Flexible Real-Time Reverberation Synthesis with Accurate Parameter Control

Reverberation is one of the most important effects used in audio production. Although nowadays numerous real-time implementations of artificial reverberation algorithms are available, many of them depend on a database of recorded or pre-synthesized room impulse responses, which are convolved with the input signal. Implementations that use an algorithmic approach are more flexible but do not let the users have full control over the produced sound, allowing only a few selected parameters to be altered. The real-time implementation of an artificial reverberation synthesizer presented in this study introduces an audio plugin based on a feedback delay network (FDN), which lets the user have full and detailed insight into the produced reverb. It allows for control of reverberation time in ten octave bands, simultaneously allowing adjusting the feedback matrix type and delay-line lengths. The proposed plugin explores various FDN setups, showing that the lowest useful order for high-quality sound is 16, and that in the case of a Householder matrix the implementation strongly affects the resulting reverberation. Experimenting with delay lengths and distribution demonstrates that choosing too wide or too narrow a length range is disadvantageous to the synthesized sound quality. The study also discusses CPU usage for different FDN orders and plugin states.