Recording - September 2011 - 50

and special effects. There’s no control panel for copying, pasting, or saving presets; that’s all hidden in a menu that pops up when you click on the preset name. ValhallaRoom represents a remarkable bargain for the home recordist looking for a great-sounding and flexible reverb. It has enough control range to do pretty drastic special effects, but is also easy to tweak for more conventional purposes; the division of labor between Early and Late reverb makes it easy to work with and learn from. Oh, and if you want to get a good reverb and do good at the same time, 10% of all ValhallaRoom sales are being donated to the American Red Cross International Disaster Relief Fund, to help out in earthquake-ravaged Japan and other places in need around the world. As a bread-and-butter reverb for a wide variety of applications, ValhallaRoom is hard to beat, and the easy asking price makes it a no-brainer; go grab the demo and give it a spin.

EASTWEST Quantum Leap Spaces
$299; www.soundsonline.com Quantum Leap Spaces is, as I said in my introduction to this reverb roundup, a very different product than the other reverbs we’ve talked about so far. It’s a convolution reverb, which means it relies on impulse responses to provide the sonic footprint of the ambiences being added to your tracks. There are a number of convolution reverbs out there on the market, and they vary widely in complexity and in the number and quality of impulse responses that come with them. Spaces stakes out new territory by providing what may be the first professional-level, fully “plug and play” convolution reverb on the market. The impulse responses do all the heavy lifting; just select the one you want, and let it do its magic on your tracks, no tweaking needed. In addition to the usual native formats, Spaces can also be used as a standalone program with audio routed to it from outside a DAW. It uses an iLok USB key for authorization and has a standard iLok-based license agreement, and unlike the other reverbs in this roundup it is available not only as a download (a big one—over a GB for all the impulse responses!) but as a boxed retail DVD. With its simplicity-first design firmly in mind, Spaces has a very simple front panel. As you can see from the screenshots, there are just four knobs—controls for Dry Signal, Wet Signal, Input Signal, and Pre Delay—and a pair of buttons, one to put the reverb in Mono and one to engage a pair of simple high- and low-cut filters. The Display button shows the filter settings, and the Mode switch isn’t actually a control but shows whether the currently selected impulse response is considered “True Stereo” or not.
50
RECORDING SEPTEMBER 2011

What does “True Stereo” mean? I can guess, but I don’t know for sure, which forces me to mention my first (and last) annoyance with Spaces: there’s no documentation at all, anywhere. None. There’s no manual—with four knobs (three of which are gain controls) and two buttons, I suppose you don’t really need one. And when you call up an impulse response, the front panel of Spaces does tell you a fair bit about how it was created: the mics and signal processors used (all of which are pretty darn magnificent!), how the response was captured and mixed, and how the analysis was carried out. The latter is important because the EASTWEST folks believe that it’s not enough to just make a sound in a space and record the results, the sound needs to be aimed the way a real instrument would be. For example, if you want a reverb to sound right for strings, the sound source for the impulse response has to be aimed the way a string ensemble would project audio. Because of this philosophy, the impulse responses are grouped not only by types of spaces, but also by the instruments they’re intended to be used for. That makes matching a source and a room very easy for the novice user, and is part of what makes Spaces such a breeze to use well. But I still wish they explained their terms somewhere; the folks at EASTWEST were kind enough to fill in the details, as follows. Every impulse response is named for its source, followed by a couple of letter codes and a reverb time in seconds. The letter codes are: M-S for mono-in/stereo out, where the input is summed to mono, S-S for stereo-in/stereo-out, ST for a 2-channel stereo impulse recording, TS for a “true stereo” 4-channel impulse recording mixed down to stereo, FR for a front-facing response, RR for a rear-facing response (usually longer and darker, good for surround mixes or alternate sonorities). Not only rooms are sampled; the impulse responses include a large number of conventional reverb programs sampled by feeding an analysis signal into another reverb and creating an impulse response from the output. These include electronica-friendly presets, gated drum reverbs, and vintage plate reverb recordings. The user experience working with Spaces is different than that of conventional reverbs, too. You don’t have anything to tweak, really; you just surf through the browser to find an impulse response that sounds good with the track you want, and you’re done. The Pre Delay and Filter settings are nice to have for special applications, but I barely used them at all in my tests, which basically consisted of matching various sound sources to Spaces and listening to the results. And drooling. Lots of drooling. Oh, man, does this plug-in sound good! Convolution reverb is popular for a reason—it’s fantastically realistic and evocative in a way that algorithmic reverbs generally aren’t, which is why the well-equipped studio has both. Walking through presets is like a trip around the world, dropping your tracks into spaces both heavenly and hellish, likely and unlikely. I could fill a page just listing all the possibilities, but I have room just for a few favorites: the Pasadena Taiko Hall, which was incredible on ethnic percussion; the gorgeous Hamburg Cathedral, incredible on choir and organ and orchestral recordings that want a bit of oomph; and of course the weird and wonderful Offbeat Locations folder, with locales like a concrete tank, a tunnel, a parking garage, and even Carlsbad Caverns. One other place in which Spaces excels—CPU load. Sitting at 9% load or less even with output latency cranked down to normally-dangerous levels, it beats pretty much every other reverb in my collection. The place where your computer will take a hit is in disk space; the program and all its impulse responses take up about 1 GB, vs. tens of MB for an algorithmic reverb—not a huge problem on today’s computers. The verdict? Quantum Leap Spaces isn’t cheap, and it’s no fun at all if you love tweaking reverb parameters just for the sake of tweaking them... but as an introduction to the beauty and clarity of convolution reverb for the nervous beginner or as a go-to convolution reverb for the discerning professional, it’s simply extraordinary.


http://www.soundsonline.com

Recording - September 2011

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

Recording - September 2011
Fade In
Talkback
Contents
Fast Forward
Surviving A Triple Music Computer Upgrade, 2011 Style
Zoom R8
Managing Large Sample Libraries
Universal Audio 4-710d
Plug-In Outlet
Reviewed And Revisited: Spectrasonics Omnisphere 1.5
iZotope Stutter Edit
Make Room For Your Music
Once Over—Reviews In Brief
Recording’sShowcase of Sound
It’s Your Music—Know Your Rights. Chapter 18: Digital Distribution Issues
Readers’ Tapes
Advertiser Index
Fade Out
Recording - September 2011 - Recording - September 2011
Recording - September 2011 - Cover2
Recording - September 2011 - 1
Recording - September 2011 - Fade In
Recording - September 2011 - 3
Recording - September 2011 - 4
Recording - September 2011 - 5
Recording - September 2011 - Contents
Recording - September 2011 - 7
Recording - September 2011 - Fast Forward
Recording - September 2011 - 9
Recording - September 2011 - 10
Recording - September 2011 - 11
Recording - September 2011 - Surviving A Triple Music Computer Upgrade, 2011 Style
Recording - September 2011 - 13
Recording - September 2011 - 14
Recording - September 2011 - 15
Recording - September 2011 - 16
Recording - September 2011 - 17
Recording - September 2011 - 18
Recording - September 2011 - 19
Recording - September 2011 - 20
Recording - September 2011 - 21
Recording - September 2011 - 22
Recording - September 2011 - 23
Recording - September 2011 - Zoom R8
Recording - September 2011 - 25
Recording - September 2011 - Managing Large Sample Libraries
Recording - September 2011 - 27
Recording - September 2011 - 28
Recording - September 2011 - 29
Recording - September 2011 - Universal Audio 4-710d
Recording - September 2011 - 31
Recording - September 2011 - 32
Recording - September 2011 - 33
Recording - September 2011 - Plug-In Outlet
Recording - September 2011 - 35
Recording - September 2011 - 36
Recording - September 2011 - 37
Recording - September 2011 - 38
Recording - September 2011 - 39
Recording - September 2011 - Reviewed And Revisited: Spectrasonics Omnisphere 1.5
Recording - September 2011 - 41
Recording - September 2011 - iZotope Stutter Edit
Recording - September 2011 - 43
Recording - September 2011 - Make Room For Your Music
Recording - September 2011 - 45
Recording - September 2011 - 46
Recording - September 2011 - 47
Recording - September 2011 - 48
Recording - September 2011 - 49
Recording - September 2011 - 50
Recording - September 2011 - 51
Recording - September 2011 - 52
Recording - September 2011 - 53
Recording - September 2011 - 54
Recording - September 2011 - 55
Recording - September 2011 - Once Over—Reviews In Brief
Recording - September 2011 - 57
Recording - September 2011 - Recording’sShowcase of Sound
Recording - September 2011 - 59
Recording - September 2011 - 60
Recording - September 2011 - 61
Recording - September 2011 - It’s Your Music—Know Your Rights. Chapter 18: Digital Distribution Issues
Recording - September 2011 - 63
Recording - September 2011 - Readers’ Tapes
Recording - September 2011 - Advertiser Index
Recording - September 2011 - 66
Recording - September 2011 - 67
Recording - September 2011 - 68
Recording - September 2011 - 69
Recording - September 2011 - 70
Recording - September 2011 - 71
Recording - September 2011 - Fade Out
Recording - September 2011 - Cover3
Recording - September 2011 - Cover4
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