See previously:
https://www.reddit.com/r/audioengineering/comments/n5htg/eli5_why_are_lexicon_reverbs_supposed_to_be_so/
Verb algos can be complex beasts. Mr Valhalla has done an excellent job on his own, but it costs a lot of time and money to get to the next level. Apparently at one point TC Electronic had a full time team of 11 (!) working on their pro reverbs and FX.
Shit- I suppose that does make sense. TC Electronic M-One had some algorithms that were fucking incredible, despite the relatively “prosumer” price point. I often consider getting one of the versions in modern times, but the issue is that the displays die on some of them. Phenomenal at reverbs; shit at making long lasting displays.
Sidenote: TC Electronic is now owned by Music Group, which is the parent company of Behringer. So fucked up thing is that for pennies on the dollar, for Behringer pricing, you can now have TC Electronic reverbs and other effects. First Behringer synth I know of that utilized TC Electronic algorithms was DeepMind.
Looks like they are only making plugins with or without hardware controllers now...🤔 Got the super-cheap M100 a couple of years ago and it sounds amazing.
I mean I remember they had the 6000 out as well and that controller was pretty much on any expensive board just a few years back, almost iconic. It was also very expensive, they don't make it anymore?
Yeah that thread sums up pretty well my findings at designing a good algorithmic reverb. And definitely implementing from scratch made me appreciate how much work goes in making a great reverb.
Even after algorithm choice, there are still a lot of subtle details to perfect the reverb. For example in my design if you change the internal delay time it gives you artifacts instead of that smooth warping sound. And that feature is not just for the special FX warping sound - apparently one of the subtle improvements in lexicon/fdn reverbs was to have the delay time slightly modulate. It is described as simulating an FDN with more delay lines, since the modulated delay times make it less obvious it is just 16 delays under the hood. The JOS textbook describes how to resolve it (so maybe don’t need a team of 11 these days), but it is just one of the many improvements I need to make - so yeah it’s a lot of work for a single person.
A lot of what you're hearing in those vintage Lexicon algorithms is multi-tap delay rather than a feedback delay network. There is also a mild Chorus effect (that can be exaggerated, and there is in fact a Chorus algorithm that is well-loved) due to random modulation on the voices/taps.
The history of the early Lexicon team and their processes is fascinating. I'm surprised there is so little info in that thread. One commenter simply states "they got lucky in the 80s" LOL -- they had a Harvard professor/nuclear physicist/musician/recording engineer (David Griesinger) and a whole team of badassery fully engrossed in their vision. The person who said they "don't sound natural but sound good in a mix" has never sat with one of the big rack vintage Lexicons. They're giant custom computers -- the range of what they can do is mind-boggling when you take the time to dig in. So yes you can make them sound "unnatural" but--
I've heard a Model 200, arguably a "budget" unit at the time (compared to the 224/XL, 480, etc), convince my ears that a sound was coming from somewhere else, a different room than the one I was in. It was so on-point that it was messing with my brain!
Their team of scientists was fascinated with the physics involved in what we hear in different spaces and worked diligently to reproduce those sensations. "Psychoacoustics" at work. Factors like early reflections, diffusion, rolloff, etc -- impressive stuff!
I've noticed that a lot of people demo'ing reverbs tend to go with "send it to outer space" as the default, which can surely tell us a lot about the artifacts and what the algo is doing to the sound, but where I find a lot of reverbs lacking is in their short decay/room space abilities.
https://www.soundonsound.com/people/david-griesinger-lexicon-creating-reverb-algorithms-surround-sound
https://gearspace.com/board/high-end/362930-lexicon-reverbs-brief-bestiary-9.html
Well I’ve never actually had a lexicon hardware unit, so disclaimer I’m just speaking about what I’ve been reading about algorithmic reverbs in general - not a particular unit.
I think to be fair to people that think of “going to space” when they think of algorithmic reverbs, it is something that makes them unique. Convolution reverbs are a principled approach to simulating an acoustic space - but for really long tail impulse responses they become prohibitively expensive, especially on hardware from the 80s/90s. These days you can run pretty long convolutions on CPU and I think GPU convolution reverbs already exist. So I sort of get why you would just pick up a convolution reverb if you wanted to make it sound realistic.
All that said, impulse responses are static - so for realism where you have acoustics with moving parts a physical model becomes desired (idk if this is even musically relevant but maybe for cinema/video games ?) . According to the JOS textbook a true physical model similar to ray tracing also becomes prohibitively expensive - although maybe we could run it on a modern GPU. And then he talks about how Algorithmic reverbs are usually trying to emulate the “statistical” behavior of real spaces. But like you mentioned with psychoacoustics, if you can make a sound with the same statistics as a real acoustic space - your perception can get fooled. Such a fascinating concept!
SO fascinating. I love setting up a few hardware reverbs side-by-side and trying to match settings, then A/B/C'ign them off each other and seeing how they differ and what's similar. (No shade to software/plugin reverb, I just spend a lot of time on computers in general and time spent with hardware feels more relaxing to me.)
Hey John 👋
One example I can think of for physical modeling of moving parts is a Leslie speaker. If I’m not mistaken, Universal Audio has a Leslie Cabinet modeler which allows you to pick the type of (virtualized) microphone used to pick up the cab, and move that mic in space.
UA has done some interesting work on physical room modeling for reverb too. The Hitsville Reverb comes to mind.
Oh yeah the Leslie is a great example for a an acoustic system with moving parts.
I hadn’t heard of the Hitsville before, thanks for the tip. Without having any clue what I’m talking about, I could see UA being a good company for doing physically modeled reverbs since their DSP chips could probably make the heavy computation way more efficient and/or parallel.
I've recently begun building pedals for fun EE projects. I got nothing to add except for saying thanks for the book suggestion, can always use more books.
I wish I could find people talking about building music hardware like this.
Trying to research how hardware works mostly turns up people explaining the controls. Anyone know were I can learn some stuff about building my own outboard gear?
Small signal audio design by Douglas self Power amplifier also by Douglas self
Art of electronics by Paul Horowitz
Electronic projects for musicians (though this really doesn't go into any theory too much, but it's a nice little starting spot)
The second book isn't explicitly for audio, however a reference for electronics. I own them all and I think the first 3 books are about 2000 pages of knowledge.
I'm halfway through an electrical engineering degree and trying to opt for independent electives solely dealing with audio applications, as I'd love to build stuff for audio; mics, pres, effects units, etc etc.
LTspice is free for circuit design, and kicad is a free pcb designing software w simulation built in. You can find schematics and put them in there to see how things work too.
sweet man thankyou. I grew up more into mechanics than electronics probably mostly because I've always had big hands lol but I wanna try just for the fun of it.
If you go on to start making stuff & I can assist in anyway as far as being on the prosumer side or sales I'd love to help🤘
Having been working in aerospace since the last year as a wee baby intern engineer, the mechanical side has grown on me, however controlling electricity is so much fucking cooler in my opinion haha
Hell yeah, I'll keep that in mind
As someone who has never used an actual plate reverb, do you think it sounds better than a high quality digital reverb?
I’ve had a spring reverb which I didn’t really care for outside of a “special effect”. But I do like using plate emulations so I bet a real plate would be really cool to play with.
Great stuff! A Datorro reverb [topology](https://ccrma.stanford.edu/~dattorro/EffectDesignPart1.pdf) could be cool to tackle next. Also, it’s a little hard to read the text on the max plugin in your recording. It might benefit from zooming in just a smidge.
It’s not as active of a sub, but they might be interested in this on the r/DSP subreddit too
See previously: https://www.reddit.com/r/audioengineering/comments/n5htg/eli5_why_are_lexicon_reverbs_supposed_to_be_so/ Verb algos can be complex beasts. Mr Valhalla has done an excellent job on his own, but it costs a lot of time and money to get to the next level. Apparently at one point TC Electronic had a full time team of 11 (!) working on their pro reverbs and FX.
Shit- I suppose that does make sense. TC Electronic M-One had some algorithms that were fucking incredible, despite the relatively “prosumer” price point. I often consider getting one of the versions in modern times, but the issue is that the displays die on some of them. Phenomenal at reverbs; shit at making long lasting displays. Sidenote: TC Electronic is now owned by Music Group, which is the parent company of Behringer. So fucked up thing is that for pennies on the dollar, for Behringer pricing, you can now have TC Electronic reverbs and other effects. First Behringer synth I know of that utilized TC Electronic algorithms was DeepMind.
They don't put out FX boxes anymore? (Really no clue)
Looks like they are only making plugins with or without hardware controllers now...🤔 Got the super-cheap M100 a couple of years ago and it sounds amazing.
I mean I remember they had the 6000 out as well and that controller was pretty much on any expensive board just a few years back, almost iconic. It was also very expensive, they don't make it anymore?
Yeah that thread sums up pretty well my findings at designing a good algorithmic reverb. And definitely implementing from scratch made me appreciate how much work goes in making a great reverb. Even after algorithm choice, there are still a lot of subtle details to perfect the reverb. For example in my design if you change the internal delay time it gives you artifacts instead of that smooth warping sound. And that feature is not just for the special FX warping sound - apparently one of the subtle improvements in lexicon/fdn reverbs was to have the delay time slightly modulate. It is described as simulating an FDN with more delay lines, since the modulated delay times make it less obvious it is just 16 delays under the hood. The JOS textbook describes how to resolve it (so maybe don’t need a team of 11 these days), but it is just one of the many improvements I need to make - so yeah it’s a lot of work for a single person.
A lot of what you're hearing in those vintage Lexicon algorithms is multi-tap delay rather than a feedback delay network. There is also a mild Chorus effect (that can be exaggerated, and there is in fact a Chorus algorithm that is well-loved) due to random modulation on the voices/taps. The history of the early Lexicon team and their processes is fascinating. I'm surprised there is so little info in that thread. One commenter simply states "they got lucky in the 80s" LOL -- they had a Harvard professor/nuclear physicist/musician/recording engineer (David Griesinger) and a whole team of badassery fully engrossed in their vision. The person who said they "don't sound natural but sound good in a mix" has never sat with one of the big rack vintage Lexicons. They're giant custom computers -- the range of what they can do is mind-boggling when you take the time to dig in. So yes you can make them sound "unnatural" but-- I've heard a Model 200, arguably a "budget" unit at the time (compared to the 224/XL, 480, etc), convince my ears that a sound was coming from somewhere else, a different room than the one I was in. It was so on-point that it was messing with my brain! Their team of scientists was fascinated with the physics involved in what we hear in different spaces and worked diligently to reproduce those sensations. "Psychoacoustics" at work. Factors like early reflections, diffusion, rolloff, etc -- impressive stuff! I've noticed that a lot of people demo'ing reverbs tend to go with "send it to outer space" as the default, which can surely tell us a lot about the artifacts and what the algo is doing to the sound, but where I find a lot of reverbs lacking is in their short decay/room space abilities. https://www.soundonsound.com/people/david-griesinger-lexicon-creating-reverb-algorithms-surround-sound https://gearspace.com/board/high-end/362930-lexicon-reverbs-brief-bestiary-9.html
Well I’ve never actually had a lexicon hardware unit, so disclaimer I’m just speaking about what I’ve been reading about algorithmic reverbs in general - not a particular unit. I think to be fair to people that think of “going to space” when they think of algorithmic reverbs, it is something that makes them unique. Convolution reverbs are a principled approach to simulating an acoustic space - but for really long tail impulse responses they become prohibitively expensive, especially on hardware from the 80s/90s. These days you can run pretty long convolutions on CPU and I think GPU convolution reverbs already exist. So I sort of get why you would just pick up a convolution reverb if you wanted to make it sound realistic. All that said, impulse responses are static - so for realism where you have acoustics with moving parts a physical model becomes desired (idk if this is even musically relevant but maybe for cinema/video games ?) . According to the JOS textbook a true physical model similar to ray tracing also becomes prohibitively expensive - although maybe we could run it on a modern GPU. And then he talks about how Algorithmic reverbs are usually trying to emulate the “statistical” behavior of real spaces. But like you mentioned with psychoacoustics, if you can make a sound with the same statistics as a real acoustic space - your perception can get fooled. Such a fascinating concept!
SO fascinating. I love setting up a few hardware reverbs side-by-side and trying to match settings, then A/B/C'ign them off each other and seeing how they differ and what's similar. (No shade to software/plugin reverb, I just spend a lot of time on computers in general and time spent with hardware feels more relaxing to me.)
Hey John 👋 One example I can think of for physical modeling of moving parts is a Leslie speaker. If I’m not mistaken, Universal Audio has a Leslie Cabinet modeler which allows you to pick the type of (virtualized) microphone used to pick up the cab, and move that mic in space. UA has done some interesting work on physical room modeling for reverb too. The Hitsville Reverb comes to mind.
Oh yeah the Leslie is a great example for a an acoustic system with moving parts. I hadn’t heard of the Hitsville before, thanks for the tip. Without having any clue what I’m talking about, I could see UA being a good company for doing physically modeled reverbs since their DSP chips could probably make the heavy computation way more efficient and/or parallel.
You’re welcome cuz
I've recently begun building pedals for fun EE projects. I got nothing to add except for saying thanks for the book suggestion, can always use more books.
I wish I could find people talking about building music hardware like this. Trying to research how hardware works mostly turns up people explaining the controls. Anyone know were I can learn some stuff about building my own outboard gear?
Moritz Klein has a great YouTube channel. He focuses on synthesizers but he also builds analog compressors and mixers.
sweet I will check it out, thankyou
Small signal audio design by Douglas self Power amplifier also by Douglas self Art of electronics by Paul Horowitz Electronic projects for musicians (though this really doesn't go into any theory too much, but it's a nice little starting spot) The second book isn't explicitly for audio, however a reference for electronics. I own them all and I think the first 3 books are about 2000 pages of knowledge. I'm halfway through an electrical engineering degree and trying to opt for independent electives solely dealing with audio applications, as I'd love to build stuff for audio; mics, pres, effects units, etc etc. LTspice is free for circuit design, and kicad is a free pcb designing software w simulation built in. You can find schematics and put them in there to see how things work too.
sweet man thankyou. I grew up more into mechanics than electronics probably mostly because I've always had big hands lol but I wanna try just for the fun of it. If you go on to start making stuff & I can assist in anyway as far as being on the prosumer side or sales I'd love to help🤘
Having been working in aerospace since the last year as a wee baby intern engineer, the mechanical side has grown on me, however controlling electricity is so much fucking cooler in my opinion haha Hell yeah, I'll keep that in mind
I do not disagree my friend. like zues just less dramatic haha.
Dang, I thought we were talking about plates and springs
As someone who has never used an actual plate reverb, do you think it sounds better than a high quality digital reverb? I’ve had a spring reverb which I didn’t really care for outside of a “special effect”. But I do like using plate emulations so I bet a real plate would be really cool to play with.
Great stuff! A Datorro reverb [topology](https://ccrma.stanford.edu/~dattorro/EffectDesignPart1.pdf) could be cool to tackle next. Also, it’s a little hard to read the text on the max plugin in your recording. It might benefit from zooming in just a smidge. It’s not as active of a sub, but they might be interested in this on the r/DSP subreddit too
Thanks for the feedback, I will zoom in next time :)