By Cory Choy

If you’re not familiar with Dear Reality — which makes binaural, ambisonics and multi-channel software tools —  here is a little background from a casual user/sound engineer who has mixed a lot of VR stuff. First, I’m going to provide a quick explainer about sound for VR, and then a little info about Dear Reality and its product dearVR’s origins. After that, you will have the background needed to fully appreciate this review of the new Exoverb reverb plugin from Dear Reality.

Sound for VR, very important in the era of Meta and Dolby Atmos, uses an ambisonics design and mix that is decoded to binaural. What is ambisonics, and why is it used? Developed in the 1970s in the UK, ambisonics, according to Wikipedia, “is a full-sphere surround sound format [containing] a speaker-independent representation of a sound field called B-format, which is then decoded to the listener’s speaker setup.”

In the case of VR, the speaker setup is headphones, and the ambisonics sphere is decoded for binaural playback. If you aren’t familiar with binaural, the layman’s way to think about it is that it’s a special format that, when experienced in headphones (it doesn’t work with speakers), makes it seem like you are actually in the space. Listeners can feel sounds not just to the left or the right, but in front, behind, above and below them – a 360-degree experience.

Up until the 2000s, binaural and ambisonics were niche offerings. After the Oculus, YouTube360 and other consumer-friendly 360 and VR experiences exploded onto the scene, binaural and ambisonics became incredibly relevant and important to the mainstream. As such, audio companies started developing new ambisonics microphones and plugins for DAWs to use to manipulate ambisonics mixes.

Sennheiser Ambeo

The Sennheiser Ambeo ambisonics microphone and its companion software, Ambeo Orbit, exploded onto the scene. They were slick, affordable, easy to use and made the technology instantly more accessible to sound engineers who were looking for out-of-the-box solutions that just worked.

Ambeo Orbit was especially popular because it had a simple, nice-looking GUI and did all the translation from stereo to ambisonics and back to binaural for you within a single plugin. No messy chain needed. In terms of quality, Ambeo was, in my opinion, middle of the pack, but in terms of ease of use, it was second to none. It also wasn’t overly processor-intensive. I used it back then and continue to use it today. Another really important thing about Ambeo Orbit? Sennheiser was giving it away for free! Wow.

Ambeo Orbit

From what I understand, the team that made the wildly successful Orbit software was spun into its own company, Dear Reality, which has since been developing its own suite of audio plugins. Dear Reality plugins have a reputation with sound mixers as generally easy to use, good-sounding and elegant, which is why I was so excited to try out the new reverb from Dear Reality, Exoverb.

What is Exoverb? Exoverb is a reverb that uses dearVR impulse response and “special sauce” to add “depth” (distance from subject) to the verbs. It costs $99. Let’s see how it does!

First impressions
The first thing I did was open up my DAW of choice, Reaper, then I loaded up a clean bit of VO recorded in the booth and threw it on.

True to form, the GUI looks nice, and there aren’t too many controls. The top of the pyramid is completely dry (no effect), and the bottom of the pyramid is completely wet. You can mix between early and late reflections quickly and intuitively, and I absolutely love this. This should be a standard for reverbs. One user note: The selection sometimes seems to get stuck, and occasionally I have to click off and on to get it to move again. Seems to happen on the corners and sides the most. Minor glitch, easy to get around.

Sounds/Presets/IRs
There are some nicely laid out menus with intuitive options here… and they sound pretty good! I would say it has a lot of the good qualities of one of my favorite verbs, ValhallaRoom. The controls do what you would expect, and there aren’t too many of them. I especially like the “Natural Ambience.”

One note: Decay goes from 50 to 150. Width goes from -1 to 1. I’m not really sure what the Decay numbers are referring to, and Width doesn’t work exactly the way I would expect it to. I would expect a 0 width to make the signal completely mono; a -1 width to be as wide of an image as possible, but flipped; and a 1 width to be as wide as possible, but not flipped. Instead, -1 is the least wide (but still not exactly mono), and 1 is the widest.

Aside from not really understanding what the numbers refer to (it would be nice to have some info displayed on hover perhaps?), I then noticed there is no help button on the plugin. I really like those. I would like a help button in the corner that shows a simple explanation of what each item does — or at the very least links me to a manual that does that.

Depth
Okay, this is the big one. This is what is supposed to make us feel further or closer to the subject in space. And it sounds… pretty good? As I turn it up, I definitely feel like there is more verb, and it’s being added in a different way than just normal wet or dry. But as I slide the knob up and down, do I feel like I’m moving further and closer to the subject? Not really? Kinda-sorta?

When using this on a subject in a short film to try to place the character in another room, the verb worked really well. (I used a “hall” verb because the character was in the hall.) But increasing the depth doesn’t increase the distance very noticeably. I don’t feel like this is putting me in the binaural/ambisonics space. Ambeo Orbit seems to do that a little better when added.

Hmm… now that I think about it, I kinda wish there was a “positioning” triangle I could use as well.

Conclusions
This is a really nice-sounding reverb. It is easy to use — the “pyramid” for wet/dry early/late is really quite genius — and the preloaded IRs are intuitive and great. Is it groundbreaking or does it do a lot more than other reverbs? Unless I’m missing something, not really. It doesn’t put me in the ambisonics/binaural/3D space as much as I was hoping.

Cory Choy is an Emmy Award-winning sound mixer at Silver Sound in NYC