Wail...you wouldn't regret it. Though you might need a Tums later that afternoon.

BassDaddy
Did anybody bite on Yorolpal's "I own everything feel sorry for me" deal? If I could right now, I would order Valhalla Plate while eating Popeye's chicken. 

Bonafide!

yorolpal
Wail...you wouldn't regret it. Though you might need a Tums later that afternoon.

Hey Larry, what are Tums going for at JRR Shop?

They're on special for $3.99 with an additional 16% off with code GAS

If you want to learn more about what makes plate reverbs different from other approaches, Sean has put together a nice summary here.
 
For those wondering if they need VPlate when they've already got other algorithmic reverbs with "Plate" presets (e.g. ValhallaVintageVerb), check out Sean's posts on Gearslutz. In it, he observes that few digital reverbs actually attempt to emulate plate characteristics with any accuracy. 
 

In other words, they are from the school of "hey, this is bright, kinda metallic, and has a fast attack. Let's call it a plate!"

 
This also explains why I've never like "Plate" reverb presets in the past, even though I like the sound of a real EMT and consider it to be the reference standard for all algorithmic reverbs due to its long-time ubiquity. 
 
 
 

I always felt the same about plates on other reverbs too - lots of times I thought "this is the kind of thing that needs a plate" yet when I tried the plate presets in other plugins I would be kinda disappointed, they were OK but just didn't sound like the plates I'd heard on classic records. Especially on snares and vocals. But ValhallaPlate is totally different. 

Ditto...    I just used it last night for the first time, replacing Rematrix Solo on a vocal send.   I chose one of the copper plate presets and after a little tweaking the result was..... smooth.   The classic "can't distinctly hear it but boy I miss it when it's gone" effect.
 

Bought it. Very nice indeed. Well worth the money.

bitflipper
Obviously, in acoustical reverberation phase is all over the place as each reflection is delayed by different amounts. It stands to reason that this would be a huge factor in determining how the reverb wash sounds. But gosh, how does one go about analyzing it? You'd need a supercomputer to ray-trace every possible path, calculate their phase shifts, and sum them moment-by-moment. (Although analyzing a plate has got to be far, far simpler than a cathedral.)

 
Measuring phase is difficult, at least as far as specific phase relationships in a reverb after the first 50 msec or so. I listen for diffusion by ear. If the initial part of the reverb sounds dry (at 100% wet), I presume that it is fairly phase coherent. If it sounds wet, it is diffuse. If it sounds strongly colored, there are probably just a few short early reflections in there.
 

And now you tell me that the speed of sound varies with frequency in a plate. This is a mind-blowing revelation. Why is that the case in steel but not in air? In all my reading on acoustics, I have never come across any reference suggesting that the SoS is not constant in homogeneous materials. You see plenty of tables that say "here's the speed in water, copper, steel" but none have a footnote saying "this is at one kilohertz only".

 
Jonathan Abel explains it way better than me, in the UA WebZine post from June 2005 that apparently won't show up as a link for me. 
 
 
The speed of sound in air is consistent for all frequencies. The dispersion in plates is due to the specifics of the bending mode. I don't claim to understand it from a physical standpoint - but I can hear it, I've read about it, and I know how to model it. 
 

Thanks again, Sean, for the information, for another great product, and (best of all for us po' folk) keeping the price down to a week's worth of peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches.

Thanks for buying the plugin! And thanks to y'all here in the forum for your kind words!
 
Sean Costello

I'm sold. It's up to Santa now. Now I know why plates have sounded like better behaved spring reverbs.