Do we need more reverb plugins? Wait. Zynaptiq ADAPTIVERB is something special. If the tag line, "harmonic tracking resynthesis" confuses you, don't worry. Think of it as a new frontier for reverbs!  
ADAPTIVERB adaptively, erm, reverberating—in Main mode.

Under The Hood  

Getting Around 

Adaptiverb in Fine-Tune mode.

Future Contours 

Adaptive Horizons 

Noah Pred is a Canadian record producer, sound designer, technologist, DJ, and Ableton Certified Trainer living in Berlin, Germany. Releasing dozens of records and touring extensively since the '90s, he currently teaches a wide variety of techniques for stage and studio at the BIMM Institute. For more information, please visit: http://... Read More

Discussion

zynaptiq
Hey there! Thank you for the great review.

I'd like to add some comments and factual corrections, though:

1) Low output level – I'd guess you were feeding drums or another type of transient-heavy or "short impulses" type signal into a setting that featured 100% mix of the SUSTAIN synth. In this case, output levels will be lower because the SUSTAIN synth actively gets rid of transients and short events – for a clean, harmonic tail. If feeding pitched, somewhat sustained sounds into the SUSTAIN, you will note regular output levels. There's more info on this in the manual. Also, for processing drums, please feed them into the REVERB section directly my reducing REVERB SOURCE (which blends between the input and the SUSTAIN's output at the input of the REVERB section). This will bypass the transient filtering effect and give "regular" reverb behavior.

2) The FREEZE function freezes the audio before the reverb, rather than simply recycling the contents of the reverb infinitely. This way, it becomes possible to recall the frozen sound from a preset, turning the plugin into a synthesizer, and all the synthesis/reverb controls will stay active. Basically, it is not an INFINITE REVERB button, but a FREEZE button – hence the naming. I can see how if you are expecting an INFINITE button you might find FREEZE counter-intuitive, but that's really an apples-to-oranges comparison IMHO. There's actually even two freezers, one for the SUSTAIN section, and one for the "direct to reverb" path, which differ slightly in content captured and sound, which you can blende between using REVERB SOURCE.

3) CPU load. Yes, the plugin is hungry. But of your machine is within the minimum system requirements spec, you should not get any "sputtering". As recommended in the manual, there are various strategies for managing CPU load: use buffer sizes of 512-1024 samples, use ALLPASS mode instead of RAY TRACE, switch of the HCF. Also, SIMPLIFY can add noticeable CPU load, setting it to zero switches it off. Some hosts will schedule all plugins down-stream of a live input on one core/thread, overloading that while others are idling – in that case you can try moving plugins/routing around to lower the load.

4) Latency. If latency is a concern, there is a LIVE mode, which switches the reported latency to zero and bypasses the internal dry delay. As result, you get zero latency for the dry path, while the reverb tail will then be late – which, considering that "large" tails usually come with pre-delay anyway, is quite often not an issue in practice.

Kind regards,
Denis
Jay Asher
Good article, but i disagree with the conclusion"it’s unlikely a safe bet for much other than offline sound design processes."

However, Denis already made the points I was going to make.

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