Audioease Altiverb 6

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 bonus for Pro Tools HD users looking to maximize every available CPU resource. If you use an HD rig, how many DSP chips do you have to throw at Altiverb? It depends on the reverb time. Up to 2.1 seconds of mono-to-stereo reverb ties up a single chip, using two chips goes up to 4.3 seconds. What about native mode for the rest of us who don’t have a Pro Tools HD system? On my quad-processor G5 with 6GB of RAM, I ran 24 stereo instances without a hitch. In other words, my “aging” legacy G5 is able to crank out more instances using native processing than I’ll ever need in any production.

On the copy protection front, you have the choice of either authorizing the plug-in to an iLok or using a challenge/response code, so you’re not forced to purchase an iLok. This is a thoughtful option that I wish other developers would adopt.

IN USE

Altiverb’s graphic interface is easy to operate. New in version 6, the Impulse Response popup menu has been replaced by a proper browser, which makes it easier to navigate among the expansive number of included IRs. What’s more, there’s a fair amount of eye candy that’s genuinely useful, not just flashy. For example, for each IR, you can view a diagram of the recorded space, and see where microphones were placed in relation to the room. I appreciate this information being conveyed through an image, because it’s easier to grok at a glance. Distances are also written out numerically.

For auditioning presets, a number of test sounds are built into the plug-in and can be triggered via mouse or computer keyboard. The sounds include percussion one-shots (snare, kick, mallet, etc.) along with vocal and solo/ensemble instrument phrases. When I’m tweaking reverb parameters, using these is much faster than continually starting and stopping my sequencer. 

Arguably, the value of any convolution reverb largely depends on the quality of its impulse responses, and in this area Altiverb scores high marks. The number and quality of included IRs is impressive, ranging from interior spaces and outdoor locations for post-production mixing to small churches, huge cathedrals, live rooms from famous recording studios, and a choice selection of rare and highly coveted hardware ’verbs, with graphic representations. There’s even a funky set of “crap reverbs” sampled by former Guitar Player editor in chief, Joe Gore, accompanied by pictures of the gear he sampled. Additionally, Audioease has a growing library of freely downloadable IRs, many of which were created in-house, with others contributed by users. In fact, as we were going to press, a set of IRs from Hollywood’s famous Todd AO scoring stage was added to the collection. Nice!

My only wish is that there were more samples from high-end hardware reverbs, specifically the Lexicon 960. Fortunately, there are commercial IR libraries that cover this territory. I’d still love to see AudioEase step up to the plate with their own samples, but their official policy is not to emulate hardware that’s still in production — a prudent choice.

Sonically, Altiverb offers the best sounding sampled acoustic spaces I’ve heard from any convolution reverb. Hats off to the recording engineers at AudioEase. The recording quality is exceptional, and because many IRs were captured with omni and cardioid microphones at various room locations, I can usually find the kind of sound I’m looking for without having to tweak.

Speaking of tweaking, the IRs are surprisingly programmable, given that we’re dealing with sampled audio. For tonal shaping, low-, mid-, and high-frequency damping is available, along with a four-band EQ that only affects the reverb, not the dry signal (see Figure 1 above). Decay time is adjustable, as is room size. More significantly, you can adjust the early reflections and reverb tail separately, but what blows me away is the Stage Position parameter, which lets you put the source audio in a specific position on the “stage” of the sampled room in a convincing way (see Figure 2 above). Sure, there are other plug-ins that offer this kind of control, but to my ears, Altiverb does it best.

On a related note, it’s become commonplace for composers who frequently produce orchestral mockups to use this positioning feature to simulate believable seating arrangements for each instrument section. There’s an informative article about this on Audioease’s website.

CONCLUSIONS

Altiverb isn’t cheap, but it’s a classic case of getting what you pay for. Its strength is in the quality and variety of its sampled acoustic spaces, which are uniformly top-notch. If you’re looking for the most realistic reverb, Altiverb has it in spades. That said, I wouldn’t necessarily recommend for, say, pop productions because in many commercial mixes, synthesized reverb (e.g., rich plates and room simulations with added chorus and delay) is still generally preferred. But for composers who produce orchestral mockups or anyone hoping to create a convincing sense of acoustic space, Altiverb is the first choice.

CLAIM CHECK

According to AudioEase, their goal with Altiverb is simply “to bring the best sounding existing real spaces to the desktop, in a tweakable way.” Compared to version 5, Altiverb 6 and 6 XL offer a number of improvements, which AudioEase are keen to point out: “The biggest thing we did was add full Pro Tools TDM support. It took us a year to work around the current three-second limitation on HD hardware. Our main TDM competition, TL Space, can’t go past three seconds of reverb. We can go up to 25. And we wanted to output stereo reverb from a single TDM chip, which Altiverb does — TL Space requires two chips.

“But we also added features from which all users will benefit. We upped the number of automation snapshots from 10 to 40. We also added the IR browser. Previously we had a popup menu, but the list of impulse responses grew too big when we expanded our library for version 6. Ultimately, we feel that no other competing convolution reverb can match the number of plug-in formats, tweakability, and most of all, the sampled spaces that Altiverb provides.”