ORIGINAL: montezuma

Fascinating info. You would want to have some pretty pristine speakers to play your original sound on in the echo chamber, for it to hold quality when recorded...

Not necessarily. The sound characteristics that make reverb in a gorgeous room are not always predictable nor intuitive. Using a little single-driver speaker could sometimes give a very natural bass roll-off and and high-frequency damping to prevent mud and splashiness in the reverb sound. A lot of the crazy designs for reverb chambers were just made up, guessed-at. Square rooms covered with plaster to make them like caves with rounded-off corners, stuff like that.

I think one of the coolest things about working in the pre-digital era was that people were a lot less theoretical about how they did stuff. You created a sound, tried to capture it, if it didn't sound good you see what you can do until it does.

It's a little weird that we now look back in astonishment at the idea of using sound in an actual space to try and simulate sound in an actual space.

These days it seems we are all afraid that invisible gremlins will imperceptibly destroy the quality of our audio if we do anything creative or if we don't follow the step-by-step procedures in "recording for dummies" or whatever. We trust the theory too much, I think.

Cheers.

ORIGINAL: montezuma
Sometimes it's the imperfections and quirks and anomolies in a recording that gives it that certain something.

Well, then my stuff is chock full of "certain something".

Just take 'pristine' as 'decent', 'good', 'appropriate' or 'desired'.

Yeah, the limitations of your gear can really encourage creativity and inventiveness.

And there's always this popular favorite in Deutchland: http://www.tank-fx.de/

I have the same book, and yes, they had a separate room with loudspeakers to play in the room and mics to pick it up and return to the desk for mixing into the final mix. I don't have book with me right now, but I think Abbey Road had one echo chamber room per studio.

Plate reverbs like the EMT 140 are still used too. I saw one for sale the other day - couldn't believe it, but I've read that some studios really still use them. They're analog, obviously, sound literally bouncing off metal plates.

Ever looked inside a spring reverb in a guitar amplifier? There really are springs in there......

Some of the art of recording is making use of limitations in some of your gear.

Wow, given the limitations I have, I should be kickin some serious butt by now :-)

Greetings all,

Fundamentally the problem of "reverb in a room" is the same as "vibration of a string" because both involve solving the wave equation --- the former in three dimensions, and the latter in one.

Because of this, it is interesting to think of a room, whatever its shape or constitution, as an instrument to be played with (for example) a violin or guitar just as the violin or guitar are played by vibrating their strings. It's fundamentally the same thing. I myself create instruments in the same way that I create IR's for reverb, namely by applying an impulse to a line, membrane, or 3-D medium at a given location and solving for the response at another location.

So if someone wants to bounce waves off of metal plates, instead of saying, "Well, that doesn't sound realistic!" one can accept this contraption as simply another instrument to be exploited for whatever sounds it does make. The same could be applied to a new concert hall or reverb chamber: The new hall or chamber is simply an instrument to be "played" by creating sounds at various locations and listening to the responses or recording them at other locations.

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On predicability:

It is true that "solving the wave equation" is not necessarily easy, but the theory is completely known. Any problem with predictability is due to 1) lack of understanding of the person solving the problem or 2) lack of computational resources or 3) lack of information regarding material parameters or room construction --- contrary to what yep seemed to be saying in "We trust the theory too much." It is "we" and/or our lack of resources that are the problem, not the theory. Research in acoustics is applied, not basic. If yep is saying that we have too much confidence in ourselves, then I would agree; we want to save time/money, so we take shortcuts, and this includes applied theory of course where inappropriate approximations are sometimes made.

Regards,
Dave Clark

From what I am able to tell, the Beatles recordings were tracked dry as possible. The reverb you hear is a combination of studio ambiance and the reverb chamber used during mix down. The mix down master was recorded by sending various signals to the chamber using sends and returns and the analog results mixed back in as the mix down occurred. The reverb was therefor dialed in as an actual chamber sound using the chambors at Abbey Road.

Most of the early Beatles recordings used only a hint of the chamber, but Capital thought they required more and the USA releases were made by taking the master mix and adding actual chamber sounds from a physical chamber here in the USA. So the reverb you hear on Roll Over Beethoven on the Beatles Second Album is NOT the same reverb you hear on the original EMI release.