A few days ago I read a great post on “worldizing” by Andrew Quinn. To be honest, I hadn’t heard that term before, but I understood the concept. Worldizing is an old technique used to replicate the quality of a sound played in a space or piece of equipment. To do this, the original recording is played back in an environment, and the result is recorded.

Today, convoluted reverb plugins like Altiverb, Waves IR, TL space, etc can achieve the same result with much less work. With these plugins, an environment only needs to be sampled once with an impulse response, and it can be used on anything you’d like. Andrew’s demo made me wonder how true convolution reverb is to worldizing. Is there a noticeable difference between the two?

To test this out, I decided to try out and compare both techniques on a few things. Continue reading →