Listening already is soo subjective. For example my wife is a painter. She can show one of her paintings to any number of people and they’ll see the same things in there. Play the same track to different people and they all hear it differently.
It can even sound different to the same person the next day.
Also audio vanishes like vapour in our brains whereas we can remember and manipulate visuals in so many ways.
Pretty crazy when you think about it. Maybe that’s what makes it so special. Idk.
Which is why there’s gated reverb.
Simple rule, if your reverb forces you to eat 2 minute noodles for a year, you’ll convince yourself it’s the best sounding reverb.
I don’t see the problem! Both are great!
A bit like the test where an electric device (shaver perhaps?) was identical but one was weighted down with a piece of lead. People unanimously perceived the heavier one as ‘better build quality’.
It is great, but i can get close with Fog convolver , it has the OTO impulse response, and i dont have to eat noodels all day long.
Careful with the … feedback amount, knowmsayin?
Yeah, that stuff. In cases of instruments/sounds, it’s more like the brand name and/or price alone is enough to make people immediately associate it with quality.
It’s a very interesting topic and specifically with sound, if you present people just the sound itself in a randomized ABX test (you compare to two sounds A and B and sound X is randomly chosen from A and B and you determine if X is sound A or sound B) it suddenly becomes hard to make definitive judgements whereas if you hear the sound coming from a synth in front of you, it’s easy to attribute certain qualities to it like “this square wave has more weight” and stuff like that.
Two of my favorite examples of reverb/delay in pop music combined artificial and “natural” reverbs to accomplish their sound:
Joy Division, Unknown Pleasures
(AMS DMX Digital Delay; Marshall Time Modulator; Melos Echo Chamber; Auratone monitor perched on toilet, picked up by a mic on other side of bathroom)
The Walkmen, Everyone Who Pretended to Like Me is Gone
(Boss Space Echo; EMT plate reverb; AKG BX10 spring reverb; recording takes in the loading dock of an old car factory)
I’m a big fan of Duane Eddy’s 2,000-gallon reverb tank. Bought from a junkyard for a few hundred bucks, so still cheaper than a Strymon pedal.
Reverb is an incredibly complex topic. There are people who have made entire careers on reverb alone. Reverb can also be very computationally intensive. On a modern computer, you have a ton more computational resources than on standalone hardware. Because of that combination of factors, it is very very difficult to make a device that does a ton of things at once, and has very good reverb. Also most reverb algorithms are trade secrets of the companies who developed them, there are only a few that can be easily copied. The most prevalent is probably the Dattorro reverb which is based on the old Lexicon reverb. Sean Costello of Valhalla has also published some reverb papers that have been used by a fair number of people as well.
Also, nerds gonna nerd out!
Fascinating. Seems like I oversimplified things in that case. Everybody’s obsessed about reverb it seems 
They’re not that hard to program. A reverb is basically (though not always) a bunch of delays with a feedback function. But it’s hard to do well, because there’s a tradeoff between an efficient algorithm that doesn’t use too much CPU and sonics giveaways that make it sound like a fake version of how sound echoes around a real space. That could mean wrong-sounding peaks at certain frequencies that give it a metallic quality, or too much feedback modulation that causes it end up sounding hissy and noisy instead of like how a sound dies away naturally.
We’re a small subset of opinionated types, many musicians don’t write or modify their own patches, or do any of the production themselves!
I mean, all the knowledge that builds to writing an efficient algorithm, especially on embedded platforms… even adapting the common research papers is too much for most, which is why I’d mentioned that many guitar pedal vendors just implement the stock reverb algorithm with no modifications!
Even badly implemented algos require domain knowledge that most persons are not going to seek out, and knowledge of the stricter constraints of their platform.
I remember thinking, even in 1979, that Martin Hannett was using full wet FX (I didn’t know the name for it), for example on the vocals in the original album version of “She’s Lost Control”. I don’t think I had heard anything like that before (or, more likely, noticed).
I don’t think anyone had heard anything like that before! The man was a visionary (“audionary”?). And also a psychopath.
But it seems like psychopathy and genius for reverb sort of go hand in hand… Off the top of my head I can think of Phil Spector, Brian Wilson, Martin Hannett, Joe Meek…
Edit: @Microtribe is right; Brian Wilson is not a psychopath, and doesn’t deserve to get lumped in with the likes of Phil Spector.
the deal with reverb is, that you mathematically approximate something, that tends to be chaotic in one way or another.
you have to simulate reflections and according interference patterns, acoustically more or less hard surfaces and their own diffuse, frequency dependant reflection properties…or in all shortness: it is not possible to mirror reality, its only possible to approximate. and as in every discipline, there are people that tend to know what theyre doing…and a lot of people that dont.
the most “accurate” is probably the convolution reverb approach as its pretty much just the impulse response/cumulative spectral decay of a real place that is superimosed over whatever signal you feed it.
Brian Wilson was not a psychopath.
He had Schizoaffective disorder. Very different thing.
