Over the last few years PSP have quietly built up an excellent reputation for the quality of their plug-ins, and Easyverb looks set to continue that trend. As its name suggests, Easyverb provides reverberation effects, but aims to make life easier for the user by replacing most of the traditional parameters such as shape, diffusion, room size, pre-delay, and so on by just two main controls and a choice of algorithms. The two controls in question are Time, which determines the decay time and hence the 'size' of the space, and Damp, which lets you add high-frequency damping to taste.
plug PSP EasyVerb
The clever part is that each of the nine algorithms — Ambience, Room, Chamber, Club, Hall, Arena, Cathedral, Spring and Plate — has its own virtual acoustic construction, complete with different source and 'mic' positions, giving each one a completely different build-up and spread of early reflections, reverb tail and overall sound. A small icon is displayed for the current choice, which helps greatly in understanding the shapes or technologies being simulated.
Ambience provides a short burst of early reflections ideal for livening up drum sounds and the like without adding obvious reverberation, which can be difficult to create with reverb plug-ins that use a single generalised algorithm. Room mimics small rectangular spaces, while Chamber has a slightly more complex dual-sloped ceiling to provide a richer set of reflections. Club is a 'multi-room' with a small stage attached to one end of a larger theatre or club space.
Hall is one of the most complex algorithms, simulating a multi-sloped environment, but like all the others I found it to have a very smooth and non-metallic tail. Arena is a huge hemispherical dome with lots of early reflections but far fewer obvious late reflections due to the lack of hard surfaces, while Cathedral provides the very smooth decay of a huge angular space with lots of hard reflections. Spring models the lumpier dual-mono sounds of multi-spring studio reverbs very effectively, while Plate emulates the considerably smoother mechanical studio devices of yesteryear, and does so far more convincingly than the other native reverb plug-ins I compared it with, other than the very much more expensive Waves Renaissance Reverb.
To fine-tune your spaces there are the usual Mix and Output level controls, an Over LED indicator, and Proc(ess) bypass button, plus a very useful two-band shelving EQ section with fully variable turnover frequencies that lets you create darker environments or those sizzling special effects.
Easyverb comes with 51 useful presets, providing all the usual options from tiny rooms through to vast sacred spaces, with a fair sprinkling of extras including various ambiences, guitar amp springs, and plates of varying dimensions. None really take advantage of the EQ section, so there are plenty more new colours left to explore.
PSP have done an excellent job with their varied algorithms, and I judged Easyverb's reverb quality close to (although rather less versatile than) Waves' Trueverb, and significantly more smooth and dense than both TC Works' Native Reverb Plus and Wave Arts' Masterverb. The various rooms and halls are wonderful, even when compared with the far more expensive Waves Renaissance Reverb — an exceptionally good result for a $69 plug-in.
Donning my nitpicking hat, I did notice some tiny anomalies part-way into long Cathedral tails, and subtle whip-like flanging when testing the plate algorithm in mono, but these were subtle in most real-world situations, and in the extreme case of the Phat Drums plate preset the flanging turned into an appealing special effect. I did also miss having adjustable pre-delay, but no doubt that will reappear on PSP's forthcoming and rather more upmarket Mixverb.
Easyverb's rich and smooth sounds do require significantly more CPU overhead than most of its competitors, and this varies quite a bit between algorithms, taking between 4 and 9 percent of my 2.8GHz Pentium 4 processor at 44.1kHz. Those with significantly slower machines than mine should bear this in mind (PSP recommend a P4 2GHz processor or faster), but those wishing to work at 96kHz won't be in for too much of a shock, since Easyverb employs downsampling at all sample rates above 50kHz to keep CPU overhead within reasonable limits.
As you have probably gathered, I was very impressed with Easyverb, It's rare to find a plug-in that's as good at ambiences and small rooms as it is with larger halls and cathedrals, but PSP's individual algorithms do all this with panache, as well as providing far more realistic plates and springs than many other reverbs can manage. Overall, Easyverb certainly lives up to its name — it may be easy to use, but it's not hard to like it! From SoundonSound