Is LiquidSonics’ Lustrous Plates Surround the best reverb to hit multichannel audio and stereo production? Damian Kearns immersed himself in the software to find out how and if surround sound plate reverb can work wonders for creative people. 

Why Multichannel Reverb?

Multichannel Reverb units and software are critical to Post Production Audio and vital in modern surround music mixing. They define the space, augment the colour and enhance or change the mood of the input sounds they encounter across the immersive audio image. When designed properly, the reverb software folds down nicely from its highest channel count to stereo without adding level bumps and suffering from cancellation sinkholes in the middle of the sound. 

Impulse Response-based (IR’s) reverbs have evolved significantly over the years but when we think of these sorts of reverbs, the tendency is to think of using them to emulate ‘real world’ spaces and devices. Lustrous Plates by LiquidSonics upends that notion by providing the audio community with a truly scintillating tool to push our creativity to new, exciting frontiers, by reengineering resonating sheets of metal into pure, glistening sonic gold. 

What is Plate Reverb?

Plate Reverb is a German invention, conceived at the Institut für Rundfunktechnik GmbH (Broadcast Technical Institute) in Nuremberg in the 1950’s. The institute developed the design with a company called Elektromesstechnik (shortened to EMT!) which resulted in the 1957 release of the EMT 140. 

Plate Reverb is a result of ‘electro-mechanical reverberation’, created by suspending a large metallic sheet - usually steel- inside a steel frame. A driver attached to the plate excites the plate into motion, and as sound moves through it, the plate flexes. Contact mics pick up this motion and through a process known as ‘transduction’ (converting one form of energy to another), the acoustical energy is conveyed as electrical energy into our audio systems. The frequency dispersion characteristics of individual plates govern the time it takes for various frequencies to travel through the plate. This creates the overall colour of the plate. Certain frequencies travel faster than others across the resonating surface.

The recording school I attended had a physical plate reverb mounted in the ceiling of an office adjoining the student control room and I spent a lot of time ‘exciting the plate’ before my career started. It turns out that the head of the school used to tune plate reverb units as a freelance gig back in the 1960’s so our mono plate reverb was always in a good state of repair. This is when I grew to love plate reverb and have used it many, many, many times since on everything ranging from music to film to tv to web advertisements. I’m a fan!

Plate Reverb tends to be bright in character, owing partly to its near instantaneous onset (very little delay between the input sound and the commencing of the plate resonating in sympathy)  and more often than not takes about 5 seconds to decay by 60dB (RT-60 is the technical term). These decay types do vary across different types of plates depending on age, materials used and suspension and tension. A dampening plate is an extra plate layer that can be used to alter this decay time because as we know, not everything is served well by a 5 second reverb tail. 

Plate Reverb, due to its inherent size and mass, can also be very full bodied and this will lead to bass build-up if the operator isn’t careful with the signal supplied to the physical unit. There’s definitely an art to playing a plate well.

The Lustre of LiquidSonics

Lustrous Plates Surround by LiquidSonics isn’t just an upscaling of the original stereo Lustrous Plates. Supporting channel widths up to 7.1.6, the algorithm was substantially modified from stereo to create what I assure you is a deeply immersive and surround reverb experience, easily modifiable through a well thought out set of software variables. I tried Lustrous Plates Surround on voice, music and sound effects over the past month and I couldn’t find anything I didn’t like the sound of. The adjustments are intuitive, simple to make and build on the original Lustrous Plates stereo software. 

Surrounded By Plate?

I’m a huge fan of another LiquidSonics offering, Cinematic Rooms. You might have stumbled across a video of me heaping praise on that software, all of which was unscripted and unprompted by the way. As a perfect partner to Cinematic Rooms, Lustrous Plates Surround adds 10 impeccably modelled plate reverb types to my sonic palette which I think is a critical building block for quality mixes. 

I recently mixed all of the theme music cues for a broadcaster’s Olympics production and wished I had had a surround plate reverb for some of the more percussive elements in the tunes. I went back and inserted Lustrous Plates Surround into a mix just to hear what it might have added, If I owned the software during the mix sessions. Upon listening, there is a sheen but also a depth this plugin brings out that is breathtaking and it seems to finish off the mix balance in the most satisfying way; glueing everything together. LiquidSonics’ Temporal Acoustic Spectral Mapping, combined with their Fusion-IR Synthesis tech results in the most realistic sounding plate models I own. The ‘Terrific Ten’ as I like to call these plate models, will be on my future surround music mixes for sure.

Controlling the Surround Sound Plate

The intrinsic crossfeed, bloom, pan and delay controls offer greater detail work over the original Lustrous Plates and are well worth the cost of the upgrade. Let’s break down some of the surround version’s tweaks.

The channel levels controls are vital for 5.1 work since a lot of the time, especially with voice, we tend to want the centre a little dryer than the sides or vice versa. A little less up front pulls us more towards the surrounds which I found very immersive and surprisingly phase coherent, given the nature of reverb. The Position knob allows the user to offset the image left or right and is a straight up level adjustment.

Moving to the Delay tab, the front, rear, centre, side and elevation can all be delayed independently by up to 500 milliseconds. I found I could create an incredible ping ping plate effect by delaying the front and centre while keeping the rear at 0.0 ms. Things resonated to the back and then bounced to the front. 

The stereo bias control in this tab is unique in that it isn’t level control, it’s a predelay. Since we perceive sound as coming from the direction we hear first, this position function doesn’t need to alter level to achieve positional bias. Test it out and look at the output levels. You’ll see they stay the same. 

The Crossfeed tab controls our plate’s perceived density. The crossfeed delay and density add width and depth to the sound by controlling how much bleed happens between right to left and left to right. I found it opened up the middle of the image a bit as I played around with it and really added a lot of depth. It also seemed to have an effect on bass build-up. I felt like higher crossfeed delay values reduced the mud that can creep in when a bass-heavy sound is fed into a plate. 

The Bloom Controls offer a staggering amount of variation over the reverb’s output. In essence, the Bloom controls “how quickly the reverb develops from the initial onset to its maximum level,” according to LiquidSonics. I found that by turning up or off one of these two knobs could take me from a tight sounding plate to the bottom of a well in no time flat. 

The equalisation is a necessary component of the Crossfeed tab, as it fundamentally shapes the timbre of the reverb. Clicking on the little filter slopes under the word ‘Equalisation’ give access to slope depths from 6-24 dB per octave.

If at any time you’re having trouble remembering what any parameter of Lustrous Plates Surround does, click on the little question mark at the top right corner of the plugin and engage “Interactive Assistance” from the dropdown menu. I wish all software developers put as much thought into their ‘Help’ menu as LiquidSonics. 

My Thoughts?

Wow! Finally, an incredibly usable, great sounding plate reverb for surround sound production. It doesn’t get better than Lustrous Plates Surround. The plates all sound fantastic. The UI is gorgeous, configurable in dark or light and scalable to 200%. The surround parameters have clearly been refined over the course of months, by consulting with experts in the field, and all the parameters are automatable. There’s a PC version and a Mac version available. As well, the stereo version of the plugin comes along with the surround and can either operate in True-Stereo or through the surround algorithm. And, the price is inarguable for the value this software brings with it. I am beyond impressed… I’m a proud owner. 

If you’re mixing music or serious post projects and want to try this for yourself, there’s a 14 day fully functioning demo available. Here’s the info:

Download here for Windows

Or here for Mac

Here’s the User Guide

The Lustrous Plates Surround trial is available for free on macOS and Windows. Just enter the iLok code below in iLok License Manager and install the plug-in:

8344-2293-5686-5987-0130-8697-5214-88

After 14 days a full license is required to continue using the plug-in. 

And here are the tech specs. 

Lustrous Plates Surround supports all major DAWs on Windows and macOS subject to the following:

• iLok 2, iLok 3, iLok Cloud or iLok machine activation

• Windows 7 and above

• OS X / macOS 10.9 and above

• VST 2.4, VST3, Audio Unit and AAX Native plug-in formats

• 64-bit DAWs are required (32-bit is not supported)

• 800 MB hard disk space is required

• At least 8 GB of main memory is recommended

• A dual core i5 processor or above is recommended

Whether you operate this in stereo or surround, I hope you find Lustrous Plates Surround as brilliant as I do. To purchase this or any other LiquidSonics product, head over to their online store. For more information, check out their website.