Review by George Shilling
It has been some years since I reviewed a new version of Altiverb. Audio Ease have however continued during all this time to quietly add new impulse responses. And these are available free to users of this grandaddy of convolution reverbs. Designed for music and post, there are improvements in this major new version that will please both camps.
Creaky
The last version had been doing great service but was starting to look a bit creaky, with audio always a little slow to react to parameter adjustment while calculations were going on under-the-bonnet. It still needed Rosetta to run on Apple Silicon, despite the fact we are up to the third iteration of these chips in Macs now. And it lacked proper support for Dolby Atmos.
Zipper
So, primarily, version 8 remedies these shortcomings. There are no ‘zipper’ effects when making adjustments, everything is smooth. You used to have to wait for a number of seconds for a light to stop blinking when adjusting the decay time. Thankfully, that is now instant. There is native support for M1 to M3 Macs. And there are now (for those prepared to splash out on the XL version) Dolby Atmos impulse responses. Wonderfully, Audio Ease had been preparing for this since they started collecting impulses more than two decades ago. So they rummaged through the archives and managed to put together Atmos versions of almost all their existing presets. Remarkable.
Wooden
There are some great new impulse responses too. There’s a lovely warm sounding wooden church used in the demo video, a Tesla car (of course), and I really like the natural sound of The Loft (RT 1.1s), a club in Amsterdam, which by the look of the accompanying panoramic video has great views too!
Cloud

One intriguing new feature is Cloud Size. This governs the spread of the effect around point sources when panning, and allows you to define the size of the reverb cloud around an object. The reverb can follow objects being dynamically panned, and will even follow multiple objects in the soundstage. New output level meters allow you to tweak level and delay separately for each output.
Baby
Of course, all the graphics of the interface have been reworked and it all looks a lot neater now. It’s still black, but has now got a modern Baby Audio style matt finish to the look, rather than the glossy and shiny appearance of old. You can rescale the window, but are locked to preset sizes rather than it being a continuous zoom. The browser is improved. It still appears in a completely separate window, but there is now a featured row of buttons at the top to find similar settings to the loaded IR. You can choose by the type of room, those with similar IR graphs, or those with similar RTs to filter the selection.
Lazy
Wonderfully, with version 8 you can still load any ancient session which used a version of Altiverb from 2006 onwards, and it should load and sound the same. You don’t get asked about file locations during install but it’s easy enough to change folders in the preferences section of the plugin. I quickly found the old IRs I’d made or downloaded (on my samples volume) and they soon loaded up and sounded as good as ever, including one of my old Orban spring reverb which I’ve since sold. Mainly due to laziness, I probably used the IR more than the real thing…! And I still love the IR I found online years ago of a Master Room Spring reverb – I remember using a real one many years ago at Pink Floyd’s Britannia Row Studios, and the IR still has the magic!
Jet
It’s always fun imagining you are in the Sydney Opera House or the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, and I have fond memories of making an album at Allaire Studios in upstate New York – no longer open, and working at Jet Studios in Brussels. There are multiple captures of different spaces around the studio buildings. The library of IRs is fabulous, with plenty of studios, scoring soundstages, churches, concert halls, oddities like Bob Marley’s Bathroom at Island/SARM, and loads of confined and unusual spaces beloved by post engineers. For existing users there is of course an upgrade price; it’s not cheap, but for a serious tool of the trade this is an excellent new version of an old workhorse that sounds as great as ever.
Pros: Apple Silicon support, Dolby Atmos for almost all IRs, smooth operation, new browser and better search.
Cons: No iLok cloud, window scaling not continuous, some features only in the XL version, expensive to upgrade.
