Recording - September 2011 - 46

2C Audio Breeze
$149.95; www.2caudio.com I reviewed 2C Audio’s flagship reverb plug-in, Aether, in our October 2009 issue; I noted its intuitive layout and informative graphics, its unique and mix-friendly features, its gorgeous sound... and the significant CPU hit it delivered with all that power. My main studio computers aren’t all that powerful, and I was forced to reserve Aether for special uses and immediate track-freezing. So when 2C Audio announced a leaner, meaner, more affordable reverb called Breeze, I was all over it. Breeze isn’t just a slimmed-down version of Aether, although that alone would be enough to get folks to try it out; it’s also a platform for some of 2C Audio’s newest ideas on reverb design, where lucky users get to play with features that might get added to Aether someday. As you can see from the screenshots, the main displays (reverb character and frequency response) are surrounded by a Navigation Bar for preset management and screen changes up top, and a simple yet comprehensive set of control knobs and sliders down below. You can double-click on any knob to type in a value for it; when you do, the units (percentage, meters, milliseconds, etc.) are displayed underneath. Combinations of two different backgrounds and two control color choices are user-selectable as four “skins”.

represent mono behavior. Cross is an intermixing of the left and right inputs into each other’s reverb processing, which has subtle but beautiful effects on the resulting stereo imaging. There’s an entire section of the PDF manual (which is excellent, by the way) just to explain these two controls in more detail, with enough diagrams to make your head spin! Fortunately, in practice, they’re easy to play with; just drag and listen until you find yourself grinning like an idiot. The eq section offers two bands called EQ and Damp. Each allows you to choose high or low shelf, 6 dB/octave high or low cut, or bypass. This lets you shape the high and low contour of the sound to taste, noting that both bands can be set to work on the highs or lows, or one for each. Note that these are not identical functions; EQ is a static setting, but Damp is time-dependent, causing the filtered frequencies to die away gradually as the reverb tail develops. Oh, before I forget: The Gain slider lives between the input and output level meters at top left, but you won’t fiddle with it as often as you might with other plug-ins. Breeze has a “Conservation Of Energy” gain scheme that automatically adjusts RMS output level so there are no drastic gain jumps when you switch presets! In practice, it works so well that you might forget Breeze has a Gain control at all... kind of scary, actually. In terms of its sound, Breeze retains much of Aether’s magic, showcasing its wide range of sonic possibilities in a nicely organized

Note the large wet/dry Mix display at bottom left; this is actually a control as well, and can be changed by clicking and dragging. It can also be locked so it doesn’t change when you swap presets, so you can quickly set up Breeze for insert or aux use without having to manually mess with wet/dry mix on every preset you audition. Reverb Time ranges from 0.10 seconds to 29.9 seconds; if you turn it up past that, you get into an Infinite mode that creates a neverending wash of reverberant sheen. Predelay ranges from 0 to 250 milliseconds. Breeze’s Geometry and Timing control groups offer enhanced early-reflection, envelope, and timbral control. The bipolar Contour knob determines the relative level of primary and secondary early reflections; if you set it below zero, you get a weird reverse effect where later reflections are louder than the earliest ones. Size ranges from 5 to 75 meters, and Shape, Density, and Diffusion interact to create the impression of a tight or damped room. Density can be set to negative values; used in moderation it helps emulate classic hardware reverbs, and at extremes it can create intriguing artificial-space sounds. A Hi-Lo switch lets you set a lower-complexity Density/ Diffusion character that saves on CPU and produces sparser and more spacious, albeit less rich, sounds. Proper interaction of the early-reflection controls can create powerfully resonant spaces, from the familiar “bathtub reverb” of a delay line turned way down to more rich and spacious tuned excitations. You can easily set up a room that rings in key with your audio; not something you’d use every day, but fascinating nonetheless. Reverb tails can be modulated with Depth and Rate controls, and two sliders control Width and Cross. Width is the stereo spread of the signal; if you crank it down to zero, the early reflections shown in blue and yellow for left and right channels will turn green, to
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menu of hundreds of presets. It’s rich, clear, and full of character, eminently tweakable, and fun to experiment with. On my relatively old Core 2 Duo MacBook with 2 GB of RAM and buffer size set to 128 samples, I couldn’t get it to eat more than 20% of CPU load no matter how hard I tried, and that number dropped a lot when switching Density/Diffusion to Lo. Compared to Aether, this is fantastic performance, and if your computer has larger cache and faster RAM the CPU load will be correspondingly lower. Breeze is less expensive than Aether, but not as cheap as some other offerings. In this case, the added expense gives you added flexibility and a truly glorious sound that can duke it out with many far more costly plug-ins. Another 2C Audio masterpiece!

Audio Damage Eos
$49; www.audiodamage.com Audio Damage has graced these pages with a variety of fascinating, fun, and very affordable plug-ins in recent years; the latest offering we wrote up was the Phosphor virtual additive synth in our April 2011 issue. Eos is a different beast entirely, different even from Audio Damage’s many other effects; while it still has some of the trademark funky weirdness that makes other AD plug-ins so much fun, it’s positively genteel in its delivery... and sounds really gorgeous, too. Eos is an algorithmic reverb that’s available as a VST plug-in for Mac and Windows, and also as an AU for Mac; there’s no RTAS version. As you can see from the screenshots, Eos provides an unusual graphic display for its predelay, room size, and decay time parameters. You can click and drag the numerical values, or just click on the shapes and pull and stretch them to taste! Grab the right side of the

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Recording - September 2011

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Recording - September 2011