iZotope fuse Stratus and Symphony 3D as Equinox

[Guy Rowland]

Once upon a time there was a lot of well-liked reverbs by Exponential Audio. Then they were bought out by iZotope and the whole range got distilled into two - Stratus 3D and Symphony 3D, and they stopped supporting the others. One, broadly was "colour" and one was "spaces" IIRC. In practice, I never really could work out why there were two at all.

And it seems iZotope agreed as both have been folded into one mighty reverb to rule them all, Equinox. The engines under the hood are identical, but the interface has drastically changed. They've added some bells and whistles - a drive, envelope, delay, chorus and compressor engine are in there, and there's an unmask section - but old patches from either of the previous products will load into Equinox.

They are only supporting Stratus and Symphony for another year. So the cynic in you will be thinking it's just another paid-for rebranding while plugins you rely on in old projects will stop working. For me, it actually makes sense. I never liked even the GUI refresh of Stratus and Symphony, with the browsers being rubbish. It sounded just fine, but wasn't fun to use and, as mentioned, I rarely knew which one to reach for. In practice there's hardly any projects I ever used it in. This feels like the logical end place for exponential reverbs, all under one roof.

There's a tag browser with 1.250 presets. So you can pick your type, size and characteristics. then whizz through the presets in situ to get close to where you need to be (mix, happily, stays fixed). The rest of the UI is pretty straightforward for further tweakage, though I'd have preferred nice big knobs for the separate ER and Tail volumes - as it is it's small clumsy digits.

The other thing that helped is that being an owner of Status and Symphony 3D, I picked it up for £25 at AudioDeluxe. That feels about the right price to upgrade (full price $149). Incidentally, you can authorize to an iLok and to a separate machine. There's also a 10 day trial to see if it floats your boat.

Full details - https://www.izotope.com/en/products/equ ... 3cMAPvQWI9