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Message: [QUOTE="Bombastus, post: 91296, member: 2178"] Reverside separates surface absorption, distance-dependent air absorption, and room-content absorption instead of treating every loss of reflected energy as one damping control. That distinction changes how you shape the Early Reflections engine because each mechanism responds to a different part of the virtual room. Surface behavior is handled through wall absorption and the Material filter, while air loss depends on how far reflected sound travels. The Fill control represents absorption caused by things inside the room, such as furniture or people, rather than by the walls themselves. Those controls can affect similar parts of the spectrum, but they are not interchangeable. That room model sits underneath [B][URL='https://goldmidi.com/community/threads/devproaudio-shipped-reverside-1-0-1-with-lower-gpu-use.76670/']Reverside's spatial reverb architecture[/URL][/B] rather than the later performance fixes in version 1.0.1. The useful part for sound design is knowing which physical behavior you are changing before you reach for another EQ or damping move. [HEADING=2]Surface absorption changes with every reflected bounce[/HEADING] Wall absorption describes how much energy a reflection loses when it interacts with the modeled room boundaries. Reverside pairs that behavior with its Material filter, which provides frequency-dependent shaping for those surface losses. A reflective surface can therefore preserve more energy while a more absorptive setup removes more of it as reflections continue to bounce. The number of bounces matters. DevProAudio specifically describes the surface effect as depending on how many times the reflected path encounters the modeled boundaries, so a reflection with a longer bounce history can accumulate more material-related loss than one arriving after fewer contacts. That is more specific than putting a static tone control across the completed reverb output. The Material section is also easier to misunderstand than its preset names suggest. Developer guidance says it should be treated as a general finishing of the room rather than a system where you separately load one material for the floor, another for the ceiling, and another for each wall. The material presets describe the surface character handled by that single processing section. That makes [B]frequency-shaped surface absorption[/B] useful when the room should lose different amounts of energy across the spectrum as reflections accumulate. It is not the same as simply making the reverb darker after generation because the modeled loss belongs to the reflection process itself. [HEADING=2]Air absorption follows distance instead of wall contact[/HEADING] Reverside models another loss mechanism through distance-dependent air absorption in the Early Reflections engine. High frequencies are attenuated according to the propagation distance of the reflected sound, so longer paths can lose more top-end energy even when the wall settings themselves remain unchanged. That separation matters when you change room dimensions or source and listener positions. A reflection can travel farther without necessarily hitting a more absorptive surface, and Reverside can respond to that extra distance through its air-related decay behavior. The result is a different control problem from wall absorption, where repeated boundary interactions are the important factor. This also explains why increasing a generic damping value would not reproduce the same internal logic. A fixed tonal cut would treat short and long reflected paths alike, while distance-related air loss gives the geometry a role in how high-frequency energy survives. Reverside introduced explicit distance-dependent high-frequency attenuation for early reflections before the 1.0 release. The practical consequence appears most clearly in larger virtual spaces. Increasing dimensions can affect reflection timing and path length while the air-loss behavior changes the spectral result of those longer journeys. You can therefore make a larger space feel different without pretending that its walls suddenly changed material. [HEADING=2]Fill represents what occupies the room[/HEADING] The Fill control handles a third phenomenon that the Material section does not. DevProAudio describes Fill as absorption caused by stuff inside the room, including furniture and people, which separates occupancy from the acoustic behavior assigned to the room surfaces. That distinction fixes a common conceptual mistake. Loading a carpet-like or wall-oriented Material setting does not mean you have also modeled a crowded studio, furnished theater, or packed room. Surface treatment and interior contents can both reduce reflected energy, but Reverside gives them separate roles because they represent different causes. Fill therefore becomes useful when the dimensions and surfaces already feel right but the room still behaves too empty. Raising interior absorption can change the reflection field without requiring you to darken every wall or shorten the virtual space. You preserve the geometry while making the environment less acoustically bare. The three controls also give you a cleaner way to diagnose an over-bright or over-live early field. Change Material behavior when the boundaries are wrong, distance-related decay when long propagation paths retain too much high-frequency energy, and Fill when the modeled space needs more internal absorption from its contents. Each move changes a different assumption inside the room model rather than using one damping knob to solve three separate problems. [/QUOTE]

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