If there's one piece of software that should have gotten cheaper over the almost 20 years it's been around, it's Altiverb. It offers pretty much no additional features or functionality above and beyond the cheapest or even free convolution verbs - it's all about the library. The entire markup is to cover what they want you to think is the massive expense of traveling around the globe and capturing the IR's, a process which probably takes between 3 and 4 man-hours at most. Not to mention they have been doing this for ages and presumably have recouped the expenses on the older IRs many, many times over. I am not even sure how I feel about companies profiting off IR captures of digital hardware units - essentially the sound of another company's intellectual property. So for instance Altiverb 7 XL includes impulses from an Eventide SP2016, but Eventide still makes money from the SP2016 today in plugin form.

Again, this software costs $900 USD on Sweetwater right now. Compare that to Superior Drummer 3 at less than half the price, a sampling instrument so deep and so groundbreaking it was years in the making. Just thinking about the labor involved in making something like SD3, it's dizzying in scope and scale... the sampling, mapping to velocities, coding the round robin so it sounds natural, bleed controls, UI design, capturing the MIDI grooves, coding the built-in plugins, all the songwriting features... half the price of Altiverb running the same code from the PT TDM days with some new impulses. Some companies are a little greedy I think.

 

But its a great Reverb right? I never used it are there any being able to compete with it?
Can you only compare convolution reverb against convolution reverb soundwise?

 

Well there is only one "right" way to deconvolve an IR - in other words an impulse from Altiverb will produce the exact same reverb loaded into Pristine Space, Logic Space Designer, TL Space etc. That's one of the fundamental limitations of convo verb, they don't have a "sound" and your options once the impulse is loaded are very limited, even adjusting RT60 simply stretches the impulse and is less preferable than just loading a longer one

So yes you could say that a convo verb is only as good as its library and Altiverb likely has the best one - however it's worth asking, if the impulses were sold separately for use in any convolution product, would they be able to get $900 for it?

 

You are mad there hasn't been new cracked versions so you made this thread?

 

is altiverb still an industry standard? ive seen plenty of people switching to other plugins like eastwest spaces 2

 

Huh? Version 7 XL is definitely out there...

 

It certainly is still industry standard in post production, I wouldn't be surprised if it's losing ground to competitors in music production though

 

Must be a nice job, traveling the world, capturing spaces.

 

i have sonsig, R4 and Blackhole .. i am happy with those reverb

 

I have worked with several convolution reverbs, besides a variety of algorithmics. To my ears there is no doubt that Altiverb is doing something in their convolution procedure (as well, perhaps, as the quality of their impulses) that makes it the superior reverb of its type. And no doubt it is a bit pricey. I admit I don't understand their marketing strategy.

It's unfortunate that you cannot load your own impulses the way Pristine Space et. al. does. It very much depends also on what kind of sound you feed into it and what kind of result you require or are looking for. It is exceptionally rich on acoustic instruments. Less so on purely electronic sounds.

 

You could get a lot done with those. I have a TC Reverb 4000, Lexicon PCM91, a pair of Lexicon 300's... so the software stuff is all kinda optional to me

Very interesting, this is what I was wondering - some kind of under-the-hood magic is the only thing that could justify that price tag IMO... I just can't imagine what it is. I have a few different sets of Lexicon 480L factory patch IR's, I will listen for differences later using IR1 or something.

 

It USED to be a nice job, but they have run out of nice spaces to record.
Now they send me to Springfield, Ohio to capture the essence of the sewer main branch feed.

 

They probably just get people who already live in those countries to record them and send the files!