With POSEIDON, one of the most innovative synths out there, VirSyn got my attention. So when they claim that their latest plug-in, called REFLECT, combines the flexibility of vintage algorithmic reverbs with the the sonic quality of convolution based reverbs I sit down and listen. Is it a poor mixture or a magic potion?

If you have used any previous VirSyn plug-ins you’ll quickly recognize the interface. It has the same menu system to the left, the same colors, and it looks as good as the rest. A nice touch is that if you hover over the knobs with the cursor it shows the value that it is currently assigned to.

There are many presets to choose from divided into several categories. The categories include: ambience, chambers, halls, plates, postpro (spaces created mainly for post production), rooms, spaces (unnantural large spaces) and user. The last one of course being where you can save your own presets in a quick to access folder.

Reflect is clearly divided into several sections. The first (to the top left) is the “early” section, which of course have to do with the early reflections of the reverb. It is the early reflections of the reverb that is handled by the impulse responses. If you don’t like the included you can always load your own. This section has three knobs: size, damping and stereo. The last one is worth to notice. I was surprised to see that Reflect wasn’t even available to use on a mono track as it is stereo only.

The second section, right next to “early”, is the tail-section. This part of the reverb is algorithmic. Here are knobs for time, size, absorption, diffusion, modulation and again stereo. So as you can see, it is possible to control the stereo image of the reverb for both the tail and the early reflections. You should be familiar with most of these parameters, but the modulation knob might need some explanation, it modifies the room size slightly over time.

Below is a four band EQ section, featuring LF, LMF, HMF and HF. Here we also find a bypass button and a pink(!) button. The latter kinky “pink” button darkens the reverb.

What else? The in section contains gain and delay knobs, and the out section contains dry/wet and tail/early knobs as well as an insert button. What does the insert button do you might ask? Well, it activates the dry/wet knob. In other words, it isn’t really necessary since the deactivated insert button sets the dry/wet knob to 100% wet. Well, no harm in having it there either. Other than that there’s of course the big graph which lets you load an impulse response by clicking it.

The sound

You might know me as a “reverb hater”, because I used to avoid them for most duties in the past and use delays instead. Over time my mixing ways have changed, and the software reverbs have also gotten better. REFLECT certainly is one of these “better” reverbs.

Having used REFLECT as my only reverb in my last three full song sessions as well as in any other projects I’ve worked with at the same time and I must say that I’m extremely pleased with it. It’s of course hard to say anything about the sound in general as it includes impulse responses, which in itself means that there are a lot of different sounds available. If I had to describe it in one way however, it would be realistic. “Sure” you might say “all good reverbs sound realistic”. That is not my point. I’m talking about the rooms, the halls, the chambers and so on. They sound very natural. It has none of that ugly muddy sound that especially older reverbs suffered from.

Bugs and bug killers

When I first got REFLECT I noticed a bug that sometimes made it very noisy. The only thing to do was to remove it and instantiate it again. I notified VirSyn of this, and because of the good support that they have, they managed to recreate this and fix it with an update that of course is available free to all owners (and included a lot of extra rooms as well). Other than that, and since then I haven’t come across any bugs.

Conclusion

I have used REFLECT in every session for the last month or so, which means working with it every day. In other words, I have given it a good run and I can only say that I’m very happy with it. It sounds very good to my ears, especially the “real” rooms. It’s hard to say – if not impossible – if the good sound is because of the IR-algorithimic marriage or not, but I will say that it is a very intriguing idea that I hope other developers pick up on as well. Who knows, it might actually be “the next big thing” in reverbs. Now go and try the demo or download some samples of REFLECT in action.

VirSyn