Equipment Review
Product Reviewed:
Acoustic Mirror
Made by: Sonic Foundry
Cost: $299
Submitted by JR#97
Rating: 
Features:
DX plugin formerly known as Acoustic Modeler
Technical Specifications:
N/A
What I liked:
This is the best plug in ever invented. I can't believe what they were able to accomplish! What Acoustic Mirror does is "mirrors" sound impulses. In other words, it takes the sound characteristics of something and applies it to your wave file. The impulse can be of anything... a room, a chapel, etc. But also electronic devices such as mics, pre's, comps, amps, so on and so on. I found a website were some dude had made impulses of vintage gear. Neuman U87i, dbx160 "blue", Urei Comp, AKG C414, and the grand prizes.... Fender Bassman, Fender vibro deluxe, Marshall Plexi, Marshall JCM 2000, and a Matchless Chieftan. Just like that and you've got a some world class amps. Very realistic, very effective. I am still totally blown away out how real these sound. For ambience projects like film/video, this plug-in is a godsend. You can make your overdubs and sound effects sound like they're from location. Very cool.
What I didn't:
SonicFoundry products have ugly interfaces. I'm not fond of that bland grey background they seem to put on everything. The plug-in is a resource hog. Lots of latency. Not much I didn't like other than trivial things.
User Tips:
Make a minus impulse if you do any electronic device mirroring. In other words, cancel out the sound of your sm57 before you try and overlay a Neumann or Audio Technica 4050 or all you'll get is an effected 57. You can model comps, pre's etc, but what you're doing is getting the characteristics of the sound. you're not actually compressing or whatever. You need to compress AND THEN apply the dbx160 imulse. Same with guitar tracks. Record your crunch and apply the amp impulses to the wave file. What I did was use a direct box splitter. sent one line to the recorder from the di and the other to the amp for monitoring purposes. I then applied the proper amount of crunch via cake fx2 and then applied the Marshall JCM2000. I'm still grinning ear to ear.
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