Acon Digital / Verberate Immersive

[Piet De Ridder]

I wasn’t aware that this existed, but when updating the Acon Acoustica audio editor earlier today, I saw it listed among my available upgrades: Verberate Immersive 2, a multi-channel spatializer. Always having considered Verberate a pretty good reverb, I didn’t think twice about giving Immersive a go.

Verberate Immersive is built for multi-channel formats up to 9.1.6, but works well in a stereo environment too. Which is how I tested it. You get control over the dry signal, the early reflections and the reverberation, control which in each case includes a two-dimensional positioner (left-right and front-back as well as control, via an adjustable rectangle, over the width and depth of the signal) and, obviously, level adjustment. There are separate EQ’s for the input, the reflections (early and tail) and the output, plus a few other parameters the usefulness of which depends on what you’re trying to do: swirl (for vintage-style tails), bloom (which alters the build-up time of the reverb), dispersion (for more accurate plate emulation).

The basic reverb algorithm of Verberate Immersive is Acon’s acclaimed “Vivid Hall” (there’s also “Legacy Hall”) and for the Early Reflections definition you can choose from a comprehensive list of options including various types of halls, rooms, chamber, mono and stereo plates and even a reverse setting.

A particularly welcome feature is that all parameters are fully automatable and, unlike what happens in Samplicity's ScoreStage, no parameter change in Verberate Immersive — not even the ones pertaining to the room size or the length of the reverb — causes undesirable side-effects or sound interruptions. So you can move things around in your mix, and even change the virtual room, in real time or via automation, without any problem.

There is some room for improvements and further development of course (and I’m sure that will happen) but as it is, this is another solid and very useful tool for positioning and spatializing your tracks.

The demo-video they've got on their website is very bad, I found, so you’re not missing anything if you don’t watch it. It's much better to download the demo and spend some time with it. The demo is fully functional, except that the output is very briefly muted at random times, but there’s more than enough unmuted time in between to be able to test and evaluate the plug-in thoroughly.

Full price is €159, and if you can upgrade from Verberate, it's €99.

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[Guy Rowland]

How does this compare to the original SPAT for you, Piet?

[Piet De Ridder]

I’ve yet to see something that truly compares with SPAT, even begins to compare with it, but Verberate Immersive definitely goes in the right direction (as does Samplicity’s ScoreStage).
SPATv3, however, offers (or ‘offered’, I guess we should say) way-way-way more detailed control over pretty much every aspect of the entire phenomenon that occurs when an object generates a sound at a specific location in a reflective environment of your design. But as I said in a post in the ScoreStage thread: control-wise, SPATv3 takes things a lot further than is actually required for a standard stereo mix, and SPAT Revolution takes things much further still (annoyingly so, I might add, if what you want to use it for is stereo mixing), so the fact that neither Verberate Immersive nor ScoreStage can compare with SPAT’s abundance of controllability — both providing, as they do, only a comparatively small set of basic (but useful) control options — isn’t necessarily the short-coming it might intially appear to be.

The more interesting (and useful) comparison, I think, would be one between Verberate Immersive and Score Stage. But I’m not ready for that one yet.

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