"From beautiful natural chamber reverb to surging delay cascades, the rich sounds of the legendary Abbey Road Studio Two echo chamber are now at your fingertips, complete with Abbey Road’s long-lost S.T.E.E.D. setup."
Insanely cheap at the moment: only $29 (regular price: $199). Requires Waves 10.
And there in lies the problem. Caveat emptor - there have been huge numbers of reports of Waves Central breaking existing installations when any v9 and v10 plugins co-exist. There are ways around it, but I'd very strongly reccommend that if you will be mixing v9 and v10 to do a lot of homework before proceeding. I'm quite a Waves fan, but have decided to forgo any new plugins or updates until they fix Waves Central on this issue, so it can manage both versions on a system. I had a chat with Waves themselves about this - essentially they said it was a human resources problem at the moment.
Guy Rowland wrote: ↑Jul 28, 2018 4:11 am(...) And there in lies the problem. (....)
Didn't run into any such problem myself. I have a small handful of Waves 9 plugins, and yesterday I simply installed the latest version of Waves Central, then Waves 10 ("install without update" was the choice I went for) and finally added the Abbey Road Chambers license. Not a hint of problem at any time.
(I don't have any WUP, I must add, which is a state of affairs that Waves frequently informs me about — with the implied message that I tread dangerously —, but I simply keep ignoring those mails.)
Anyway, the Abbey Road Chambers work, as does every other Waves plugin I already had installed. And about those Chambers: a good plugin, but not a great one. In my opinion, that is. At $29, absolutely nothing to complain about of course, at $199 though, I'd be a bit annoyed with myself.
That rings a bell - I think a lot of the people who have had all sorts of problems didn't check "install without update", and ended up in a world of pain.
Good to hear you had a smooth experience with it but I'll confess I'm still wary on Windows, and hoping they'll make it more robust. It knows what licenses you have, it should therefore know not to update any v9 to v10 as a default.
I never got on the Waves bandwagon years ago after hearing and seeing all kinds of Waveshell issues that my composer friends had. Not really enthused about going there unless the plugin is massively better than others.
Charlie Clouser: " I have no interest in, and no need to create, "realistic orchestral mockups". That way lies madness."
Gosh this seems like quickly develop into a Waves thread rather the plug-in thread, but I'm caught in the WUP again having to pay almost $300 for what I really don't know. I'm slowly finding alternatives to all my Waves plug-ins and since most of what I have are emulations I'm pretty happy with the Slate subscription. If I wasn't feeling this way I would have bought the Chambers immediately though.
There’s nothing bad about it, Larry, quite the contrary, it’s just that I really did not need yet another plugin that can give me nice sounding chamber reverb. And since I’m completely immune to the deceptive sillyness that, supposedly, I now have “a bit of Abbey Road” inside my computer, that aspect of the product — its aura of myth and legend, if you will — doesn’t get me excited either. (Just as I’m deeply allergic to any device that claims to offer me a reverberant slice of the Vienna Konzerthaus, or ToddAO, or Teldex or whatever.)
The STEED feature is a nice extra, and genuinely *very* useful if you like that sort of thing, but again: if you’re after something like that, you can quite easily simulate it with a cleverly routed combination of (modulated) tape-ish delay, EQ and quality chamber reverb.
The plugin is quite heavy on the CPU, yes, but not as bad as several testimonials had me believe it is. Three, four instances is perfectly possible on my ageing machine. Maybe more. (Depending of course on whatever else I am using.)
Bottom line, for me: great-sounding chamber reverb with a hint of character that isn’t all that easy to find in (or recreate with) other reverbs, and with STEED added, you have an inspiring, fun-to-experiment-with combo of production tools.
With these Abbey Road Chambers, I have bought nothing that I didn’t have already in some form or other, but having it all available in a single, well-configured, high-quality plugin, is not without unique value and appeal.
There are not a lot of Waves plugins in my goto list. I love their effects stuff. I am still a sucker for Doppler, Doubler, Enigma, MondoMod, MetaFlanger, and SoundShifter. I also keep C4 and L2 at the top of the list. And I still think their Durrough meters are about the best out there (I used them for years in broadcast settings).
And one of the first studios in which I worked (learned?) had a real chamber. I loved the sound of the chamber. Prior to that I used spring and plate reverb, and there is nothing wrong with either one, but a real, physical chamber remains somewhat magical to me.
After listening to every audio demo I could find I'm really curious! I've downloaded the demo, and will take it for a spin later today. If it is even nearly as good as a real chamber I'll deal with the whole V9 vs V10 thing. Especially at $29.
