suphuckers said:
T
While I was checking that thing out I think I figured out part of what bugs me on some of this reverb stuff though.
Natural sounds loose energy as they get closer to you. At the same time they get louder because they are getting closer. It's a balance. By the time they hit your ears (depending on the room) they have lost a lot of energy. It makes the sound waves pretty pleasant (depending on the content, but either way certainly compared to the original source, but this is whats so cool about this particular effect) Right at the moment it hits your ear drums, there should be a swell due to you actually being inside the sound wave. Most reverbs are not doing a very good job of simulating this. It (I'm sure) has to do with the speaker being so close to your ears, (..and I'm not a sound engineer) but it seems to me, they should be able to do something with the wave form to make it look more like it has some age on it.
Most reverb sounds more like delay to me than reverb. ...and yes I know reverb and delay have a lot in common. If they were the same then we wouldn't have both though LoL.
The larger the room the longer it should take the sound to travel back to your ears. The amount of energy loss compared to the delay time in a lot of these effects doesn't seem to be accurate to my ears. I think this is what I'm hearing.
So that should more clearly explain the "corner effect", and what makes it seem to me as if the timings are off.
..but maybe people just set them up wrong. Maybe if you get some time and desire, you can mess around with some of that gear and see if you hear what I'm talking about Marco. Maybe you can adjust some of that out on that Eventide gear. It costs too much for me to buy it (to test it) considering I hear it every time I listen to it.
I think you're describing what you hear well. Reverbs are probably the most complex of effects to design for many of the observations you mention.
If you get into the deep editing on the Eclipse, you see that the reverb algorithm is a series of short delays cascading (16 of them if I recall) into one another (that's also the basis of diffusion). The delay times start very short; maybe around 25 to 35 ms and incrementally get longer. If you start too short, it sounds metallic and if you end to long, it borders on slapback.
The pre-delay is critical for realism because natural reverb doesn't reach your ear until it goes from the origin to a wall and back (pre-delay) and past you and to the wall behind the source and this bouncing continues until the sound runs out of energy. This is what the cascading delays replicate. Add to that equation, room modes, resonant frequencies, nulls and peaks and quickly you see that there is no one perfect way to create reverb.
One thing about many of the Eventide presets is they tend to show off the envelope filtering and modulation of various parameters. I have a feeling, that's what you're not liking about some of what you heard. Personally, I've tried to tweak some of the reverb algorithms and it's real easy to eff it all up and really takes making small changes and listening to the results and how it impacts the source material being fed into it.
The classic Lexicons have a dedicated chip just for the reverb and other chips for everything else they do. They also allow some very powerful and complex internal routing options for feedback loops and have the potential of creating massive oscillation that can blow your speakers if you're not careful! Wild stuff! I think it could take years to wrap one's head around all the possibilities in a PCM80/81.
The modern boxes take some of the amazing creations that came out of the old racks and turn them into a setting on a rotary switch and then give you the most basic parameters to tweak; mix, depth, speed, size, etc. Very convenient and easy to find a good sound but pale in comparison to the massive amount of adjustable parameters in the original racks. It's easy to see why the paradigm shifted, too much power is dangerous in the wrong hands! Or in other words, it's really easy to make those great old racks sound like sh!t if you don't know what you're doing!
