Spatializer by quantovox - Released

Gravitas

@McD said:

@oat_phipps said:

It's customary to let the dev or creative reply themselves.

Sure. The question hangs in the air on a thread where the developer has been engaged.
I'd expect there to be no answer.

As you asserted yourself as spokesperson?

With the best of intentions to take a bit of pressure off the developer and
maintain an open dialogue.

Cool.
Sorry, I took it the wrong way.

For me a question about future plans with a developer
in in the same category as asking a co-worker about their salary.

Okay, I can see what you're saying.

I can understand why
you'd like to know... but I respect that fact the the best answer is probably silence.

I hear you.

I was offended hence my reply.

You'd likely be offended if there's no reply from the developer too which is why I tend to
assert myself and sometimes a developer will let me know they appreciate not documenting a future because it's often done in haste and results in the kind of attacks
we see for Matt mentioning audio tracks and never getting to a finished implementation.

I'm guilty of this to be fair.
The latter rather than the former as you well know.
I know I still have to finish that track.
I'm back in Auria Pro land for awhile so I can call it up.

I don't actually even need to explain myself to you
I'm doing so out of courtesy.

I'm still preaching to the choir and you're take is understandable but I can deal with the
negative feedback because I've seen too many cases where developers carry the weight of
missed expectations.

I can empathise with this.
Cool.

As a creative I have been asked many times over
throughout the course of my career what plans do I have?

Of course, reporters and customers always want disclosure on the future.

Whether those plans happen or not?
It's nice to discuss the future rather than sitting there waiting to be fed.

It's nice for the customer or journalist but a bear trap for a developer, IMHO unless
the feature is past the testing phase. Shit happens. Plan on it.

Agreed.
There's no better plan than having a ,"Z Plan".
Must include toilet paper just in case.

Also furthermore I do have a good lawyer, actually two.
We quite often have discussions about the future
and they make sure I get it down on paper or more.

Wow. Did you just switch to having a lawyer for holding a creative accountable for
deliverables? or are you using a lawyer to assure that the future is covered by suitable
caveats?

When decipher these two questions?
I shall know the true meaning of Life....

What I shall do is this instead...

One specialises in the Music Business and the other has a background in Criminal Law.
There are cross over points.

Technically they are not mine.
I sometimes use the possessive rather than the ,
'We are working together for a better future'.

How many developers post their plans here? If they did, how did it work out?

I haven't noticed.

Probably hasn't happened often. @Michael did it because he thought "Uber Loopy" was
a month or 2 away from being fully baked. Oops. Matt disclosed his roadmap. Double oops.

No way....
Oops.

Agreed. It’s surprising, flattering and enjoyable when people ask me what kind of songs I’ve been making lately. It gives me an indirect way of talking about myself without feeling egotistical. People actually interested in listening doesn’t happen very often.

Hardly the same relationship between creative and consumer. Most of us can't give away our songs let alone sell them. I don't think that's really a reflection on the music by the way but more a function of the difficulty in marketing music as a product in the age streaming.

Agreed to a certain point.
Some have made the decision not to share.

Obviously a dev (or any other person in general) may not want to spend the time on the forum chitchatting instead of using it as a “tool” for quick technical feedback. But it don’t hurt to ask.

It doesn't hurt the asker... I'm contending that is not the best idea for the dev. I've seen some well meaning dev's and product managers that try to use this forum for capturing
input from potential customers and disappeared into the night thinking "I won't try that again."

So that's the reason why???
As it's been tried and tested, that's a good heads up for the future.
Simply hit and run.

The Forum's "third rail" topics are:
subscription-based pricing

Get's on my nerves so I don't bother getting involved in the discussions though
I can see the value in it for both the consumer and the producers of such content.
For me? It's like paying rent for something I do myself everyday.

re-branding Desktop software as IOS cripple-ware gateways to the desktop cash cow
and free apps that need a large bundle of IAP's to be useful

Yeah.

TL; but you made it too here... it's a slow news day.

Very accurate.
Apparently the Olympics is on.
Tokyo I do believe.

This is a very well made app... keeping on page one is a service to the developer to get out the word.

Agreed.
The moment it landed it went in on a mix.
It's staying in the mix.

McD

The @quantovox web site has a product page with 6 categories and 3 of them are currently empty and 1 of them mentions "Project X". So, much for a roadmap:

https://forum.audiob.us/uploads/editor/zy/vemmjevl0mjn.png

Gravitas

@McD said:
The @quantovox web site has a product page where 4 of the categories are currently empty and 1 of them mentions "Project X". So, much for a roadmap:

https://forum.audiob.us/uploads/editor/zy/vemmjevl0mjn.png

That's one way of putting.

I like that...

Intriguing...

McD

The @quantovox "Poles and Zeros" app was announced on their Facebook page in 2015.

https://forum.audiob.us/uploads/editor/uc/9njinhwcrr7a.png

As a company they look like a custom programming house that sells DSP code and consulting. They are probably very good at the math of DSP much like the DDMF developer is in his day job a physics modeling specialist.

McD

@quantovox explains the apps use case:

"Spatializer is a great choice for stereo widening when you need to keep the Mid channel (or mono mix) perfectly intact."

>

Would it make sense to also ship an app that creates Acoustic Spaces that impact the mono mix?

I suspect I just bought (yet another) reverb... and I'm OK with that if it leads me to
mixes that have better clarity while still sounding epic and grand. In fact, sounding huge but maintaining a crisp core from the input signal is worth a lot to me. I don't begrudge these folks $7 for the education by example. The presets are all worth studying.

We have the most open dialogue with the developer(s) at @Blue_Mangoo and it would be great to learn more about DSP from this new dev team. @Blue_Mangoo creates instructional videos and offers new products in open "betas" using TestFlight links.

quantovox

@gusgranite said:

@quantovox said:
We had previously been heavily involved with a comparatively large effort for creating a realtime resampling engine for iOS, and it's a very tricky area in terms of balancing delays, aliasing, and computational requirements.

Did it ever see the light of day?

The product reached release candidate stage, but had requirement changes which necessitated a larger re-examination including the question whether aliasing from even a high-quality realtime resampler still fits the product vision and marketing goals of a true desktop-class professional plugin, or there are alternatives available even at the cost of significant re-engineering.

(Note: I edited this response since it concerns design & development efforts for a product yet to be released, that can still head into many possible directions in the future. I was happy to share this story (giving a glimpse into what can go on in audio software development) in the original context, so I left the original answer up for a day, but would like to avoid having it cached for posterity. Thanks.)

Gravitas

@McD said:
The @quantovox "Poles and Zeros" app was announced on their Facebook page in 2015.

The quality shows in the craft.

As a company they look like a custom programming house that sells DSP code and consulting. They are probably very good at the math of DSP much like the DDMF developer is in his day job a physics modeling specialist.

Sounds really, really cool.

In regards to the app itself?

What's amazing is that it disappears in the mix.
I can't hear it.
I can hear what it does.

McD

Sound test drive example.

This file cycles through 10 second intervals of:

0-10, 30-40, 1:00-10 NO FX Applied.
10-20, 40-50, 1:10-20 Spatializer Applied.
20-30, 50-60, 1:20-30 Wider Applied.

The first 30 seconds are not helpful because of the arrangement of the source material.
But those that follow show clear differences.

quantovox

@Gravitas said:
@quantovox

Out of curiosity, what other effects do you have lined up for the future?

I can share that we're reverb specialists, and working on products that we believe are clear standouts from the competition. Our iOS reverb prototype has an incomparably better spectral flatness than a $20 popular competing product (that's not to say that that's the best product out there), while also delivering a physically more accurate model than all existing high-flatness reverb implementations that we're aware of.

It is our main focus, but right now we've started looking at smaller projects to get us introduced and established in this field and provide funding for our ongoing research-heavy or otherwise prolonged projects (that have the potential to be sped up).

We also have a unique system partially developed for creating synthetic impulse responses that unfortunately runs on extremely costly hardware. We mainly focused on creating infrastructure to reproduce boring real-world interior architectures (maybe with a slight twist) but originally designed concepts for a system to model spaces that couldn't exist in the real world (yet would deliver meaningful sonic performance, so don't imagine something stupidly wacky like a 1km long hall), but that project has extremely hard technical challenges, although we don't consider them unsolvable. We may or may not create an accompanying application (as opposed to selling IR libraries only). Of course a key feature here would be free placement of sound sources and possibly microphones, without any cheating or trickery.
These systems could be trivially adapted (we conducted some acoustic tests in fact) to explore various experimental augmentations to modeled plate reverbs by the way - although us being somewhat obsessed with acoustic quality are not the biggest fans of real-world plate reverbs, but we're not here to judge.

We also dabble in various approaches to sound synthesis that we believe to be unique. As it happens, we actually have a kind of a curious hammered/plucked-string instrument VST prototype that can create a kind of hybrid acoustic-electric piano sound, and may have the potential of becoming something totally not boring

So yeah... a lot of stuff going on, and things are starting to gain momentum.

Gravitas

@quantovox said:

@Gravitas said:
@quantovox

Out of curiosity, what other effects do you have lined up for the future?

I can share that we're reverb specialists, and working on products that we believe are clear standouts from the competition. Our iOS reverb prototype has an incomparably better spectral flatness than a $20 popular competing product (that's not to say that that's the best product out there), while also delivering a physically more accurate model than all existing high-flatness reverb implementations that we're aware of.

I adore reverbs.

It is our main focus, but right now we've started looking at smaller projects to get us introduced and established in this field and provide funding for our ongoing research-heavy or otherwise prolonged projects (that have the potential to be sped up).

We also have a unique system partially developed for creating synthetic impulse responses that unfortunately runs on extremely costly hardware.

This sounds very interesting.
A talk or two would be great unless it's top secret of course ?.?

We mainly focused on creating infrastructure to reproduce boring real-world interior architectures (maybe with a slight twist) but originally designed concepts for a system to model spaces that couldn't exist in the real world (yet would deliver meaningful sonic performance, so don't imagine something stupidly wacky like a 1km long hall),

A 1km long hall sounds cool.
Nearest I got was setting an Alesis Midiverb iv to infinite.
Yeah, I know.
Not in the same ballpark at all.

but the hardware requirements need to be brought down with some black magic for that. We may or may not create an accompanying application (as opposed to selling IR libraries only).
These systems could be trivially adapted (we conducted some acoustic tests in fact) to explore various experimental augmentations to modeled plate reverbs by the way - although us being somewhat obsessed with acoustic quality are not the biggest fans of real-world plate reverbs, but we're not here to judge.

Plate reverb is an acquired taste.
It either rocks your boat or it doesn't.

We also dabble in various approaches to sound synthesis that we believe to be unique. As it happens, we actually have a kind of a curious hammered/plucked-string instrument VST prototype that can create a kind of hybrid acoustic-electric piano sound, and may have the potential of becoming something totally not boring

I currently don't have a desktop so if this is going to come to iOS that would be great.

So yeah... a lot of stuff going on, and things are starting to gain momentum.

This sounds fascinating.

Some really interesting things to look forward and to discover.

Thank you for sharing.

eylvy

Giveaway and demo

McD

@quantovox - I think the ripe application area for IOS would be modeled instruments like what Modart has done with PianoTeq and SWAM with the standard orchestral instruments. The main benefit for the average user being scalability: trading storage requirements for CPU... on iPads and phones we pay dearly for storage while CPU resources keep tracking Moore's law for 2x capability at the same price.

There's a lot of these types of apps in the VST space and only a handful on IOS but the
economics of (units sold x price) is a complex puzzle. Developers that work in both markets seem to think there's a benefit for coming in around 1/3 to 1/4 of the desktop pricing.

DDMF was going for the $5 FX app strategy but finally gave up and thought it's a niche and changed to $25 per app pricing. Still, the DDMF VST's sell for $75 generally, I think.

The FX space is very crowded but creating a brand around sonic quality will help. ToneBoosters has done this in the $10 per app space while Fab Filter asks $25-30 for
more features and it would be interesting to see which wins the (units sold x price)
calculus.

Modeled percussion instruments might be a good place to test the waters. We all tend to
add drums irrespective of genre. Of course, I'm old school and what the new artists want in a drum is something decidedly non-acoustic. Still, models can be made to target any type of sound. A modeled instrument that exposes the parameters as AUv3 parameters
would likely generate a lot of interest, especially if the resulting sounds are unique and not typical acoustic sounds. Many like to apply LFO's and automate turning many knobs at once and seek something new in the resulting chaos.

The biggest complaint I have with IOS AUv3 apps are the limited number I can use at the same time and modeling is the solution for that issue. My performance "rigs" run shy of
RAM and consume all the CPU just moving/mixing audio blocks around... moving/mixing audio blocks is the real problem.

Based on the audio quality of the Spatializer, I'll be eager to see what you bring to the
store.

Eventide has worked the "boutique" reverb market to perfection and I own them all on IOS and got most "on sale" or in discounted bundles.

quantovox

@McD said:
@quantovox - I think the ripe application area for IOS would be modeled instruments like what Modart has done with PianoTeq and SWAM with the standard orchestral instruments. The main benefit for the average user being scalability: trading storage requirements for CPU... on iPads and phones we pay dearly for storage while CPU resources keep tracking Moore's law for 2x capability at the same price.

There's a lot of these types of apps in the VST space and only a handful on IOS but the
economics of (units sold x price) is a complex puzzle. Developers that work in both markets seem to think there's a benefit for coming in around 1/3 to 1/4 of the desktop pricing.

DDMF was going for the $5 FX app strategy but finally gave up and thought it's a niche and changed to $25 per app pricing. Still, the DDMF VST's sell for $75 generally, I think.

The FX space is very crowded but creating a brand around sonic quality will help. ToneBoosters has done this in the $10 per app space while Fab Filter asks $25-30 for
more features and it would be interesting to see which wins the (units sold x price)
calculus.

Modeled percussion instruments might be a good place to test the waters. We all tend to
add drums irrespective of genre. Of course, I'm old school and what the new artists want in a drum is something decidedly non-acoustic. Still, models can be made to target any type of sound. A modeled instrument that exposes the parameters as AUv3 parameters
would likely generate a lot of interest, especially if the resulting sounds are unique and not typical acoustic sounds. Many like to apply LFO's and automate turning many knobs at once and seek something new in the resulting chaos.

The biggest complaint I have with IOS AUv3 apps are the limited number I can use at the same time and modeling is the solution for that issue. My performance "rigs" run shy of
RAM and consume all the CPU just moving/mixing audio blocks around... moving/mixing audio blocks is the real problem.

Based on the audio quality of the Spatializer, I'll be eager to see what you bring to the
store.

Eventide has worked the "boutique" reverb market to perfection and I own them all on IOS and got most "on sale" or in discounted bundles.

That's pretty neatly summarized. Thanks for sharing this perspective.

McD

@quantovox said:
That's pretty neatly summarized. Thanks for sharing this perspective.

I have to admit my purchasing has slowed down recently because I have so many great
apps in so many typical niches. How many reverbs does one need? But when a new one
is <$10 I tend to grab it just for the inspiration to make something with it or do a demo
of it.

AudioGus

Wow, this is great! Really helps meld my drums together.

Edit: huh, neat for mastering too…

ChancedMusic

@quantovox said:

@DukeWonder said:

@quantovox said:

@gregsmith said:

@quantovox said:

@gregsmith said:
@quantovox sorry to be ‘that guy’ but are there any plans to make this universal? (Iphone compatible)

@gregsmith said:
@quantovox sorry to be ‘that guy’ but are there any plans to make this universal? (Iphone compatible)

Yes, it's the highest priority feature in the pipeline right now.

Brilliant! Is it intro discounted at the moment or is this the normal price?

Intro price should be in effect until August 20, yes.

Do you plan to have the Universal update in before the sale ends?

That's an understandable question indeed. To give you a direct answer, the original launch offer wasn't planned with an iPhone release in mind, and at this moment it still isn't. That's not to say that we may not revise this if more details surface. Sorry for not being able to provide more clarity as things stand now.

No problem. Appreciate the response.

@McD go ahead and let devs speak for themselves, thanks.

Gravitas

@DukeWonder said:

@quantovox said:

@DukeWonder said:

@quantovox said:

@gregsmith said:

@quantovox said:

@gregsmith said:
@quantovox sorry to be ‘that guy’ but are there any plans to make this universal? (Iphone compatible)

@gregsmith said:
@quantovox sorry to be ‘that guy’ but are there any plans to make this universal? (Iphone compatible)

Yes, it's the highest priority feature in the pipeline right now.

Brilliant! Is it intro discounted at the moment or is this the normal price?

Intro price should be in effect until August 20, yes.

Do you plan to have the Universal update in before the sale ends?

That's an understandable question indeed. To give you a direct answer, the original launch offer wasn't planned with an iPhone release in mind, and at this moment it still isn't. That's not to say that we may not revise this if more details surface. Sorry for not being able to provide more clarity as things stand now.

No problem. Appreciate the response.

@McD go ahead and let devs speak for themselves, thanks.

After McD's and I's discussion earlier I can understand why McD spoke up for the dev's.
He knows the platform nside out and he also provided good background information.
I learnt quite a few things even though I've been on the forum
for quite sometime now and some of the topics/issues he spoke about are pertinent.

It's all good though.

ChancedMusic

@Gravitas said:

@DukeWonder said:

@quantovox said:

@DukeWonder said:

@quantovox said:

@gregsmith said:

@quantovox said:

@gregsmith said:
@quantovox sorry to be ‘that guy’ but are there any plans to make this universal? (Iphone compatible)

@gregsmith said:
@quantovox sorry to be ‘that guy’ but are there any plans to make this universal? (Iphone compatible)

Yes, it's the highest priority feature in the pipeline right now.

Brilliant! Is it intro discounted at the moment or is this the normal price?

Intro price should be in effect until August 20, yes.

Do you plan to have the Universal update in before the sale ends?

That's an understandable question indeed. To give you a direct answer, the original launch offer wasn't planned with an iPhone release in mind, and at this moment it still isn't. That's not to say that we may not revise this if more details surface. Sorry for not being able to provide more clarity as things stand now.

No problem. Appreciate the response.

@McD go ahead and let devs speak for themselves, thanks.

After McD's and I's discussion earlier I can understand why McD spoke up for the dev's.
He knows the platform nside out and he also provided good background information.
I learnt quite a few things even though I've been on the forum
for quite sometime now and some of the topics/issues he spoke about are pertinent.

It's all good though.

I can appreciate that. But this thread is about a specific developer and a specific app. You two both have taken over this thread unnecessarily. And speaking for a developer on their own thread is a bit rude.

gusgranite

@quantovox said:

@Gravitas said:
@quantovox

Out of curiosity, what other effects do you have lined up for the future?

I can share that we're reverb specialists, and working on products that we believe are clear standouts from the competition. Our iOS reverb prototype has an incomparably better spectral flatness than a $20 popular competing product (that's not to say that that's the best product out there), while also delivering a physically more accurate model than all existing high-flatness reverb implementations that we're aware of.

It is our main focus, but right now we've started looking at smaller projects to get us introduced and established in this field and provide funding for our ongoing research-heavy or otherwise prolonged projects (that have the potential to be sped up).

We also have a unique system partially developed for creating synthetic impulse responses that unfortunately runs on extremely costly hardware. We mainly focused on creating infrastructure to reproduce boring real-world interior architectures (maybe with a slight twist) but originally designed concepts for a system to model spaces that couldn't exist in the real world (yet would deliver meaningful sonic performance, so don't imagine something stupidly wacky like a 1km long hall), but that project has extremely hard technical challenges, although we don't consider them unsolvable. We may or may not create an accompanying application (as opposed to selling IR libraries only). Of course a key feature here would be free placement of sound sources and possibly microphones, without any cheating or trickery.
These systems could be trivially adapted (we conducted some acoustic tests in fact) to explore various experimental augmentations to modeled plate reverbs by the way - although us being somewhat obsessed with acoustic quality are not the biggest fans of real-world plate reverbs, but we're not here to judge.

We also dabble in various approaches to sound synthesis that we believe to be unique. As it happens, we actually have a kind of a curious hammered/plucked-string instrument VST prototype that can create a kind of hybrid acoustic-electric piano sound, and may have the potential of becoming something totally not boring

So yeah... a lot of stuff going on, and things are starting to gain momentum.

Really interesting! Thank you for sharing that. Best of luck to you 👍

Gravitas

@DukeWonder said:

@Gravitas said:

@DukeWonder said:

@quantovox said:

@DukeWonder said:

@quantovox said:

@gregsmith said:

@quantovox said:

@gregsmith said:
@quantovox sorry to be ‘that guy’ but are there any plans to make this universal? (Iphone compatible)

@gregsmith said:
@quantovox sorry to be ‘that guy’ but are there any plans to make this universal? (Iphone compatible)

Yes, it's the highest priority feature in the pipeline right now.

Brilliant! Is it intro discounted at the moment or is this the normal price?

Intro price should be in effect until August 20, yes.

Do you plan to have the Universal update in before the sale ends?

That's an understandable question indeed. To give you a direct answer, the original launch offer wasn't planned with an iPhone release in mind, and at this moment it still isn't. That's not to say that we may not revise this if more details surface. Sorry for not being able to provide more clarity as things stand now.

No problem. Appreciate the response.

@McD go ahead and let devs speak for themselves, thanks.

After McD's and I's discussion earlier I can understand why McD spoke up for the dev's.
He knows the platform nside out and he also provided good background information.
I learnt quite a few things even though I've been on the forum
for quite sometime now and some of the topics/issues he spoke about are pertinent.

It's all good though.

I can appreciate that. But this thread is about a specific developer and a specific app. You two both have taken over this thread unnecessarily.

Fair enough.
I thought McD's and I's conversation was pertinent and it is in keeping with the subject matter.

And speaking for a developer on their own thread is a bit rude.

That's why we had had that discussion and it was resolved quite amicably.

McD

@DukeWonder said:
And speaking for a developer on their own thread is a bit rude.

I'm not addressing this specifically to @DukeWonder but rather general comments
on how I think we should interact with developers on the forum... there are only
a couple that weigh in and they have excellent relationships in general here. But
they are a resource for education and insights that few of us can match.

If you look at the comments you'll see the developer has avoided answering
questions about futures but has requested our input to help them target a useful
app use case. Smart use of a user forum, IMHO.

My intention is to gently pull a new developer into becoming comfortable on the forum.
I can't see how anyone would assume I was speaking for @quantovox... I was speaking about developers in general terms. Of course, @quantovox has the option of answering
any question or ignoring it if it seems like a bad idea.

And if you have look through the thread they have participated. Tech boffins here could
learn a lot from DSP programmers about iPad architecture as compared to Desktop/Laptop
systems. We assume the new M1's will open the doors to apps like Logic but a developer
would know how big a leap that is because the operating system under the hood must
provide all the right services to make such a port possible and IOS may still be coded to
the least capable device.

Wouldn't it be great if we could lure @quantovox into sharing some industry insider details?

Regarding "hi-jacking" the thread, that's what forums are for... conversations. @qauntivox
has all the other options for getting out carefully controlled marketing messages:
Youtube, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

It's bigger problem when a new app's thread rolls off the front page due to a lack of comments. Only a few apps hang on the front page for months, like Drambo... which
was a front page stable for months before release.

Let's keep this one around for a few more sales of the product... nothing gets the attention
of a developer like sales and good reviews on the App Store.

Gravitas

@McD said:

@DukeWonder said:
And speaking for a developer on their own thread is a bit rude.

I'm not addressing this specifically to @DukeWonder but rather general comments
on how I think we should interact with developers on the forum... there are only
a couple that weigh in and they have excellent relationships in general here. But
they are a resource for education and insights that few of us can match.

If you look at the comments you'll see the developer has avoided answering
questions about futures but has requested our input to help them target a useful
app use case. Smart use of a user forum, IMHO.

My intention is to gently pull a new developer into becoming comfortable on the forum.
I can't see how anyone would assume I was speaking for @quantovox... I was speaking about developers in general terms. Of course, @quantovox has the option of answering
any question or ignoring it if it seems like a bad idea.

And if you have look through the thread they have participated. Tech boffins here could
learn a lot from DSP programmers about iPad architecture as compared to Desktop/Laptop
systems. We assume the new M1's will open the doors to apps like Logic but a developer
would know how big a leap that is because the operating system under the hood must
provide all the right services to make such a port possible and IOS may still be coded to
the least capable device.

Wouldn't it be great if we could lure @quantovox into sharing some industry insider details?

Regarding "hi-jacking" the thread, that's what forums are for... conversations. @qauntivox
has all the other options for getting out carefully controlled marketing messages:
Youtube, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

It's bigger problem when a new app's thread rolls off the front page due to a lack of comments. Only a few apps hang on the front page for months, like Drambo... which
was a front page stable for months before release.

Let's keep this one around for a few more sales of the product... nothing gets the attention
of a developer like sales and good reviews on the App Store.

+1

Agreed.

Very good pointers.

quantovox

Hi Everyone. We gave an answer yesterday on Jade Starr's livestream to a question whether Spatializer will enhance the widening effect of a convolution reverb when it is chained with it (although the question wasn't formulated very clearly - and it was actually mentioning "doubling" the width among other things).

*** Before continuing, of course Spatializer can augment a reverb to a great extent if it's set to a small timescale while the reverb is set to a larger scale setting (like a concert hall), as is highlighted in the app description. But that augmentation works best when it fits the context and the setup of the mix - whereas the question made me think of a more general use case coming from the customer's expectation.

So I gave a confirmation in my answer, but I'd like to clarify that. So a more precise answer would be that it can depend on the reverb plus the signal too. The rule of thumb applies here as well: when an input has significant stereo width already, Spatializer may or may not widen it further depending on the interaction between the incoming side channel and the synthesized one that Spatializer creates.

In such cases simple M/S balance processing is the proverbial hammer that will get the job done most efficiently - that is if your goal is to increase the width further.

Anyway, those of you who already own the plugin, I'm genuinely interested in your experiences in this area. I would welcome any feedback regarding chaining with reverbs, in order to be able to answer such questions in a significantly more concise way, but my experiences sofar show that there could be a great variance in results. I based my original answer on highly positive feedback from reviewers specifically to this use case, but it may not be a clear cut case across the board (and different people may have wildly different setups / ideas).

Thanks!

P.S.
Usually when phase superpositions play a key role in an effect, to get to "100%", things need to get aligned extremely precisely. This is not a linear phenomenon, changes start happening very fast near the alignment point. This is the exact reason why nonlinear-phase Parallel EQ works surprisingly well as concluded by Dan Worrall in one of his videos I believe. And the exact reason why "width" in a rich signal cannot be increased beyond a point (with delays, reverbs, spatializers, etc) unless you start attenuating the Mid channel relative to the Side channel.

NeuM

Got it thanks to Doug’s little demo on YouTube. Doug, you’re killin’ me, man! I buy almost everything you demo.

McD

@quantovox said:
Anyway, those of you who already own the plugin, I'm genuinely interested in your experiences in this area. I would welcome any feedback regarding chaining with reverbs.

I've been trying Spatializer with various reverbs and for the music sources I'm using
the reverbs seem to cloud the image and I generally turn them off.

So, I tried experimenting with stereo to mono since a lot of my sources have stereo
images to see how that changed the resulting output of Spatializer. I can see how it
really impacts mono signals but you did tell me it would.

It doesn't widen signals without a strong mid-channel presence.

I haven't tried multiple "series" connected instances yet to see if there's any special magic there. I suspect not.

I have used 8-10 instances and it's very CPU efficient unlike a lot of FX apps I use.
I'm not sure running those extra instances really bought me much over just using
one on the masterbus.

It's turning out to be a FX I'll probably use along with Magic Death Eye Stereo in my master bus so I can tune in an image I like . I find the combination provides a realist "reverb" function. This might end my era drenching tracks in "space reverb" to add complexity.

quantovox

@McD said:
I haven't tried multiple "series" connected instances yet to see if there's any special magic there. I suspect not.

It is definitely not a primary intended use.

For those who would like to experiment, if the there is enough Mid channel dominance after the first instance, you can probably fine-tune the imaging by applying a second instance that has a very different timescale setting. In a completely different approach, you can also use the width EQ's creatively to create a complementary pair of instances (although there would be an overlap in the midrange which you could remove with a 3rd party side EQ).

But we're inclined to agree in general, and you have to bear in mind that this may impact the side channel frequency response.

Thanks for your feedback regarding chaining with reverbs.

quantovox

@McD said:
I have used 8-10 instances and it's very CPU efficient unlike a lot of FX apps I use.
I'm not sure running those extra instances really bought me much over just using
one on the masterbus.

One thing to consider is the transient shaping that is under the hood. That may give rise to subtle differences between the two approaches (that could increase as you dial up timescale / decay / High EQ settings). Whether one method is better over the other is really up to the sound engineer. Per-track instantiation may be a safer bet and a clear choice when you want to apply stronger effects (that's why we took optimization very seriously), on the other hand a good mix can benefit from a single effect on the master bus. But we're entering subjective and genre-specific (and even toolset-specific) waters here. The freedom is there to choose what works best.

McD

I hope to hear from more "intro" purchasers about their impressions.

I would love to see more apps from this team... they know how to make pristine tools.

Getting a DSP maker thinking about modeling apps would be great.

As it happens, we actually have a kind of a curious hammered/plucked-string instrument VST prototype that can create a kind of hybrid acoustic-electric piano sound, and may have the potential of becoming something totally not boring

Gravitas

The Client liked the sound of the vocals.

I used Spatializer as the only effect
on the lead, adlibs and chorus
except for eq and compression.

No complaints.

oat_phipps

IT NEVER HURTS TO ASK

adages will never, ever fail you

And I got to read a bunch of interesting stuff as a result.