Recording - December 2014 - 19

With 50 seconds of totally smooth reverb time, this is one
of the spaciest reverbs I have heard "in the box" in a long
time. This reverb can run the gamut from small and plate-ish
to big sizzling caverns with just a few tweaks, and it almost
always sounds great.

At $200, Sparkverb is right in the middle of the plug-in price realm.
It's totally worth the price if you are after an infinitely tweakable and
unique reverb that offers stunning sound for your next project.-PV

Sonnet Technologies Echo Express SE II
Thunderbolt 2 Chassis and Tempo SSD
$499 and $149; www.sonnettech.com

What Sparkverb is not is a convolution reverb, seeking to
trick the ear into thinking you recorded in an actual 1400s
stone chapel, nor is it a spec-for-spec model of a vintage
EMT, PCM, REV, or the like. This is a true algorithmic reverb
that stands on its own; it pays homage to the great boxes of
the late 1980s and early 1990s, not by aping their sound,
but more by emulating how they functioned and interacted
with their users.
Sparkverb does take some CPU oomph, but is still
respectably thrifty compared to many other plug-ins. One
instance with a 20 second tail tickled about 1/8 of my CPU
usage meter in Cubase on my quad-core iMac, so you can
easily run more than one in a session, but it will add up if
you go crazy with multiple instances.

Technology morphs and changes at an alarming rate, especially
when it comes to computers. Setting aside all the proprietary
cabling protocols of recent years, the remaining standards are still
evolving. USB is now in its third incarnation, FireWire has doubled
from 400 to 800 and then gone... and the latest and greatest is
now Thunderbolt, which is already at version 2. Internal peripheral
add-on cards have gone from PCI to PCIe with every possible connection and function available; while PCIe still has a healthy
foothold in the PC world, in the Mac realm it has now ceased to
ship with current computers since the launch of the latest Mac Pro.
While many of us love having the latest and greatest Macs at our
fingertips, most of us would rather not upgrade and/or give up many
of our PCIe based conveniences, especially audio interface cards and
DSP accelerators such as those offered by Universal Audio. This is
where Sonnet Technologies, maker of all manner of computer expansion and upgrade systems, comes in. Sonnet offers a lineup of 1- to 3slot PCIe expansion chassis that connect to any Mac (Air, MacBook
Pro, iMac, mini, and Pro) via Thunderbolt and Thunderbolt 2.
I just switched my studio's platform from PC to a pimped out iMac
and needed to find a home for my pair of PCIe cards, a Universal
Audio UAD-2 OCTO Card and a Lynx AES16e running to my Aurora
16 converter. The solution was Sonnet's Echo Express SE II Chassis. The
SE II is the 2-slot model in the Echo Express line; at 6.5 x 11 x 4.6",

http://www.sonnettech.com http://www.dynaudioprofessional.com http://www.dynaudioprofessional.com

Recording - December 2014

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