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Article from Electronics & Music Maker, September 1985 |
A special, report on budget digital reverb, with the spotlight focussed firmly on two groundbreaking new machines, the Yamaha REV7 and Roland SRV2000. Paul White and Simon Trask take up the story.
Digital reverb, for so long the sole preserve of the large multitrack studio, is now affordable, controllable and MIDI-compatible. We report on two trailblazing machines.
When Roland introduced programmable effect patches on their SDE3000 and SDE1000 digital delays in late 1983, it laid the ground for a new generation of signal processor that offered the musician and sound engineer a much greater degree of flexibility in the use of such effects. It stands to reason that if you can commit the details of a sound patch to memory, you're much more likely to use it in a creative and consistent way.
The obvious next step was to tie this newfound programmability in with MIDI, which is what Yamaha did with their D1500 DDL in the latter half of 1984. The 1500 allowed 16 user-programmable effects patches to be selected by MIDI patch-change codes over a MIDI channel selectable between 1 and 16. This form of remote switching is a real boon to keyboard players with MIDI-compatible synths, as it enables you to associate a musical sound with a particular delay effect. At the touch of a button, you can go from a piano with a single repeat echo to a flanged string sound to a choir sound with ADT.
Of all the sound-processing effects that digital technology has recently brought into the hands of the less-than-wealthy, reverberation is probably the most important. It's the treatment that's been around for longest, and the reason for that lies in the fact that it's the effect we encounter most frequently in the outside world.
For the uninitiated, reverberation is a phenomenon produced by multiple reflections of sound waves, and has a character that's determined by the environment in which the sound occurs. The direct signal is obviously the first to reach the listener (and is therefore also the strongest), but depending on the size and shape of the environment, there will be any number of subsequent reflections from the various surfaces which define that environment. It's the number and relative strengths of these reflections which give us a sense of spatial location and dimension, and add both intensity and quality to the initial sound.
The reflective ability of the surfaces involved obviously plays an important part in the reverberation effect, so surfaces such as thick carpets and curtains are good at absorbing sound and tend to create a 'dry' environment, whilst hard surfaces such as marble, stone or concrete are highly reflective, and can create richly reverberant sounds. It's possible to create an acoustic space with surfaces that are completely non-reflective (it's called an anechoic chamber), but if your home doesn't have one, every sound you play is in some way affected by what happens after it's passed through your amplification system.
But what happens if you don't want your music to sound as if it's being played in a living room? Well, you could consider investing in a device designed specifically to create artificial spatial environments. A reverberation unit is something that simulates, within reason, the characteristics of naturally occurring environments (plus some unnatural ones).
Hence the great importance musicians, engineers and producers have been attaching to good reverb for a generation or more. It doesn't matter if you have no other outboard effects at all in your studio - a good reverb unit will carry the thing off.
Until recently, sources of really good artificial reverb were both complex to use and expensive to buy, but thanks to the downward cost spiral in which digital technology currently finds itself, such sources have come within reach of the vast majority of musicians and sound engineers. The two machines under review here - the Yamaha REV7 and the Roland SRV2000 - are both ground-breakers when it comes to bringing digital reverb to a bigger, less affluent market than ever before.
Aside from being relatively inexpensive, they share MIDI patch selection facilities, a standard rack-mounting format, and quite a bit more besides. They also have more than the odd difference in spec and in operation, though, as we shall soon see.
In historic terms, the REV7 is a combination of the programmable reverb circuits that grace the company's REV1 professional unit (though suitably scaled-down - the REV1 is very expensive) and the MIDI interconnection facilities and affordable price of the D1500 delay line. As such, it breaks new ground for Yamaha as a manufacturer, and like the Roland unit, is further evidence that there is a rapidly increasing empathy between designers in the musical instrument and studio fields. The idea is that the REV7 (and machines like it) have a specification that would be more than acceptable to the sound engineer, while having the operational facilities to give the musician something that's genuinely accessible and creative in use.
Let's get the obvious over with first. The REV7 is a 2U-high, 19" rack-mounting unit, such as will fit alongside your 19" rackmounting washing machine and your 19" rackmounting microwave oven. Apparently, even the most practically-minded studio engineers appreciate good cosmetic design, and their clients certainly do, so with this in mind, the REV7 is off to a good start. Cast in a serious-looking black, gold and grey livery, the machine exudes style and looks as though it means business from the word go. The front panel plays host to a two-digit red LED readout showing the currently selected effect patch, and a backlit 2 X 16-character LCD which conveys the current program name and the various associated parameters.
To the left of the aforementioned LCD window is an eight-point input level LED meter, whilst beneath the window are a mono/stereo input switch, an input level selector, a rotary control for mixing the direct and reverb signals at the output stage, a three-band parametric equaliser, and an EQ on/off switch to go with it. The three EQ bands have overlapping frequency ranges which together cover an overall range of 50Hz-20kHz. They act on the reverb sound at the pre-reverb stage, but not on the direct sound. Rotary controls governing frequency and level adjustment are provided for each band, and as you might expect, the provision of an EQing facility such as this greatly enhances the degree of control you have over the sound produced - though it's worth noting that the EQ settings aren't programmable.
"The most important reverb characteristic is decay time, or the time the effect takes to decay beyond human hearing."
The right-hand half of the front panel is occupied by a mass of closely-positioned pushbutton pads which form four groups of controls. First off is a group of eight pads which allows single-press selection of the first seven preset effects, or (if the User Memory pad is switched in) the first seven user-programmed effects. The next group of controls includes increment and decrement pads which allow you to step through all 90 programs, whilst the third group is a numeric keypad which allows you to punch in your desired effect number.
You needn't confine yourself to the front panel, though, as the REV7's packaging gives you a hand-held remote control unit (complete with lengthy cable) which plugs into the rear of the machine and allows you to select the first seven preset and user effects with single button-presses (as on the front panel), and to step upwards through the remaining presets. Sadly, you can't use this facility to select the remaining user-programmed effects, so if you envisage using the remote control a lot, you'll have to put your most-used effects in positions 31-37, which is a nuisance. Neither can you control the EQ section or carry out any parameter editing remotely.
Moving neatly back to the front of the REV7 itself, remaining controls include pads dedicated to each of the seven user-programmable parameters (see later), a MIDI Control pad which gives access to MIDI channel and patch allocation, a Bypass control which cancels the reverb signal (this allows you to switch instantly between reverbed and 'dry' signals), an Out Phase pad which reverses the polarity of the right output of the reverb' signal, and a Mute control, which the manual claims cancels the entire output but in fact doesn't affect the direct signal when Bypass is on.
"The REV7 has 30 onboard effects and 60 user-programmable memories — a healthy number that puts it ahead of current competition."
The Early Reflection sounds feature the standard initial delay, first reflection and diffusion parameters, and also include liveliness, room size and mode. Liveliness refers to the rate at which the reflected sounds fade (a setting of zero simulates an acoustically 'dead' room), whilst room size determines the time gaps between the early reflections in a manner that's directly proportional to the size of the room (Yamaha have thoughtfully included a Room Size chart at the back of the REV7's user manual). Mode is a handy feature which provides six special cases of early reflection. These are respectively: small hall, large hall, random (an irregular series of reflections which couldn't occur naturally), plate and spring.
Delay type settings allow you to set an initial delay which can give a total possible delay of one second, first reflection delay and level, left and right channel delay times (from 0.1 to 900 msecs) and an overall delay level.
Parameters for Echo-type effects are very similar, with the addition of a feedback gain parameter (top setting gives a virtually infinite repeat) and what Yamaha endearingly call 'high dump', which allows you to reduce the high-frequency response of the echo effect to provide a more muted sound. Needless to say, this unit won't give you the flexibility of a dedicated echo device, but it's a useful addition to the arsenal of effects that the REV7 is capable of creating.
Finally, the Modulation-type effects all feature the initial delay and first reflection parameters already mentioned, with the addition of various LFO modulation parameters. Thus, the stereo flanging settings allow you to set the depth and frequency of modulation of the delay time, whilst the chorus effects allow you to set amplitude modulation depth, delay modulation depth and modulation frequency. Other modulation effects available are reverb flange, stereo phasing, tremolo (well, vibrato actually) and the enigmatically-named 'symphonic', which turns out to be a variation on the ADT/chorus theme.
When it comes to actually setting up a sound using this wondrous array of parameters and groups of parameters, you soon come to realise that this is a much more painless process than the size of said array might imply. If you have a reasonable knowledge of what reverb is about (though you won't find an introduction to the subject in the user manual, incidentally), and some idea of what you want to achieve 'pseudo-acoustically', selecting each parameter in turn and varying it turns out to be a straightforward three-step process that rapidly becomes second-nature.
It goes without saying that once your artificial ambience is the way you want it to be and you've saved it to memory, it remains there even when the REV7 is switched off. Unfortunately, you can't give each of your own reverb patches a name under which to save it, which, when you consider that there's plenty of space in the REV7's LCD for the display of a word or two, is a bit of a shame.
Much more serious, though, is the fact that the REV7 doesn't actually allow you to create reverb patches from scratch. This limitation is imposed by the way each type of effect has its own seven variable parameters, and what it means in practice is that all you can ever do is edit presets - not quite the open-ended programmability that mass of editable parameters promises at first sight.
If you're working on a Large Hall preset, for instance, you can muck about with decay time, initial delay, and the delay and level of the first reflection, among other things. But what you can't do is experiment with different patterns of initial reflections, or their liveliness or room size. This really is a bit of an imposition, and it's only partly offset by the fact that the presets themselves are both high in quality and varied in character, and by the way the plethora of editing permutations means you can change a preset sound beyond recognition.
But enough of this niggling. What you're all itching to know is: what does the REV7 sound like? On the whole, unbelievably good. Then again, a sampling frequency of 31.25kHz (the REV1 sampled at 44.1 kHz, but of such compromises are budget units made) giving a maximum bandwidth of 12kHz, and linear 16-bit quantisation, you'd expect the sound quality to be good.
Starting with the conventional Hall and Plate sounds, these are pleasantly smooth and natural-sounding, and the only disappointment is the fact that varying the diffusion parameter does surprisingly little to alter the overall sound. Even if you know what you're listening for, quite drastic changes in this version of diffusion can be almost imperceptible, which means you have to adjust it from one extreme of its range to another to derive any knowledge of its existence. Which, of course, renders all the settings in between more than a mite redundant...
The Early Reflections modes provide just that - without the main body of reverb. They're useful for simulating environments with relatively unobtrusive reverb characteristics (the average living room, say), or for giving a mono sound source some semblance of stereo depth. Both liveliness and room size are editable parameters in this field of operation, which gives a fair amount of flexibility, and makes it all the more difficult to understand why this facility is omitted from some of the REV7's more commonly used reverb treatments. The way things are structured at the moment, all your hall simulations have to be built up using the same set of initial reflections, and there's no way you can change their spacing or decay profile.
"As for EQ sections, you can actually create some excellent standard reverb effects without using them at all."
With the object of designing a thoroughly modern reverb unit, Yamaha have endowed the REV7 with the ability to create plenty of special effects in addition to more traditional ones. Thus, you'll find ample provision for the creation of reversed and gated reverb patches, both of which can be very convincing.
As for the DDL effects, these are all more than decent in their own right (though it's worth stressing that the REV7's delay section isn't nearly as comprehensive as many dedicated DDLs), and one patch in particular, flanged reverb, is very expensive-sounding and, in the right hands, surprisingly tasteful.
As for the EQ section, it's worth pointing out that you can create most standard reverb effects (and quite a few non-standard ones) without it. Thus it's not really too much of a handicap that the section's values aren't programmable, and in many cases, you'd be best off looking upon it as an extension of the EQ on the mixing desk.
And so to MIDI which, as we all know, is a lot more important than reverb sounds, and probably more important than music itself. The REV7 follows in the footsteps of the D1500 by allowing MIDI channel selection (all 16 channels and Omni) and assignment of any effect patch to any voice patch - the 90 effect patches may be assigned to any of voice patches 1-128. The existence of a MIDI Thru socket is certainly going to be a bonus for anyone who wants to incorporate the REV7 into a broader MIDI setup but lacks the requisite MIDI routing unit.
The patch-assignment facility is particularly useful. So much so, in fact, that it really should have been part of the MIDI spec from the beginning; it would certainly help if manufacturers were to implement a similar allocation system on synthesisers from now on. It's never going to be the answer to all your problems (you can assign the same receiving patch to any number of transmitting patches, but a transmitting patch can only have one receiving patch - for fairly obvious reasons unless you adopt an even more sophisticated system).
What Yamaha haven't included is the facility to disable patch changes, though you can minimise any problems this might cause by assigning all your voice patches to appropriate effect patches. The current (lack of a) system relies on users aligning the patches they wish to combine, but more often than not means people end up using certain combinations purely by chance, or else selecting patches manually on the slave instrument.
What's a real shame is that there's no way of saving any of your carefully-crafted patches or instrument-specific voice/effect allocations. Despite a healthy number of user-programmable memories and the above-mentioned patch allocation system, there are plenty of situations (particularly in a professional studio environment) where single and bulk patch dump facilities would be invaluable — notably for loading customised sets of effects. Even more valuable would be the ability to load a new set of voice/effect allocations tailored to a particular synth, or even tailored to a new set of voices for the same synth.
There's no earthly reason why effect patches shouldn't be given the same 'transportability' we take for granted with synth patches - after all, the requirements are basically the same.
Roland's offering is a neat rack-mounting package that can synthesise and store up to 32 different acoustic environments (rather less than the REV7), and can create contemporary gated or non-linear sounds in addition to the more conventional rooms, halls and plates. The memories can be accessed using MIDI patch-change information, increment/decrement footswitches, or the front panel controls.
Like the Yamaha, the SRV gives you a high degree of control over a number of different reverb parameters, including room size, initial reflection characteristics, reverb density and frequency content, to name but a few. More on those later, though.
"You have to bring the Roland's filters into play to curtail the high frequencies of virtually any treatment you set up."
Turning to the spec sheet, we find that the maximum reverb decay time is a massive 99 seconds (far, far longer than the same parameter on the Yamaha) and that this can be frozen to give infinite sustain (plus or minus 10%) by means of a footswitch. In this mode, the sound can be added to in real time, which means layered reverb effects are a very realistic possibility.
In terms of styling, Roland's designers have adopted a different - but by no means inferior - approach to making their machine look impressive. The SRV2000 has a typically Roland black anodised panel, and a really comprehensive numeric display. Looking more closely, we find that the first controls from the left of the panel are the bypass switch (complete with status LED) and the input gain control, the effects of which are monitored by a six-segment LED meter - much the same as on the SDE2500 DDL (see next month's E&MM for a review of this). The multi-function display is flanked by control buttons, the exact functions of which we'll be considering later, and the display itself comprises no less than six windows, all of which contain either two or three seven-segment LED numeric displays. Whether you prefer this approach to the all-embracing LCD window of the REV7 is a matter of personal taste; objectively, they both do their jobs admirably. Directly to the left of the display is a rocker switch that increments or decrements the memory number, while to the right of the display are five more similar switches, which control the parameter values displayed in the last five windows. All these controls work in the same way by stepping up or down through the parameter values, and pressing both sides of the switch increases the stepping rate.
Turning our attention to the back panel, we find MIDI Out and MIDI Thru connectors and a recessed reverb/direct knob, in addition to the more usual signal and footswitch connections. As is customary with reverb units (and like the REV7), this is a mono in, stereo out machine, and could therefore find use as a device for beefing up mono signals by spreading them across a stereo soundstage.
In the footswitch department, there are five sockets: two for preset up/down switches, two for delay in/out switches, and one to activate the aforementioned Infinite facility. No footswitches are included in the Roland's RRP, but they're very straightforward units, so if you haven't enough change to buy any, you could always make some.
Time to get more seriously into what the SRV2000 can achieve in practical reverb terms. Unlike the REV7, the Roland machine doesn't confine you to editing factory preset patches, since the design imposes no limitations regarding which parameters you can adjust within each type of effect. You start setting up a reverb sound by choosing one of the basic plate, room or hall settings, and then adjusting the parameters until you achieve your desired effect. Two plates, five halls and eight room simulations form the basis of all the effects, the rooms varying in size from a one-foot cube to a hundred-foot cube. Size in this context doesn't define the reverb time, but dictates the colouration and reverb density of the environment; the same is true of the halls and plates.
Decay time is adjustable from 0.5 seconds to 99 seconds though the choice of basic 'environment' does dictate the maximum decay time for a particular effect. You can add a pre-delay up to a maximum of 999mS (to create the illusion of distance between the sound source and the nearest wall), and there's also a rather sophisticated EQ section, which comprises two parametric stages and a shelving high pass filter. These are programmed via the increment keys, and the display when the unit is put into equaliser mode using, you've guessed it, the Equaliser button.
Of course, a real environment does not reflect all frequencies equally. Most man-made rooms tend to absorb high frequencies more readily than low ones (probably due to the recent fetish for flock wall paper), and it's for this reason that most electronic room simulators contain some form of high-frequency damping control. The SRV2000 lets you choose from 99 levels of HF damping, so you can create an emulation of just about any size of enclosed space - from the empty hold of an oil tanker to the inside of a sleeping bag (well, almost).
That's all very well, but what if you're after an unnatural acoustic environment? No problem: just press the non-linear button. The non-linear section allows you to gate any reverb effect that you may have previously set up; the maximum gate time is 450mS, which is more than adequate for any gated effect we've ever come across. Although gated reverb is generally used on drums, it can also yield interesting results when used on other sound sources such as electric guitar or synth.
It might seem that these controls are all you need to produce the reverb effect you've been dreaming about, but... there's more.
There's a further mode of operation imaginatively called 'Further mode', which lets you alter the very structure of time and space, or at least what passes for it inside this box. In essence, this mode lets you alter reverb density in ten stages, and this corresponds in real life to the number of reflections in any given space of time after the original sound - the higher the density, the more reflections there are. In the case of a real room, this parameter is affected by the shape of a room and the number and type of objects within it.
As for those crucial first reflections, the Roland lets you adjust them in one of two ways. First, the level of these reflections can be adjusted using the Attack Gain parameter, which gives a choice of nine levels. Second, you can adjust the attack time, again over nine levels.
"The greater the number of variable parameters you give people, the more horrendous noises they can create with them."
This too has its counterpart in real life. When you're at the front of a large room near to a sound source, the reverb density builds up quite quickly. But move towards the rear of the room, and the attack or onset of reverberation becomes noticeably slower. Although this might not appear to be all that significant, it's one of those things the brain picks up on in order to analyse an environment.
And as an additional bonus, the SRV2000 lets you change the density of these initial reflections without altering the density of the reverb that follows...
If you don't want to go to all the trouble of defining your hypothetical room from scratch, you can just select a room or hall program and then press the Room Simulator button. This calls up from memory a pre-programmed set of parameters which have been designed to create a reasonably realistic simulation of a typical room.
The use of 16-bit linear conversion circuitry and 28-bit parallel arithmetic processing means that, as with the REV7, sound quality is really very impressive. Quite simply, there's no perceptible distortion or noise - the dynamic range is a quoted 90dB.
The stereo output results in an illusion of great depth, and the sound seems to have considerable front to back perspective as well as panoramic spread. All the conventional reverb sounds are smooth and convincing, and for those cynics who think that a 10kHz bandwidth is not enough, it's worth saying that you need to bring the filters into play to curtail the high-frequency end of virtually every sound treatment you can set up, to avoid the output becoming unnaturally bright. This is partly due to the fact that real-life reverberation contains relatively little in the way of extremely high or extremely low frequencies, though it may also be that by the time you've worked in studios long enough to understand the advantages of an 18kHz bandwidth, your hearing will have deteriorated to the point where you can't appreciate it anyway.
Seriously though, the gated reverb sounds are as realistic (if that's a word you can apply to an effect that has no parallel in the real world) as the conventional settings. Imagine our disappointment, though, when we found that the SRV2000 doesn't follow the REV7 in offering a set plan for reverse reverb effects. Could we simulate the effect using the existing parameters? We wondered.
Well, after much button-poking, it transpired that a fair reverse envelope simulation could be set up by choosing a very fast decay time, and a long attack time and a high level on the initial reflections. This doesn't give you reverb before the sound actually takes place (you'll have to buy a Zlatna Panega anticipation sampler for that... see E&MM April), but it does add a reverse envelope to the reverb directly following a sound - and is especially effective when used on snare drums where a little pre-delay helps the illusion of acoustic space along.
But one particularly useful thing Roland have incorporated into this design is a facility for programming the reverb level as well as the other parameters, so you can set up reverb patches for a given mix or arrangement without having to worry about changing levels.
What Yamaha's designers have seen fit to build onto the REV7 in the way of MIDI facilities, Roland's people have also deemed worthy of fitting to their digital reverb. Thus, the SRV2000 can be addressed in MIDI Omni mode or can respond to any one of 16 designated MIDI channels, and the 32 reverb memories can be called up using MIDI patch-change information. In practice, of course, this means the SRV2000 can be programmed to operate in conjunction with a MIDI keyboard, such that each patch change calls up a reverb setting selected to complement the synth patch. One thing to watch in this context is that the reverb output is muted whenever a memory is changed, so don't expect one reverb effect to flow smoothly into the next without a break.
It's reckoned in some circles that the more variable parameters you give people, the greater the number of horrendous noises they can create with them. And in support of this theory, we found that with the incredible programming sophistication these two reverb units offer, it is indeed possible to generate some utterly hideous reverb and delay effects. If you want to make a drum kit sound like it's being played in a sardine tin (with the sardines still in it), one of these machines will fit the bill nicely.
Precisely which of these two you plump for is pretty much up to you. Without wishing to sound like a publicity handout, it's worth saying that each is an excellent machine in its own right, and a real advance for synth players and engineers alike.
The Roland has extra programmability in its favour. There's nothing worse than being presented with a whole load of variable parameters, only to discover that some of them are not accessible in certain modes. Yet this is exactly the problem the REV7 presents you with once you've been using it for an hour or two. The Roland, by contrast, gives you complete programming flexibility, as well as offering a set of 16 fine-sounding presets you can use as a basis for editing if you want to; you can even restore them to the machine's memory after you've erased them.
Yet the Yamaha scores over the SRV2000 in other areas. Its memory is significantly bigger, it has a useful DDL built in that makes it rather more than just a reverb unit, and it also sounds subjectively cleaner, if occasionally more noisy, than the Roland.
So, an even match between two extremely sophisticated machines, both of which should go a long way towards altering the way keyboard players view reverb effects, and the way recording engineers view musical sounds.
Yamaha REV7 £1199
More from Yamaha, (Contact Details)
Roland SRV2000 £1399
More from Roland UK, (Contact Details)
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Roland SRV2000 - Studio Test
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SRV-2000 - A Computer Reverb
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The Studio That Tom Built
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Yamaha REV7 - Digital Reverb
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Browse category: Studio/Rack FX > Yamaha
Browse category: Studio/Rack FX > Roland
All Revved Up
(HSR Mar 86)
Interior Designs - Yamaha REV5 Reverb
(SOS Nov 87)
Browse category: Studio/Rack FX > Yamaha
Gear in this article:
Studio/Rack FX > Yamaha > REV 7
Studio/Rack FX > Roland > SRV-2000 Digital Reverb
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Review by Paul White, Simon Trask
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