Sorry to have missed your 9 month old comment. Exponential Audio has done some amazing work with the surround plug-ins. They sound great and do react to changing source placement very well and are ideal for film sound use for that reason. Since version 1.1.0 Phoenixverb Surround and R2 Surround can support linking 2 plug-ins to obtain reverb in the ceiling… 9.1 for Atmos and 13.1 for Auro 3D… all with responsiveness to the panning of the input sound. We used Phoenixverb Surround on Dawn of the Planet of the Apes for the ape vocals in particular, and I was very pleased with how it contributed to the natural spatial qualities in our Atmos mix.

What Do you think of the new Exponetial Audio Phoenix surround Verb?Did anyone try this?

Hi Douglas,
With respect to direct and reflected sound.
Direct Sound means it has an unobstructed line of sight path from source to listener.
If I turn up the stereo in the lounge room and walk into the kitchen I can still hear the stereo and make out which song is playing.
In this case the direct sound path is so severely attenuated by walls I don’t really hear it at all – I hear reflected sound.

In some of the more challenging Houses of Worship I’ve worked in the sound from the loudspeaker is completely obscured by a huge sandstone pillar in some seats – there can be no direct sound path.
But there is a strong first reflection path where the loudspeaker sound is reflected by the side wall so as to effectively go around the pillar – a clever snooker player might get to the target by bouncing the white ball off the cush in a similar process.
In this case the listener localises the source to the reflection but it’s still reflected sound – not direct sound.
That means not only that it has traveled further than direct sound would have but also it has it’s spectral content modified by the reflection coefficients of the material it bounced off.

The point I was making really is that you really need something better than reverberation simulation models to replicate outdoor sound.
Reverberation by definition has no directional clues.

Approaching or departing sources outdoors should, IMHO, be assigned attributes related to the distance from the listener and the presence of delayed echoes. Distance attenuation would vary the frequency response in accordance with documented air attenuation. Decay time for a distant source might also increase with distance depending on the geography.

And yes again – you need to be able to pan it to the general direction of the source.

Anyhow ……

Best Regards

These are certainly my own opinions. I am a practicing sound editor and mixer, not an acoustician or scientist. My theories about sound in the real world are based on listening, on my readings and talks with people who know more than me, on practical work mixing films, and on experimentation in the studio. It’s in the practical work that I first noticed the need to pan the “reverb” returns in order to get them to cohere with the source sound. And it was through experimentation that I discovered that none of the “5.0 reverbs” actually do what I want. I always send to stereo or even mono “reverbs” in a mix and pan the outputs, since that’s the only way to get the sound of the “reverb” plug-ins to stick to the source. As I pointed out in the article, this is a tip for sound mixing for theatrical cinematic applications. The article can be seen as a plea for a simple solution to this regular film sound workflow step of having to pan the reverb returns to achieve a coherent effect for the audience.  

My diagrams are essentially copies of similar ones I have seen here:  

http://www.torgny.biz/Recording%20sound_2.htm

And here:  

http://www.feilding.net/sfuad/musi3012-01/html/lectures/021_environment_I.htm

I believe that the modeling of acoustic early reflections and reverberation shown in these diagrams is similar to the ray tracing models of light propagation and vision that are commonly used for VFX rendering of 3D models. It is true that only under a minority of conditions is there a shoebox shaped set of walls around the sound sour and listener. I believe it is useful as an elementary example of how sound can propagate in a space, and of the gradual diffusion of the sound.  

I love your example of a truck on a valley road whose direct exhaust and brake sounds are obscured by an earthen berm, so the only sounds which reach the listener’s ears are reflected ones. And I thank you for pointing out that the sounds which I have lumped together as “reverberation” are more accurately reflected, diffracted and refracted. As you make very clear, there are many complex sonic reflections in the myriad possible environments we find ourselves in (or can imagine ourselves in). Exteriors are particularly interesting cases. Beaches, forests, fields, mountainsides, all have complex and widely spaced reflections with lots of atmospheric filtering, and are thus more difficult to use as examples in my article.  

I want to make clear that “reverb” in the general sense that I have used it, and which is fairly common in sound studio work, includes the “early reflections”, and in fact includes all the sounds heard after the sound is emitted, apart from the direct sound. I also tried to make it clear that there is a more specific sense of the word reverberation “the latest reflections of sound arrive from all directions in a diffuse reverberation until the sound fades into inaudibility”.  

There aren’t many sound reflection, diffraction and refraction plug-ins that I know of outside of the many “reverb” plug-ins widely available, a number of which I mention in the article. There is one exception I can think of “Orbit” by Audio Ease which models room reflections and positioning, but not more diffuse reverberations. There have been and probably are still others I can’t name. Many “reverb” plug-ins allow the user to turn down the reverberation so that the early reflections can be featured. They are still known as “reverb” plug-ins.  

I’m not sure if I understand how the reflected sound can ever arrive before the direct sound. You say, “you need the semi diffuse sound to be audible BEFORE the direct sound”. I can see in your truck on valley road example how the direct sound can be obscured so that only reflected sound is heard. But it doesn’t arrive later, it is gone. Direct sound, by definition, arrives before the reflected sound. I can imagine situations where the reflected sound can be louder than the direct sound, but not earlier.  

To be honest, I’ve only just discovered Verb while researching this article, so I don’t have any other tips and tricks to share, though I too am interested if anyone else does. And as I explore the great sounding and powerful plug-in I will share anything that seems interesting.

As for using Verb or other helpful multichannel reverbs which may require more computer cycles vs panning the outputs of a narrower reverb to allow for more instances of a reverb plugin. One of the main attractions of a localizing surround reverb that responds to the FMP feature of Pro Tools send pan is that it makes it possible to share one reverb for any number of sounds which may all be arbitrarily panned, and each will give correctly panned outputs. This can save any number of separate send busses, separately panned aux inputs with separate reverb plug-ins inserted. That can save a lot of cycles. It also saves a lot of panning efforts from the editor/mixer.

I too am very eager to see what two of the super creators in reverb design come up with next. I think there is a place in the market for more plug-ins that do what we want in post. Maybe music mixers like Cameron will be interested too!

I have to say that when I first read about the issue of panning multichannel reverbs first thing that came in my mind was Ircam Verb as it’s my go to reverb.

I hadn’t had the chance to use it in a 5.0 channel mix but I do use it a lot for experimental sound design as well as natural spaces (the single algorithmic reverb that I can use for outdoor spaces).

Is there any chance there will be a followup with tips and tricks for this particular piece of coding gem?

Quick question also regarding panning stereo verbs: I’m planning on getting East West Spaces as based on what I heard is the most natural convolution based reverb.
Given that I might work in the future on multichannel mixes is there any possible ways to modify the sound with a after effect in a similar way the diffuseness parameter in Verb works?
 Questin probably valid for any other non multichannel reverb out there.

On another note really excited on Michael Carnes’s personal take on “natural reverbs” as well as seeing new stuff from AudioEase.