What is The Best Reverb Plugin?

What is The Best Reverb Plugin?

With so many reverb plugins to choose from it's difficult to separate the good from the bad. If you're looking for something special or even just looking to upgrade your stock reverb there's different types of reverb here for you.

Don't worry - We've tested, summarised and presented a round-up of our top reverb plugins available today. Whether you're looking for reverbs best for EDM, Trance or Dubstep or something more traditional for film and orchestral music composing there's something here for everyone. 

A lot of aspects can affect a reverbs sound, not only whether the type such as plate, hall, spring but also the algorithm itself having an impact on whether the reverb has that great sound or not. 

 

Valhalla Vintage Verb 

 Valhalla Vintage Verb

We could have picked ANY of Valhalla reverb offerings and they'd equally made this list as they are all good reverbs but VintageVerb really is the jewel in the crown with 18 different reverb algorithms inspired by the classic hardware digital reverbs of the 1970s and 1980s all the way up until present time in the form of what it calls 'Colour Modes'.

Lots of configurability such as early reflections, room sizes and the usual pre-delay and decay aspects means you can dial in the reverb sound to suit your work.

Easy to use clean lines GUI, light on CPU but sounds phenomenal. Works well on all sources and will happily sit on a bus or insert doing what it needs to do.

Waves H-Reverb

 Waves H-verb

Waves have combined two reverb technologies of Convolution and Algorithmic to bring the best of both worlds to their reverb - this means you get the realism and authenticity of reverb impulse response mixed with the flexibility of algorithmic styles of reverb sound.

Additionally they've extended the range of control by including a whole host of additional options, providing not only the usual decay time and pre delay and so forth but also more advanced modulation such as as Dynamics, EQ, and Tempo sync making it great for electronic styles.

Included presets include many famously inspired ones from hardware reverbs such as the fabled 'tiled room' from the Lexicon PCM70 and the results are very pleasing indeed. 

2CAudio - Aether

Aether Reverb

Aether is an award-winning, self-modulating algorithmic reverb in which the developers call "ultimate quality" 

Highly praised for its high quality it has a really rich enveloping quality to it and whilst it's breath of parameters and controls will seem overwhelming to some it has an absolutely HUGE preset collection which will help you to quickly dial in the right reverb for your situation. 

Fabfilter Pro-R

Fabfilter Reverb 

Fabfilter throws the traditional method of altering parameters on its head by providing more amalgamated approach to its big, easy to use dials as well as direct control from the EQ like graphical display which really feels quite natural in use.

This means less to get in the way, less to worry about and more focus on the sound. Allowing software to take out the tedium of getting the 'right' sound. It also encourages experimentation.

Naturally, as with all things Fabfilter it sounds fantastic and not traditionally "same" in sound to any one classic reverb but instead bringing its own sound to the table.

We particularly like this introduction video from Fabfilter themselves.

 

Liquid Sonics Seventh Heaven Reverb

Liquid Sonics reverb

The only true convolution reverb on this list. Seventh Heaven professional. Drawing inspiration from the original hardware Bricasti M7, it comes complete with over 10gb of impulses and has all the usual controls you'd expect from a good quality reverb. 

It sounds phenomenal and is nearly impossible to get a bad sound out of it. Arguably better suited to traditional genres of physical instrumentation if you want the best sounding reverb full stop it'd be silly to pass up trying this one. 

 

Lexicon Native PCM 

Lexicon Reverb

Lexicon, the biggest name in algorithmic reverbs and once only available in expensive hardware form is now available as software, based on their high end algorithms in their original hardware the Lexicon PCM.

As you'd expect, included presets cover all manner of their hardware offerings as well as updated versions of the same.

The sound is nearly every bit as good as the hardware counterpart. Providing the Lexicon character that no other reverb on this list can match.

So now armed with this information you can take stock and make some more informed choices on what you want from your reverb plugin and which reverb plugin might be right for you.

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