don't agree at all. They have well laid out controls of a feature-rich professional reverb.
And the opposite for Neoverb, which is a disgrace and really offending to any mixing engineer.

If you want an easy to dial reverb that never sounds bad, get Relab Sonsig Rev-A.

Symphony has replaced R4 as my Aux 1. Kilohearts Convolver for IR on Aux 2.

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Tried hard to love RevA. Got it on release. Sold it a year later. Just too bright all the time to my ears, even on the darkest settings. Also the controls weren’t intuitive to me.

R4 and Nimbus controls, while uglier, made more sense.

vitocorleone123 said:

Just too bright all the time to my ears, even on the darkest settings

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An interesting technique a discord acquaintance showed me with Sonsig in particular was using a low pass gate on the input signal, so the reverb got brighter dynamically. It's pretty sweet. But you can do that with any reverb!