Keyboard Magazine - March 2008 - (Page 72) AUDITION AUDIOEASE ALTIVERB 6 CONVOLUTION REVERB PLUG-IN by John Krogh To hear an impulse response in reverse, click this. You can scroll through several pages of information about the currently loaded impulse response. This window can also be detached and expanded for a better view. To audition the current preset, you can trigger built-in test sounds by clicking these. Even though sampled reverbs normally don’t offer a lot of tweakability, Altiverb lets you separately adjust the reverb tail and amount of early reflections. You can tailor the sound of an impulse response using the damping controls along with the EQ. Altiverb revolutionized the art of mixing music on computers. Or at least, Dutch developers AudioEase redefined how we could create a sense of space when it came to mixing “inside the box.” Prior to Altiverb, software reverbs all had one thing in common: their sound was synthesized. Altiverb, however, uses convolution technology, which essentially involves “grafting” a sample of an acoustic space (called an impulse response or IR for short) onto another audio signal. This has the effect of placing that signal “inside” the sampled acoustic space. Because the source of a convolution reverb is an actual recording of a reverberant space, the results sound remarkably realistic. AudioEase didn’t invent convolution reverb, but they certainly popularized it with Altiverb. When it was first released in 2002, Altiverb was the only realtime convolution reverb plug-in on the market, and the other option for getting convolution into your tracks was Sony’s DRS-777, a dedicated hardware box with a small car’s price tag. Since then, competition has become fierce, but AudioEase certainly hasn’t rested on its laurels. At version 6, Altiverb is a mature, feature-rich reverb, and as I discovered, it’s still ahead of the competition in several areas, namely CPU efficiency, maximum reverb time (25 seconds), and the quality of its sampled acoustic spaces. EFFICIENCY The big difference between versions 5 and 6 is that Altiverb can now run on Digidesign HD hardware, which is a 72 keyboard 03-2008 Convolution reverb software. PROS Diverse, high-quality collection of impulse responses for music and post-production mixing. Available in stereo and surround versions. Users get access to a growing library of new IRs. Editing parameters afford a fair amount of flexibility with the sampled spaces. CONS There aren’t many IRs from high-end hardware digital reverbs. Altiverb 6 XL, $995 (upgrade from version 5 [HTDM], $100); Altiverb 6 Regular, $595 (free upgrade from 5 to 6) AudioEase www.audioease.com http://www.audioease.com
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