DVR2 Digital Vintage Reverb

E N G L I S H

Congratulations with the purchase of your new Vintage Reverb plug-in for PowerCore. DVR2 offers a pristine Generic Reverb with true vintage flavor. Generic Reverb is com- plementary to Source Reverb, and both types are at disposal as optional plug-ins for PowerCore.

The term “Generic Reverb” is used to describe a flattering sustain effect, which can be added to many sources of a mix. It produces little character but also does no harm, because the effect is blurred or washed out. Instead, it adds a good sense of spacious- ness and more or less pronounced modulation.

Recreation of a Classic

The development of DVR2 has been a process extending several years, with the goal of recreating the most shining Generic Reverb of all times, the EMT250. A particularly well sounding machine was refurbished, and in the making of DVR2 many design dis- ciplines were involved...

Hardware technical: What was the precision of converters and how where they imple- mented in the eighties with emphasis, block scaling, linearity, filters etc? How much processing and RAM was available, what was the sample rate etc?

Software technical: Which kind of processing was done in discrete circuitry, what type of truncation and noise floor artifacts would result, how could the low sample rate be mimicked precisely, and how could all of this be transferred to a modern DSP plat- form.

Perceptual: Making sure the qualities of the original processor was preserved. Sweet modulation, spectral characteristics, spaciousness, distortion, saturation etc. Hundreds of hours spent listening and measuring.

User: The four basic parameters of the EMT250 were carefully laid out, offering a remarkably simple user interface with complex, yet optimized interactions under the hood. DVR2 is a resemblance of that including range and coarseness of parameters.

Better than the Classic?

While DVR2 in Normal mode is very close to the sound of a perfectly aligned 250, having used much DSP power to mimic artifacts of old hardware, the algorithm can also be put in a High Resolution mode. Using this function, the noise floor is much lower – but use your own ears to determine if this is actually a plus for a specific situ- ation.

Please note: Many of the constraints and criteria listed above produce non-linear audio behavior, making it impossible to obtain more than a static and crude result if trying to sample an original processor. A minute emulation does more justice to the original from an audio point of view, and can also still be adjusted.

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