Acoustic Mirror from Sony


Acoustic Mirror from Sony
by Jack Conrad
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Here's a natural reverb program that can make your music tracks, vocals, location sound effects all sound like they were recorded together in the same place, at the same time and with a believable spatial ambiance. The accurate recreation of acoustical signatures, or "impulse responses", is the basis of Sonic Foundry's Acoustic Mirror DirectX Audio Plug-in. This program will re-define your perception of reverberation when compared to the sometimes unnatural sounds of artificial reverbs.

Hundreds of hours were spent measuring the acoustics of different environments to produce this truly amazing collection of impulses that encompasses every imaginable reverberation source from concert halls and churches to caves and bathrooms, 400-foot long train tunnels and bridges to silos and forests. There are impulses for plates, boingy springs, vintage ribbon, tube and dynamic mics and modern microphones. Since these impulses are added to your sound files, you can audition them until you find the proper effect. Real-time auditions (before committing to processing the audio file) require the substitution of access speed for maximum CPU processing power with a concomitant, temporary loss of sound quality. However, once you've selected the best impulse, you reset the controls and process your files in full, highest quality audio.

One terrific feature of Acoustic Mirror allows you to capture impulses from any remote recording local and applied them to sounds not recorded at that location. This ability is of tremendous value for the seamless integration of different location sound bites into a cohesive sound image. Tones generated by this program are recorded from different points around the remote recording location. This raw data, when edited in Sonic's Sound Forge, is turned into useable sonic signatures.

I fed the installation CD-ROM into my PII, 400 mHz PC and stepped through the install process easily. The program loaded right into my Direct-X folder and was immediately accessible to all my music programs. The Sonic Foundry interface is so intuitive and easy to use, I was quickly looking for cheap thrills in no time at all. How about drums in a tunnel, drums at the Vatican, drums off a cliff! Once you've chosen an impulse, there are several parameters adjustable from the front page controls: Wet/Dry Mix faders control or the mix of unprocessed and processed; EQ Section, with it's high and low shelving filters, is used to tailor the frequency response of the impulse; Impulse Envelope is used to define the impulse length or create effects; Response Width controls the size of the stereo field; and Response Delay controls the amount of delay between the dry signal and the effected output. Since response delay can be a negative time value, you can create some interesting effects by having the effected signal precede the dry one.

Listing at $249 MSRP, Acoustic Mirror requires a DirectX host application to run and operates on Windows 9x, Windows 2000 or NT 4.0 platforms. Sonic Foundry is located at 754 Williamson Street, Madison, WI 53703. On the web at: www.sonicfoundry.com. You can order 24 hours a day, seven days a week at: 800-577-6642 or E-mail to sales@sonicfoundry.com for more information.

Jack Conrad, ex-studio musician, sideman and songwriter, has co-written hits for Three Dog Night, The Babys and Heart.

Edited by: Barry Rudolph

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