![]() ![]() The reverb quality is outstanding too, whether creating huge, bright and sparkling washes, warm, dark and tight resonances, or anything in between. By breaking away from this traditional approach Baby Audio has created a processor that is both flexible and very intuitive to use, and which is therefore much easier to tailor to fit the task at hand (whatever that task may be). With a traditional algorithmic reverb, the first step to creating an ambience is to choose the type of reverb you want to use – room, auditorium, plate, etc. This makes it easy to create rhythmic and timed reverb effects, but can cause problems if your project contains tempo changes because the resulting change in the pre-delay time can create weird pitch-shift artefacts (much like when adjusting a delay plug-in whilst the sound is playing). These can be set in familiar milliseconds, but what’s particularly interesting is that they can also be flipped to a DAW-synced mode, allowing the start and end times to be expressed as note lengths. Rather than using concepts of pre-delay and reverb time, Crystalline provides simple start and end sliders for controlling the overall reverb timing – start is analogous to pre-delay end is analogous to reverb time. In addition to these frequency-centric modifiers, there’s also a built-in gate for those classic gated reverb effects, and a transient processor that allows either the attack or sustain portions of the reverb sound to be accentuated. A tilt EQ makes it easy to shift the tonal emphasis of the reverb, whilst a Smoothing control increases the strength of a preset EQ curve designed to reduce common problem frequencies. There’s also a high-pass filter that only affects the stereo side signal, allowing you to remove weight from the width of the reverb whilst keeping it intact in the centre of the stereo image. Tonal characteristics can be modified with a damping control that’s a combo of LPF and HPF. The remaining two groups of controls provide tools that sculpt the generated reflections. The threshold frequency where this effect kicks-in can be set to 2kHz, 4kHz or 8kHz, with the decay times increased by 2x, 4x or 6x. This can create a lot of space in the sound, as well as allowing a lot of variety. Of particular note here is the Shimmer setting, which increases the decay time of higher frequencies. It’s good in busy mixes, though, and useful as something of a special effect. This modulation can enhance the overall density of the reverb sound, but also creates a shifting pitch focus within the reverb that can sound a bit incongruous when it stands out too far. The density of reflections can be set in three steps, and a slow modulation can be added. The Depth section provides access to further details of how Crystalline generates its reflections. The stereo spread of reflections is also controlled here, and can run from mono, through a natural stereo image, all the way to an artificial super-wide spread. The room size can be set in five steps ranging from “tiny” to “spacey”, whilst the brightness of the reflections – their ‘sparkle’, as Baby Audio refers to it – is freely adjustable. The basic reflection characteristics of the imaginary space Crystalline creates are configured within the (you guessed it!) Reflections section. This is all presented within a clean, tactile, modern-looking interface in which traditional knobs and dials are eschewed in favour of interactive widgets that use icon-like graphics to illustrate both the parameter they control and the current parameter value. ![]() The most important parameters are arranged into four groups that represent the different reverb processing stages – Reflections, Depth, Clean-up and Shape – each containing just three (largely) self-explanatory parameters. This may sound like an extra layer of complication but, thanks to Baby Audio’s clever interface design, it really isn’t. ![]()
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