Over the last few years, LiquidSonics have developed some of the best sounding reverb plugins on the market. Highlights include Reverberate 3, a powerful, modulated dual-engine convolution reverb, HD Cart, an emulation of a classic Lexicon 480L expansion cartridge and Seventh Heaven, a highly accurate Bricasti M7 plug-in simulation. However, there’s one LiquidSonics reverb in particular which has become ubiquitous in post production studios all around the world, Cinematic Rooms Professional. With many audio post professionals now favouring this as their go to reverb for surround room simulation, there are several reasons why Cinematic Rooms Pro has developed such a dedicated user base. Let’s take a look at three of those reasons…

Excellent Fold-Down

Modern immersive workflows such as Dolby Atmos can pose some challenges when creating fold-down mixes in 7.1, 5.1 or stereo. Many surround reverbs exhibit phase problems when a surround output is down-mixed to a format with a lower channel count. Fortunately, Cinematic Rooms Pro doesn’t exhibit such problems since the plugin is optimised for fold-down performance.

One example of this is in the Crossfeed section of the plugin. Crossfeed control acts as a form of pan tracking. Rather than having the reverb remain uniform in all channels as the source sound moves around, crossfeed lets you set the delay, level and rolloff of the crossfeed reverb so that reverb in other channels sound further away or at different levels to the channels closest to the sound. Four different crossfeed processing topologies are available, selectable from the Settings menu when the channel count is 4.0 and above.

All crossfeed reverb is decorrelated for optimal fold-down performance. One crossfeed mode which can be particularly useful in this regard is ‘True-Stereo Plane L/R Propagation Only’. The plugin can be virtually divided into a set of true-stereo reverbs along the stereo plane lines. This could be thought of as a ‘multi true-stereo’ option. It is analogous to workflows using stereo reverbs for surround purposes (except the reverb is fully decorrelated so exhibits optimal fold-down performance without a need to manually tweak stereo instance parameters to decorrelate them).

Transparency

One of the key benefits which really makes Cinematic Rooms Pro sound as good as it does is its transparency. By this, we mean the lack of phasing from reflections. One issue which can be encountered with other reverbs when using existing recordings with reverb already present is the dreaded ‘room-within-a-room effect’. Cinematic Rooms Pro avoids this issue. What’s more, it provides settings which can help to combat phase issues from multiple source mics.

Decorrelation coding improves reverberation coexistence in a few specific troublesome situations, such as where mic bleed may be present in two or more sources resulting in delayed correlated content in various channels that could cause phase issues. Take the example of two mics picking up the same sound source. A spot mic and an overhead could easily be picking up some amount of the same source with a delay in the region of 1-20ms, which is the range known for causing very noticeable phasing and comb filtering effects. Typically, when fed into different instances of the same reverb, audible phase problems can arise in this situation. Cinematic Rooms Professional has the solution. If you put it on both channels, select the same preset, and hit play you’ll get the same problem – that is until you select a different decorrelation coding from the settings menu. All of a sudden, you have two acoustically cohesive signals that are fully decorrelated from each other. The summation of these signals is possible without any of the phase problems we previously experienced.

Keeping Up With The Latest Tech And Workflows

Many of the industry heavyweights have fallen behind the curve with their plugins over the last few years. With the introduction of Apple Silicon, a number of the major plugin developers took a very long time to release native versions, leaving many users with no option but to either stick with an older machine or to run their DAW and all plugins under Rosetta. Right from the time of Apple’s announcement to transition all Macs over to their own chip architecture, LiquidSonics posted and updated a blog which detailed their roadmap for Apple Silicon support across their range of plugins. Needless to say, LiquidSonics were one of the first plugin brands to release fully native versions of their entire product line-up.

Owners of Seventh Heaven, Reverberate 3, Lustrous Plates and Cinematic Rooms Pro saw the introduction of dynamics processing in 2022. In Cinematic Rooms Pro, compression can be used to thicken a reverb, making it sound even more dense in the initial phase as it will squash down any peaks and accentuate the speed of onset, whilst ducking is usually employed to reduce the weight of a reverb whilst a passage or phrase is playing so that the reverb only moves to fill space left in the mix. Ducking a reverb is a powerful tool if you need to prevent a reverb swamping the dry signal. It helps to keep the reverb tucked away until there is space in the mix for it to fill the space between phrases. This will often improve clarity and intelligibility.

Also on the subject of technology, innovation and workflows is track widths in Pro Tools. In the 2023.6 release, Avid introduced 9.1.6 tracks widths. LiquidSonics were quick to update Cinematic Room Pro to support this track width, providing full support for Dolby Atmos workflows.

Conclusion

We’ve touched on a few of the specific technical reasons why Cinematic Rooms Pro has found favour in so many post production facilities today. It’s an extremely powerful and feature-rich reverb plugin but ultimately, it just sounds really good! If you’re the type of user who just wants to recall and use presets in a reverb then you’ll be more than happy with the results Cinematic Room Pro provides. If, on the other hand, you like to delve in deeper and have control of a broad array of controls for complete tweakability, then this superb plugin from LiquidSonics has you covered.

For more information on Cinematic Rooms Professional, or to try it for free, visit the LiquidSonics website via the button below.