Product Reviews

With the Space Designer convolving reverb, Emagic has made available a complicated mathematical concept to users of Logic 6.3, the result of which is arguably the best-sounding reverb plug-in available today.

The principle behind the convolution process - the key to achieving the most realistic reverbs - is that an impulse response is captured by recording the total reflections that occur after an initial signal spike in a given acoustic space, be it cathedral or cave. This recording can then be merged with your song's audio files, so effectively the audio sounds like it was actually recorded within the selected space.

Space Designer comes with 1000 professional-quality impulse responses (IRs), covering all manner of indoor and outdoor spaces (everything from bathrooms and large halls to pine forests), as well as hundreds of responses from legendary hardware reverb and delay units that would otherwise cost thousands of pounds.

Naturally, Space Designer does a lot more than merely apply delicious real-time convolution reverbs. As with all Emagic products, the devil is in the details. For a start, it looks fantastic. Atop the attractive interface, the comprehensive editing options are neatly laid out and, for the most part, are entirely intuitive.

Input controls are on the left side, output on the right. The lower part of the interface contains the Filter and Effects sections, incorporating four different filter types, resonance, low-shelving EQ and a Stereo Spread dial. Beneath the main Envelopes window are the settings for the typical reverb parameters of Level, Attack and Decay.

The Envelopes display features Volume (displayed in red), Filter (yellow) and Density (cyan). These envelopes can be adjusted by their Bézier curves and draggable nodes, making experimentation enjoyable and easy. Further sonic adventures can be had using the Reverse Envelope. If ever things go too far, simply press the Reset button.

Once an IR has been loaded, it can be turned into a synthesised IR, which brings all envelopes and effects into play. The quality of these synthesised IRs is high. You can also switch between a loaded IR sample and the synthesised IR without losing the settings of either, a feature unique to Space Designer.

Plug-in settings are saved with each song

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and automatically recalled. Full automation isn't possible due to the nature of the convolution process, as the plug-in has to recalculate the change before audio can be routed through it. However, you can automate the Stereo Crossfeed, Direct Output and Reverb Output parameters, either manually or with a MIDI controller.

Slip and slide

Another neat function is the Sample Rate slider, which can reduce the rate by half, quarter or eighth divisions, making the IR proportionately longer. In other words, if you halve the sample rate, the IR becomes twice as long but half as dense, creating new reverbs that still sound great but require less CPU power. By the same token, if the sample rate is doubled, the IR is halved in length - the Preserve Length button counters this if necessary.

Finally, the Deconvolution facility allows you to record and use your own IRs (although this feature doesn't currently work in Mac OS X 10.3). A full-spectrum sine sweep and tutorial are provided on the CD, and Space Designer uses a non-proprietary file format, so any AIFF, SDII or WAV IR can be imported.

There are some criticisms. Space Designer can only be used in Logic 6.3, so you can't use it with other applications. Logic Audio 6 can't process more than two outputs from a plug-in so surround reverb isn't possible, as it is with Audio Ease's Altiverb. Also, for 'technical reasons' the IR files aren't tracked by Logic's Project Manager, so users have to update their Project Folders manually. Finally, some people may consider that Space Designer is expensive and a processor hog.

Another issue is that you can't do the kind of complex calculations convolution reverbs demand - or get the quality of results they produce - with anything less than a fast G4. Lesser Macs are not powerful enough. This partly explains why until now the best reverbs have tended to be available only on expensive third-party DSP cards.

In our tests, using a dual-1GHz Power Mac G4 running OS X 10.2.6, the CPU hit wasn't nearly as bad as expected. With 12 audio tracks using three independent Space Designer reverbs all with different settings, Logic's System Performance meter hovered below the halfway point, which didn't seem excessive.

However, compared with similar software products - for example, Altiverb - the price of Space Designer is competitive; compared with hardware, it's even more so.

Ultimately, you get what you pay for and Space Designer is the best reverb currently available for Logic users, providing a powerful, flexible reverb environment and a huge, superb-sounding library of Impulse Response files to use in it. Built directly into Logic's code, Space Designer offers unmatched consistency, performance, integration and stability. What's more, the sounds - the most important aspect of any reverb unit - are consistently excellent. Space Designer is an excellent package.