A Reverb Acoustic Treatment Discussion

In last week’s Google Hangout I was asked how to apply artificial reverb in a mix and how to use such a plugin to mimic a great sounding room. Alright well what the guy who posed the question was trying to accomplish is what companies do to create different sound stage. They sample a particular sound quality in the analog domain and then they recreate it in the digital domain through sampling and measurement, rate and all those good things.

So what he wants to do is take analog sound, a particular room sound and convert, it into an electronic digital device and sure you could do that. There are all kinds of companies out there that do things like that. Your home theater receivers will have different hall sounds if you will but the manufacture has gone to four or five really nice concert halls throughout the world, taken some acoustical measurements in and then translated those measurements into some kind of software.

Well it’s a big leap to do something like that. You have to take that data and play it to speakers in another room that’s not even close to the size of the hall. So that’s why this stuff doesn’t really sound that good unless your room is of a size that has a fighting chance to reproduce what’s encoded in the digital data. So I’m sure it can be done and you guys that are always using electronics to create music and sounds, probably the more things you have to work with the better for you. So cool project.

It would be a cool thing to try and do but way beyond the scope of anything I would attempt electronically. I have trouble operating my cell phone! I’m an analog acoustician.

I’m a guy that likes to build it, test it and then tell people about it because that’s really the only way. Build it, test it and then tell. What is it? B.T.T, build, test and tell and that’s what we’ve been doing for people in the acoustical field and it’s great because then people get a chance to see some actual technologies that have been used and tested.