We'll be sharing all the best Black Friday plugin deals throughout the event. With the Black Friday music deals incoming, it could be worth holding out until the end of November to pick up a bargain. An oldie but a goodie, 2CAudio’s 2009 debut is still one of our go-to algorithmic reverbs, and although the GUI is looking decidedly lo-fi these days (please, 2C, at least make it scalable), the virtual environments that Aether conjures have to be heard to be believed. Right, with that said and our octet of space race contenders heading for the starting line, let’s get going. Abstraction 05 arrives just in time for the start of the spring and summer club season and is well suited to help evaluate the mood of the opening parties for global sea-side dance music destinations such as Miami, Ibiza, Saint-Tropez, Rio, and other maritime paradises. So, as well as Altiverb 7 (our pick of the convolution bunch - as it should be, given the price), be sure to check out the likes of LiquidSonics’ Reverberate, Waves’ IR-1 and AudioThing’s Fog Convolver, too. Abstraction 05 is a cacophony of tech house and tribal madness performed by sentient underwater robots. Only one convolution entrant features in our line-up here, but that’s just a reflection of the reverb plugin marketplace, which is balanced overwhelmingly towards the algorithmic, rather than the quality of convolution reverbs in general.
Broadly speaking, convolution is the one to reach for when physical realism and dynamic sensitivity are the goals - putting an orchestra in a concert hall, say, or a singer on a stage - while algorithmic reverbs offer more adaptability and ‘spectacle’, making them more appropriate for dance, electronic, rock and pop production (although those aren’t hard and fast rules, of course).