Choosing a reverb is a bit like choosing a car. They will all get you to where you are going, but some are better suited than others for the road ahead. While there are certainly some crowd favourites when it comes to reverbs for post, LiquidSonics’ new Cinematic Rooms Professional is truly designed from the ground up with post professionals in mind. 

First Impressions

So what makes a great reverb? When it comes to choosing a reverb to use on a project, the two biggest factors are how it sounds and how quickly one can dial in the sound for a particular scene. Cinematic Rooms Professional checks both of these boxes.

The interface is VERY intuitive.

Luckily work has been picking up, so I had the opportunity to use Cinematic Rooms Professional on two new projects to really put it through the paces. While the reverb does come with 50+ settings designed for post, I generally needed to create my own setting for most scenes. With the first project, a feature narrative I am mixing in Atmos, I was able to dial in a setting for all 46 scenes in under two hours.

The interface is VERY intuitive. You may not have as many physical knobs as some other reverbs out there and some may use a different name, but once you spend time dialling in the first room or two, it starts going quickly.

Size and Reverb Time are probably the most universally recognisable settings to reach for and do what you would expect. Other knobs like Proximity, Reflectivity and “Refl / Rev Mix” are exceptionally helpful to quickly tune in the sound of a room to match picture. 

Granular When You Want It To Be

The above are a starting point. There are a number of sub-settings to really dial things in with the professional version. Typically when setting up a project, I insert an EQ after my reverb to roll off some high frequencies and make any other tweaks. With Cinematic Rooms Professional, it includes an independent eq section built-in for both the reflections and reverberation. This is great because sometimes you might want to keep more of the high-frequencies from the reflection, but less from the reverb.

Once you have the room defined, I found myself reaching for the treble and bass contour as well as the low boost to take a little edge off or tame some excessive boominess.

What Is X-Feed?

X-Feed is the control that sets CInematic Rooms Professional apart from any other reverb on the market. X-Feed controls the cross-feed of the reverb and reflections between the various channels when mixing in surround. What this does is controls how localised the reverb is with regards to the panning location of the signal feeding it.

If a signal, say dialogue or footsteps are panned center, you can localize the reverberation to only emit from the center speaker or choose how it spreads around the surround field. Inversely you can mute the center reflections or reverb under settings if you wanted to, for example, keep the music or ambiences out of the center channel.

With most reverbs, you can’t control this cross-feed, which tends to lead to a blurred soundfield, especially when you start sending multiple sounds to the same instance.

Ready For Atmos

With major content providers like Netflix and Amazon Prime jumping on the Atmos bandwagon, it is more important than ever to choose plug-ins that support working in Atmos. For my workflow I am using six 7.1.2 instances of Cinematic Rooms Professional, two each for the dialogue, effects and music respectively which feed the 7.1.2 beds. The first thing I do when setting up a project is go through the whole film and set up each scene, checkerboarding between an A and B reverb for each stem/bed.

If you want to take it even further, Cinematic Rooms Professional supports up to 7.1.6 and using some aux tracks can route those additional channels as objects for that extra level of control. Even more than when working in 5.1 or 7.1, the ability to control the cross-feed becomes even more important. As you move objects through the overheads or around the surrounds, you can really localise the reverb (when you want to) or let it fill the room.

Great For Music Too

In addition to working well for dialogue and effects, Cinematic Rooms Professional can hold its own on a music track. There are also a number of Hall and Room settings that sounded pretty great without having to do much (if any) tweaking to the presets. Also with more people mixing music in Atmos, This is one of only a few reverbs available that natively supports the format.

The quality is on-par or better than its competitors, but hands down wins for being able to quickly and intuitively dial in a space.

Final Thoughts

At a price of $399 for the professional version, it is a must-have for anyone working in post sound, especially if you are mixing in Atmos. The quality is on-par or better than its competitors, but hands down wins for being able to quickly and intuitively dial in a space.

It may be a small detail, but one of my favourite settings is the ability to scale the user interface. When working with three monitors in the studio, 100% makes it easily readable, but when working on a laptop, the 70% make the plugin interface more manageable when working on a single 15” screen.

I would say the only thing I would like to see, which I could see them adding in a future release, would be additional presets for post. I would personally like to see some specifically for exteriors. That being said, once you get used to the interface it is quite easy to dial in your own and save them as user presets. In the meantime, I have included a set of presets I have created that worked for me.

Like any other plug-in, the best way to decide if it is right for you is to try it out for yourself. Luckily, LiquidSonics offers a free trial so you can take it for a spin. You won’t be disappointed.

Want to learn more about Cinematic Rooms Professional? Be sure to check out their blog.

Audio Examples

Below are binaural versions of some Dolby Atmos examples using Cinematic Rooms. Use headphones.

Download 7.1.2 Wav files of these examples here.

If you want to download the presets Korey created for this review you can get them here.