Reply to thread

Message: [QUOTE="Bombastus, post: 92009, member: 2178"] Eventide’s Blackhole places pre-delay before its reverb section, while diffusion alters the reverb’s character after the timing gap is set. Both controls can clean up a crowded effect, but they do it at different moments. Pre-delay decides when wet energy begins relative to the dry sound, whereas [B][URL='https://goldmidi.com/community/resources/reverb-diffusion-explained.72/']diffusion shapes the buildup of reflections[/URL][/B] once the reverberant structure starts developing. Treating them as substitutes can produce a reverb with plenty of separation but an ugly tail, or a beautifully smooth tail that still smothers the attack. [HEADING=2]Pre-delay protects the front of a sound[/HEADING] A conventional pre-delay inserts time between the dry event and the onset of reverberant energy. Increase it, and the original transient gets a cleaner patch of time before the room arrives. Reduce it and the wet signal begins closer to the source, so the attack and the reverb are more likely to overlap. The useful part is not a magic millisecond value. Listen to whether the dry consonant, drum hit, pluck, or other leading edge finishes its important work before the reverb starts competing with it. A longer gap can make an effect feel cleaner without shortening the decay or thinning the tail. Early reflections complicate the picture because some reverbs delay the whole wet path, while others expose separate timing for early and late sections. Direct sound and early reflections are treated as distinct perceptual components in [B][URL='https://aes2.org/publications/elibrary-page/?id=22239']spatial rendering work on salient room reflections[/URL][/B], which is a useful reminder that the first arrivals are not merely a quieter version of the late tail. Moving them changes the sense of space as well as the amount of clutter around the source. Pre-delay also should not be read as a literal distance meter. Artificial reverbs can hold back reflections in ways a physical room would not, and separate early or late delays make the geometry even less literal. Use the gap for timing and separation first, then judge whether the spatial impression still makes sense. [HEADING=2]Diffusion changes the texture after the gap[/HEADING] Diffusion works on a different problem. Once reflections begin, the control influences how quickly they lose their individual edges and form a denser field. Low settings can leave flutter, grain, or little clusters of echoes, while higher settings generally push the result toward a smoother wash. A long pre-delay cannot repair a coarse tail. It merely gives the coarse tail more room before it arrives. Likewise, high diffusion cannot create a clean gap around the dry attack if the reverberant signal begins immediately and already overlaps the source. The distinction becomes obvious with short, exposed sounds. Set a noticeable pre-delay and low diffusion, and you may hear a clean dry hit followed by a separate burst of grainy reflections. Keep the same gap and raise diffusion, and the arrival time stays similar while the material after it becomes smoother. Some algorithms blur even this neat separation. Eventide documents a case where setting pre-delay to zero can still leave audible delay because the diffusion and reverb-tail stages contain their own built-in delay. In that design, turning the pre-delay section off is not identical to leaving it active at zero milliseconds. [HEADING=2]The cleanest setting depends on what follows the gap[/HEADING] Start by deciding whether the front of the source needs more room. If the dry attack is being swallowed, move pre-delay while leaving diffusion alone. Once the entrance feels right, listen past it and decide whether the reverb itself sounds coarse, chattery, smeared, or suitably smooth. Long pre-delay can make diffusion problems easier to hear. The silence creates a hard boundary between source and effect, so a grainy reverb may announce itself more clearly when it finally enters. Short pre-delay can hide some of that texture inside the original sound, although the mix may become less intelligible in return. High diffusion can also soften the perceived arrival of the reverb even when the numerical pre-delay has not changed. A dense buildup has fewer obvious individual echoes announcing the start, while a sparse pattern can make the same timing gap feel more conspicuous. The clock value stays fixed, but the entrance does not necessarily feel identical. Keep decay, wet level, and size steady while separating the controls by ear. Adjust pre-delay until the dry event and the start of the wet field sit where you want them, then adjust diffusion for the texture that follows. If changing diffusion seems to move the onset itself, you are probably hearing an architectural interaction inside that particular reverb rather than evidence that pre-delay and diffusion are the same control. [/QUOTE]

Name