Sound ClipsThis is a collection of our official sound clips, to give you a first impression of what Room Simulation sounds like. Carefully selected from our algorithm kitchen, all clips have been commented by Wolf Buchleitner, our Maître de Cuisine himself. For those of you who'd like to share sound clips with the community, there's another sound clip section in the context of our forum. All sound files are available as both MP3s (192 kbps) - to have a quick listen on your PC, and uncompressed, high-quality downloadable WAV files - to be scrutinized in your professional monitoring environment. 035 The Trumpet Shall Sound
The Trumpet shall sound!
And it does exactly that. The trumpet does sound so perfectly wonderful, because our experienced trumpet player is trained to play with, and stimulate, the acoustics of Westminster Abbey. Note how he's pumping-up the ambience volume while blowing a continuous high A starting at 00:19. Well, nope. The horn section has been recorded with an iPhone, at a waiting room of a doctor's office, and it's even mono ...   041 Small Market Square
Here is another highlight from my Dialog Library: Small Square. Picture yourself on a small square in a picturesque old town, surrounded by historic two or three-storey buildings. Something like Naumburg or Göttingen market square, or Rostock Neuer Markt.
First eight bars is the unprocessed original recording, almost mono.
A/B surprise works best with small point-sized monitors like computer speakers or Auratones. Have fun.
 039 Atmo St. Peter
This is the first sound clip which makes me wonder whether there is anybody out here who likes digging through such off-the-wall stuff (like me).
Well, it's the noise of an amateur choir in their rehearsal room. They've just finished their final chord; next will be the choirmaster commenting something like: "Ok, that was fine. Thank you. We're finished for today. See you all on friday." The clip plays back-to-back both the dry and my St.Peter version.  040 Sewerage
Our Dialog Library, a comprehensive library of manufacturer's presets for radio dramas, include carefully-balanced separate initial reflections; which means that they all sound very lively and tangy for dialogs. Does this mean that I've changed my mind about separate initial reflections?
No way, I still hate separate initial reflections for high-quality music environments. In fact, dashing through all those classrooms, parking garages, and aircraft hangars makes me pretty much aggressive, as I feel like riding trough an Oktoberfest tunnel of horror. Turning to the Music presets now and then for recreation is like a sunrise to me - a divine revelation. Here is my favorite from the Dialog Library: the Sewerage preset Isn't it magic how all those acoustic will-o'-the-wisps from afar are being joined into a magic musical concerto? Not by some random generator in the algorithm, but simply by interference. Listen with headphones.  034 Choir in a Box
This is the beginning of a well-known Händel masterpiece (note to visitors: the one from the diagram, but all launch pads straight up here).
Picture yourself in a fairytale, where a curious little child has just opened a colorfully painted wooden box... Listen with headphones or point-source speakers.  036 Drum Kit in an Oil Barrel
People often ask us why Quantec room simulators feature one single algorithm only. No dedicated algos for plates, rooms, concert halls, or churches...
The answer is simple, it's solely fiddling about our room model's parameter set, which does the trick alone - always. Distinctive wardrobes, cardboard boxes, and more similar stuff has come within reach now, too. Here is an example of how much you can stretch and detune the QRS models' parameters. It's an old favourite at Quantec from 1982, but now, due to many new room parameters, the barrel sounds much more convincing than ever. Note the cymbal's natural resonance (the narrow-bandwidth tone that you can hear if you place your ear exactly sideways the cymbal), which hits one of the barrel's resonance modes near the end of the final reverberation tail.  017 Get Voice Out of Head
In the past, the QRS algorithm has been praised mostly for large rooms. Living rooms and wardrobes have just been additional side effects. I've changed that radically with the 249x. Now there is a comprehensive collection of state-of-the-art small rooms, too. As perfect as the large ones.
A classical situation: an amateur recording from a musician's living room. When monitored with headphones, most of the singers and instruments remain inside the listener's head. With the new small-room optimizations, the 249x simply puts the musicians from inside the head back to the living room, or the Irish Pub. With headphones, there's a pronounced in/out effect, while with speakers, there are just two distinct sounds.  032 3D Sound Example with HRTF
In the background of this song - from the Munich Singer/Songwriter Elke Brüsch ("Elle") - there is a noise-like sound effect circulating around your head. The first part is the original, the second is processed through a church-type ambience.
With church, the sound effect is definitely not as precise as dry. But the run of the curve hasn't changed much, and that's essential. Contrary to all other reverberators, the QRS algorithm has no disturbing (or interfering) first reflections, and so maintains the HRTF ("head-related transfer functions") 3D clues to a large extent. Listen with headphones.  028 Drum Sticks in Various Rooms Drums, Room Size 1E3, RT60 2.00sec (Concert Hall) (Filesize: 5MB) WAV (high Quality) Drums, Room Size 1E1, RT60 0.16sec (Living Room) (Filesize: 4MB) WAV (high Quality) Drums, Room Size 1E0, RT60 0.10sec (Cardboard Box) (Filesize: 4MB) WAV (high Quality)
This is the standard drumkit. First half of each clip is the original, second half is processed.
 037 Politician at Natatorium
Here comes a state-of-the-art version of a 1987 QRS/XL favorite: the ambience of the Müllersche Volksbad, a gorgeous Art Nouveau public indoor pool here in Munich.
To demonstrate the terrific reflection density of that site, the male voice will be followed by a sequence of 10 very sharp clicks of <100µs width. The resemblance to electrical spark gap bangs in a real indoor pool is amazing.  031 Vivaldi: Flute & Orchestra
This is a live recording with already beautiful reverberation from the concert hall on it. First the original recording without any processing.
At 00:17, the Yardstick steps in, with a much larger and deeper room. Listen to the clip several times, and try to concentrate on just one single instrument (or orchestra voice) for every repetition. Note that position, size, and transparency of the focused instrument does not change at all with the onset of excess reverberation. The demo clip ends abruptly after three ascending flute scales, to give you an idea of the quality of the reverberation tail. To replay the clip, pick the light player bar with your mouse near 00:22, then shift it back to 00:12. Headphones recommended.  023 Thrills with the Trills Organ Trills Room Size 1E4 (Filesize: 2MB) WAV (high Quality) Organ Trills Room Size 1E5 (Filesize: 2MB) WAV (high Quality) Organ Trills Room Size 1E6 (Filesize: 2MB) WAV (high Quality)
Here is an acoustic reconstruction of what has coined me when I was 13: lost trills straying like ghost lights through the dark, empty church - like gondola cabins on imaginary cableways. This is, was, and will ever be the heart of the QRS algorithm - Amen.
LOUD LOUDSPEAKERS PLEASE !!! A word from Wolf Buchleitner, inventor of room simulation: Few of you know that I got my pocket money as a young lad playing organ during Sunday services. My best memories come from playing evenings during the week when the church was dark and empty. I experimented with muted flutes and nasal reeds, pressing the keys slowly to expand the onset of attacks, and went wild with tremolo. My point is that it was through listening, and listening alone, intently and repeatedly, that I learned what true church reverberation sounded like.  022 Female Radio Speaker Laughing
This is an example of what can happen when trying to improvise a radio spot while live on air ...
The room is similar to "Living Room furnished", but I tweaked it for a pretty unobtrusive, neutral character. 249x is being turned on 00:15 for the first time, every sound effect before that time is no QUANTEC. Please listen with headphones (excess reverb with speakers).  016 Guitar Plays Carolan @ Concert Hall
Another amateur recording, which, as seen from the phase meter, is almost mono. The exposition is the original in-head-localized recording, while, up from it's repetition at 00:17, the recording is processed by the 249x standard "1E3 concert hall + audience" preset.
Pay attention to the physical size, and to the positional accuracy (slightly on the right) of the guitar. And yes: watch out for the noise from the brass-wound strings...  011 Huge 1E6 Room with Harp and Flute
This giant one-million cubic meter almost open space has inherent long internal delay paths, an excessively slow and gentle attack behavior, and almost horizontal "Hallelujah launch pads". On the 249x, we've drastically increased the "internal recording capacity" - entire musical phrases can be captured now, and will appear in the reverberation tail over and over again in endlessly scrambled sequences.
Watch for the noisy plucks from the harp, and for wind noise from the flute. If you have a spectrum analyzer available, you can see a lot of subsonic energy from 00:29 to 00:33. This energy results from the snapping strings when plucked heavily, which is not at their tuned natural resonances. Think of a slingshot shooting air bullets. If the room is able to respond to such low frequency components, i.e. has enough low-frequent room resonances ("modes"), it will preserve the disturbances from the pressure kick for some time. This is one of the clues which make people "feel" a large room. With small rooms, the modes are starting way too high to create this effect.  020 Brass Band
The final part of Charpentier's famous Te Deum prelude.
Sure, it's an overkill regarding the dry/wet balance. But, once again, a chance to grab a mouthful of wonderful room acoustics. Including a lost handclap near the end, which nicely flavours an otherwise perfect reverb tail: no artifacts, no coloration. Note: Please compare with the "041 Small Market Square" example on this page. Both sound clips are based on the same dry recording.  043 Cheap Verb
I'm a regular visitor of amateur rock, pop, folk, etc. festivals. Occasionally, for augmenting a dramaturgical highlight, the front singers ask for some reverberation on voice. As soon as the FOH engineer turns up the reverb, he gets frightened by a sound so embarassing unnatural, that she drastically cuts down the volume after a second or two. Many small venues with tight budgets completely do without artificial reverberation, or at least try to avoid it whenever possible.
My question was: is the QRS room simulation model flexible enough to emulate typical low-cost reverberators, too? - Just by tweaking the publicly accessible parameters, not by changing the internal algorithm structure... The answer is: it's easily possible to mimic those low-cost reverberation units from the local music store. The clip demonstrates, in sequence, the $99, $199, and $299 verbs from the Yardstick Music Library. Check the spaciality of the first one with headsets. It's the detuned correlation parameter and those very high room resonances that do the trick... Legal note: this is not a quote or commercial offer. It's not Quantec's policy to sell reverberation units for $99, $199, $299, or any other amount less than a few thousand US dollars.  027 Low Frequency & Subsonic
This is 2 seconds of pink noise, and 58 sec of reverb tail. You may listen with headphones or speakers, and, more important, you should watch it on your spectum analyzer during fadeout.
The important settings are: Size/model: 1E5 RT60: 10 sec RT60HI: x0.25 RT60LO: x6.3 BassBoost: +15dBu BassEdge: 63Hz  021 Female Voice with Audience
This is clearly one of my favorites. I've got hold of this gem while casually overhearing my son's Blackmore's Night live album (Richie Blackmore & Candice Night). The original is pretty dry - so I couldn't resist to relocate the event to a medieval minster.
Please listen with headphones (excess reverb with speakers).  018 Orchestra Blasts
1E4 with 2.8 sec - works as expected.
 033 Get Extreme Compact Mix Out of Head
I take my hat off to this highly talented sound engineer: he has created a masterpiece in a class of its own. This is the most dense mix I've ever run into. So it's a sacrilege: I try to get out of the head again what he has stuffed into so virtuosicly.
The clip starts with two chorus parts in a row. The 1st is the original dry mix, the 2nd starting at 00:12 is processed in its entirety by the Yardstick's 1E1 room model. Then, near 00:24, a verse starts, where I permanently switch from Dry to Wet and back again on every beat. With headphones, there's a pronounced in/out effect, while with speakers, there are just two distinct sounds.  012 Double Basses & Clarinet @ Taj Mahal
Isn't it wonderful to feel the clarinet's eruptions bouncing through the room? With such stunning transparency...
This sound clip is persuasive proof of my "launch pad" theory. The double basses are burdened with a lot of reverberation while bowed, but not so while plucked. The reverberation burden for the clarinet is medium to low, depending on how fast it's being played. At last, the clacking of the clarinet keys is so short that there's almost no reverberation on it. Well, with an RT60 of umpteen seconds for an orchestra piece, it's definitely far too much of a good thing. But I'm sure that you wouldn't have guessed the figure without counting out the final reverb tail, did you?  013 Sine Wave Sequences Sine Wave (Dry) (Filesize: 1MB) WAV (high Quality) Sine Wave (1E4) (Filesize: 3MB) WAV (high Quality) Sine Wave (1E6) (Filesize: 3MB) WAV (high Quality)
Experience the difference between 1E4 and 1E6, all other settings equal.
(Be careful, loud signals!)  001 Large Pipe Organ - Yardstick vs. Church
What is it: a majestic pipe organ chord of about 10 seconds duration, recorded in a church with nearly 6 seconds of RT60. I've tweaked the Yardstick's parameters to approximate the real church's sound as much as possible.
I split the chord into five pieces: four of them have been soft-gated for 2 seconds each, passed through the Yardstick, recorded until the end of the Yardstick's reverberation tail. 00:32 - The fifth clip - Yardstick in BYPASS now - contains the final 2 seconds of the organ chord, then the natural reverberation tail from the church. Caveat: the Yardstick input is a ramp-down of the gated chord, i.e. all pipes stop simultaneously, while the church is fed by the individual pipes loosing their air flow.  010 Classical Piano - Yardstick vs. Vintage QRS
My design target for the 249x series was to get rid of all the 1982 QRS metallicy, without sacrificing any of the spaciality the QRS algorithm is famous for.
 
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