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Mike Storey and His Plate Reverb (Video)
"Reverberation is the persistence of sound in a particular space after the original sound is produced," says Wikipedia. More often than not, in studio recordings reverb is added digitally; virtually every FOSS or proprietary sound-editing program has a built-in reverb utility. But what if you're the sort of purist who prefers the analog sound of vinyl records to the digital sound of MP3s or CDs? What if you're the kind of musician who records at the original Sun Studio in Memphis to get that original rock and roll sound? That may be overly picky for most musicians, but there are some who would rather sound like Johnny Cash than Flavor Flav, and they're the ones who are going to insist on real analog reverb instead of twiddling a setting in Audacity. There are many types of analog reverbs, of course. One of the purest types, preferred by many audio purists, is the adjustable plate reverb, and Jim Cunnigham's Ecoplate is considered by many to be the best plate reverb ever -- which brings us to Mike Storey, who wanted an Ecoplate-type plate reverb so badly that he spent eight months building one. He'll run your audio files through it for a (highly negotiable) fee, and maybe give you a bit of advice if you want to build your own, although his biggest piece of advice for you (at the end of the video) to think long and hard before you become a home-brew reverberator, with or without advice and components from Jim Cunningham.
And here I always thought the purest sound was live music.
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http://www.npr.org/2009/12/31/122114058/the-loudness-wars-why-music-sounds-worse?sc=nl&cc=mn-20100102
It's not that it's more pure. It's that vinyl is usually mastered correctly and thus sounds better.
I worked in a recording studio that had a nice, large, live room - no parallel walls (including the ceiling/floor). Very often we would use that room as the reverb in our mixdowns. A single high-end speaker in one end and a couple of nice mics on the other was the sweetest reverb you could get. If you have a good sized garage that is "bouncy", you can get a nice short verb out of that.
And they had 5 of the Ecoplate monsters. They have a sound all to their own - bigger, fuller, warmer, with more depth, that couldn't be duplicated any other way, and Warners had about every type of reverb at the studio. You have to sit in a control room, listening through great monitors like Westlakes, to hear what they do to vocals and drums. For voice, a good C12 and an Ecoplate will put a S$^t eatin' grin on any engineer's face.
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had a technique where he would pipe the audio from the recording studio down to a basement where loudspeakers played the audio and picked it back up on microphones and back to the control room. I always thought that it would be fun to try if I had access to a large warehouse or something.