Electronic Musician, US

“2010 Editors Choice Award! 5/5 Review Score! Aether is a reverb plug-in like no other. Offering over 40 adjustable parameter controls, many of them unique to Aether, it may be the most programmable reverb plug-in on the planet. But that wouldn't mean much if this processor didn't also sound good. No worries, Aether sounds incredible! Aether is an engineer's wet dream. The outstanding sound quality, deep programmability and great price make Aether the reverb plug-in to beat!”

Sound On Sound Mag, UK

“Overall I was deeply impressed by Aether's rich and versatile sound and it's the best sounding native plug-in reverb i've heard to date by a long chalk. This is a damn fine reverb and 2Caudio should be very proud of their first baby.”

Computer Music Mag, UK

“10/10! Editors Choice Award! Performance Award! One of the best algorithmic Reverbs we've ever heard! Fantastic Sound quality. Great for both mixing and sound design. Highly useful tail envelope controls. Excellent categorized presets. ER Space presets system is very cool.”

Recording Mag, US

“For anyone with at least a fast dual-core computer, I can recommend Aether without reservation. It's powerful beyond just about anything else out there, and gobs of fun to mess with. The universe of native reverbs has a new gold standard”

Sascha Dikiciyan, LA, CA

“Aether blew my mind. It is really the best algorithmic reverb out there. I will be using it on pretty much everything.”

Richard Devine, Atlanta

“Aether is stunning. A true work of art. It has completely blown me away in terms of depth, and sound quality. Highly recommended if your looking for something totally unique and out of the ordinary for reverbs. Simply Love It!”

Barry Jamieson, Invol2ver

“Aether has a sculptural quality to it that makes it instantly pleasing to hear. It allows you to perfectly shape the space around your sound, giving it an incredible and convincing ambience. It has given me extremely detailed and warm sounding reverbs that are hard to find this good, even from some of the best hardware and software reverbs available. Simply first class.”

Carlos Boll, Atlanta

“I've not been this happy over a plugin purchase in years. Now I can get rid of my old hardware units.”

Mark Russell, London

“I didn't even try the demo. It just looked great. I love Galbanum's Abstraction Sample Series so I knew it would be good. Aether looked so good and fitting for my current BBC TV project, "Kingdom" that I didn't really mind... So I bought it instantly. And now that I have it working, I can say, I love Aether.”

Nexusdawn

“Being somewhat a reverb junkie, I recently demoed and purchased Aether. In an ocean of VST plugins, and sea of reverb plugs, it can be very difficult to keep track of software that truly stands out. And in that sense, I would recommend anyone currently seeking out a reverb plugin, to take a look at Aether.I really appreciate its open, spacious, and smooth sound. Organic, breathing, and alive, with none of the metalicness found in many, if not most plugin reverbs on the market today. ”

Tom B-Rock, South Florida

“Hey, I'm a hardware LX fan, and I have quite a few units to compare Aether to. At first listen, I really think it could be favorably compared. I'm not just 'blowing smoke', as I'm of the belief that nothing sounds quite like a LX. This is a very clean-sounding FX unit. The algorithms are indeed as dynamic as advertised. There's none of that spring reverb-type of 'twang' hovering over them, as you might find in many other reverb simulators. From time to time, I've been drawn towards pushing it into 'unreal' territory. I keep coming back to the 'real' spaces, because they seem to envelope the source without overwhelming it.”

Adam Fitzgerald, Oxford

”I'm really loving this new verb, infact all other verbs at my disposal are now a bit defunct, I certainly won't be using Convolution verb which I had some samples of the big hardware verbs for, they pale in comparison. Your reverb sounds, beautiful, smooth, very transparant and requires very little processing to get it to fit in a mix. It is also very versatile and works equally as well for small, medium and long reverb. You've done a great job at keeping cpu consumption down without comprimising sound quality. All in all I'm very happy with my purchase. Cheers..Adam

Richard Morris, UK

“Fabulous reverb.....technical specs and formal applications aside. I find Aether is incredible for all sorts of maxed out creative atmospheres and other odd ball weirdness which I think it excels at, you can throw lots of stuff at it all at once and it keeps musical and coherent (or not)...dense, deep and with great perspective, you can make the sources just melt and bleed into the whole sound stage, I would even say it has the lush factor, warm and engaging, Aether can also generate a very intense and enveloping feeling to it depending what you are doing with it. ”

Daniel Hogan, Dublin

“I would like to take this opportunity to say how very much I am enjoying Aether. It is a teriffic product. I feel very lucky and privileged to have a VST of this quality, available to me.”

Yoko K, Washington DC

“This is the best freakin reverb ever!”

Jim Hurley, Sunnyvale

“My first impression is good going through the presets. The sound quality is excellent. I like how there are very few glitches advancing through the presets. Often in other products there is a lot of zipper noise as the delay lines get restarted.”

“Aether sounds great! I've already got all the Powercore, the UAD Plate 140, and the Oxford Reverbs but there's still a chance I may grab this anway. btw, your waveforms were the main reason I just bought Alchemy.”

Albert Einstein

“Space without aether is unthinkable.”

One year ago we released Aether 1.0 and said the following:

"First and foremost, Aether sounds absolutely incredible. We believe it is one of the best sounding reverbs on the market. Period. The rest is just detail."

A lot has happened since then and it seems the industry experts agree:

Aether is an award-winning, ultimate quality, self-modulating algorithmic reverb. It is the first product of 2CAudio, a new sister company of Galbanum. 2CAudio develops audio plug-ins for all of the various host standards and will focus on spatial processing, advanced creative effects, and other future-forward ideas. Aether 1.0.1 is available immediately for direct download via the Galbanum web store, and the "Buy Now" link above directs to this location.

Aether 1.5 is currently in the final stages of development and testing. This new version represets a major update to Aether and we are VERY excited about it! The 1.5 version implements some incredible advancements in areas of audio quality and functionality and is designed to compete directly with the absolute best-of-the-best at any price point. More information will be available shortly.

1.5 will be a FREE update to all existing customers. If you are a new customer, there is no reason to wait for the update. You can start using the award-winning 1.0.1 today, and will be updated to 1.5 when it becomes available. Aether 1.5 will also be available for the first time for the Digidesign RTAS platform, and 64bit VST hosts.

A fully developed 2Caudio web-site will be online soon. Please use Safari, Firefox 3, Opera 9, or IE 8 to properly view this site.

Unlike convolution reverbs, Aether is not a static process, and no two instances of Aether are ever exactly the same. The same is true in real world acoustical spaces as well: a building's acoustical character may vary slightly depending on several factors such as its current occupancy, and even more subtle things such as the current temperature and humidity. Thus, acoustic space itself is alive in the real world and is constantly shifting, morphing, and evolving to produce a complex array of potential impulse responses. A sampled impulse response of a real acoustic space, can be quite accurate for that particular moment, but it tells only part of the story. It is like a picture of a lake, versus the lake itself. A lake in the real world is unlikely to spontaneously develop waves the size of those found in the ocean, but it is never quite as still as a picture either. Aether's approach does not simply sample one static picture in time, but rather captures the complete subtly of the dynamic chaotic processes found in life and it retains all the detail and organic feel of these processes. Aether is alive!

Is worth 1000 words or in our case over 75 parameters. Aether's algorithm is conceptually divided into two parts: Early Reflections, and Late Reflections. The early reflections stage provides discrete delay patterns, which provide spatial cues that identify the nature of the given acoustic space. Aether mathematically calculates and subtly randomizes these ER delay patterns in pure floating point precision based on an incredibly complex algorithm that is designed to accurately mimic physical reality. This part of the algorithm consists of over 75 variable parameters which control the characteristics of the resulting ER patterns. In effort to maximize usability and user friendliness, this complexity is hidden from the user, and is instead wrapped into a single visual macro called Space Type. Thus the user does not have to deal with complex esoteric DSP parameters that only a physicist would understand and instead he simply chooses visually the type of environment he would like to use, and Aether makes the appropriate changes to the algorithm behind the scenes. 33 different default Space Types ship with Aether, and the interface provides five additional control knobs to customize their most important aspects. These controls allow adjustment of the size and geometrical shape of the Space Type default as well the positioning models used to determine where the sound source and listener are in the room.

In a real acoustic space there is no real distinction between Early and Late Reflections and the entire composite response of a real acoustic space consists of ERs, LRs, and frequency characteristics of the given environment. Thus in order to truly represent a given space accurately all three of these things should align to meet the characteristics of the acoustic environment. Aether offers an intuitive solution to this issue by providing a Link button that allows various parameters to be linked to the Space Type macro control. The additional ER controls, the LR controls, both set of controls, or none of the controls can be linked to Space Type. This way, when a user selects the "Telephone Booth" space for example, an appropriate size and reverb time can optionally be set automatically as well. Of course the linked parameters can then be adjusted by the user as desired and hybrid presets can also be developed by quickly combining the characteristics of two or more different space types. The end result is a balance of maximum ease of use and ultimate flexibility.

In addition to the intrinsic variance found at the very heart of the Aether algorithm, Aether also offers even more modulation possibilities to keep the verb from sounding dead and static. Two simple modulation controls are offered to invoke additional random LFO modulations in the Late Reflections section of the algorithm. The Modulation Rate and Period controls create musically-pleasing, randomly shifting resonances in the spectrum of the diffuse Late Reflections. Modulation period length extends to over eight minutes to allow for imperceivably slow shifts in the resonance of the reverb tail that guarantee the reverb sound will never be exactly the same over the course of an entire song. This completely eliminates the metallic sound which plagues many inferior reverb designs on the market.

Most software reverbs on the market are effectively Mono-to-Stereo processes and even when they are inserted on a stereo track, the stereo input is first summed to mono and then fed into the reverb. This is fine for mono sources, such as lead vocals that are panned dead center, but it is generally not desirable for stereo sources or for use on send busses where several panned instruments share the same reverb. The problem with this is that the stereo image of the source is collapsed and lost in the diffusion of the omnidirectional reverb. In such cases the spatial information and panning of the source is disregarded and all sources are assumed to come from one point within the reverb. Ultra high-end hardware companies have known this for decades and offer advanced modes including True Stereo and Dual Mono. Aether offers the same modes in software form, and goes one step further by offering "Cross" and "Width" controls that allow the reverb to blend seamlessly from Dual Mono, to effectively a Summed Mono input, to Dual Mono with reversed channels, and anywhere in-between. Finally, Aether also offers the traditional Mono-to-Stereo mode to reduce CPU usage when needed. For more information on this topic, please download the Aether Manual available in the Links and Downloads section above and read the "Understanding Cross and Width" section.

Reverb energy in nature decays exponentially - that is to say that it decreases rapidly after the sound source has stopped emitting sound. This is probably a good thing in nature as we would not want to hear a thunder boom continue on for weeks after the lightning strike! In musical applications, however, often we would like the reverb to remain higher in volume for a little longer as to augment the sense of space around a particular instrument. When using traditional exponentially decaying reverb designs, producers and engineers often resort to raising the gain of the reverb to achieve this goal. They soon realize, however, that the rest of mix gets muddy very quickly, and so they reach for their gates to compensate for this problem. This of course results in its own set of complications, and in the words of the immortal Wesley Snipes, is a bit like trying to ice-skate uphill. Aether offers two controls, Spread and Sustain, to keep the energy in the reverb tail higher a little longer than normal without muddying the mix and still allowing a natural decay down to negative infinity. Aether also offers an Attack control to shape the reverb tail's attack envelope to allow for slower build-up as is found in larger buildings. These combine to provide the ultimate control over the time envelope of the Late Reflections. For more information on this topic, please download the Aether Manual available in the Links and Downloads section above and read the "Understanding Aether's Time Envelope Controls" section.

And keep only what you want. Aether employs an industry first, advanced frequency dependent decay time scaling process that allows users to specifically sculpt and carve custom reverb damping curves with unprecedented flexibility. Aether divides the audio frequency range into three frequency ranges and allows each frequency range to have its own time scaling factor. To add further flexibility the "Q" or filter slope of both filter cut-off points is adjustable from 0.05 to 1.00 to allow extreme variance from gentle sloping curves to extremely steep ones. This allows the users to keep the mix clean in critical bands while allowing more space in others, and it allows preset designers to achieve both ultimate realism and intentional supernatural effects.

Don't be limited to only that which you can capture with a microphone. Why contract NASA to build you a $10 billion, 1000-meter geodesic dome made out of the latest nano-material buckyballs to provide a negative refractive index so that you can run your sine sweep impulse through it and capture a static IR? Instead, simply use Aether in some extreme settings to achieve the result you are after. Want a 120 second reverb that decays quickly in the mid range, but sustains more in the highs? Need a reverb that decays infinitely in a one octave mid-range band while all other frequencies fall always quickly, and at the same time reverses it's panning of the late reflections? No problem. Have it your way! You are limited only by your imagination.

Simply take a look at our interface and then compare to the competition. Aether's engineering robustness, precision, and sound quality are second to none, but who is to say that a reverb interface must be cold, sterile, and unwelcoming? We did not get the memo. Most of our customers are musicians, not scientists, and so as such, we took the liberty to have a little fun and get a little creative. We use things like color coding, macro controls, and parameter linking to make things intuitive and painless. We think you will appreciate it, and will find our efforts welcoming and inspiring. At the same time, we did not sacrifice any degree of control for the power user. Consider as one simple example, that behind our sexy and good looking semi-transparent knobs, lies a floating-point parameter system whereby you may text-enter any value you choose in full floating-point precision and this is the value that will be used by the algorithm and saved in the preset. Want input gain to be -11.347841 dB for some reason? Simply text enter it and that is what will be used. Or just move the knob by feel like a normal human. You decide. It's up to you.

Audio quality is the number one design goal of Aether, and we have taken a no compromise approach to achieve that goal. Having said that, we recognize that most users do not have a supercomputer in their basement and we are very well aware of the need to run the plugin on real-world systems of varying degrees of processing power. Aether's core DSP engine is highly optimized. Most of the processing code is written in low level assembly language and is manually tuned to squeeze the maximum power out of your existing system. Our development is Intel-only and this allows us to focus our energies on doing one thing very well instead of spreading our resources thin by trying to support too many obsolete platforms. SSE media acceleration instructions are used extensively throughout the algorithm. Additionally, the ER and LR sections of the algorithm may also be independently turned on or off to save CPU power when one is not needed. We've gone to great lengths to ensure that the plug-in takes as few cycles as possible so you can load more instances without sacrificing quality.

If you have just read all of the above detail and are left thinking "I just want a great verb sound! What do all these details mean to me? Do they really matter?" The honest answer: maybe not to you. For you, we have two things to say: First, as stated above, we believe Aether is the best sounding reverb on the market. Period. Second, did we mention the preset browser page? The preset browser page displays approximately 200 world class, professionally designed factory presets which are only a single click away and load instantly. When we say instantly, we really mean it--there is no waiting for an impulse response to load from your hard-drive. A quick scan through these presets will allow you to quickly find exactly the right sound you need for your application and using the browser page instead of the main page will keep you protected from becoming a Space-Time-Freq like the rest of us here at 2CAudio!