Surround Hall; Chamber & Surround Chamber; Plate & Surround Plate; Ambience & Surround Ambience - Lexicon 960L Owner's Manual

960L

Surround Hall

Surround Hall is a surround version of Random Hall having
16 delay voices, one for each possible channel pairing (LF
to C, C to LF, LF to LS, etc.). It may be useful for Foley work
by giving a more precise sense of a space's size.
Chamber & Surround Chamber
Chamber is a complex miniature-space effect resembling
an echo chamber at its smaller settings and, at its larger
ones, a small performance space with a more rapid build-
up of reflection density than Random Hall. Reverberant
tails are randomized.
Plate & Surround Plate
The Plate programs mimic the sounds of metal plates, with
high initial diffusion and a relatively bright, colored sound.
For this reason, they are good choices for percussion. They
are designed to be heard as part of the music, mellowing
and thickening the initial sound itself. The Plate sound is
what most people associate with the word reverb, and it is
useful for all popular music.
Ambience & Surround Ambience
Ambience generates the strong reflections that appear in
the first few hundred milliseconds of the reverberation
process. These early reflections become part of the direct
sound without coloring it, giving it better blend and a def-
inite position in space and conveying the impression of a
hall surrounding you while the music is playing. It lends
warmth, spaciousness and depth to a performance.
When a signal is supplied to a single input of Surround
Ambience – for example the left front – the program gen-
erates early reflections first in the front left and right output
channels. If the FSLevel control is set to maximum, reflec-
tions are then generated in the left rear and right rear out-
put channels. FSLevel and FSRolloff control the relative
level and frequency response between the front early
reflections and rear early reflections. In a large room the
rear early reflections could be perhaps 3dB less in total
level, and somewhat more ro l l e d - o ff in fre q u e n c y
response. (However, it is unlikely that these differences are
audible in practice.)
When a signal is supplied to a rear input, for example the
the Left Surround input, the primary early reflections will
come from the left surround and right surround outputs,
and FSLevel and FSRolloff control the level and frequency
response of the early reflections that come from the front.
Thus with surround ambience the amplitude and frequen-
cy characteristics of a large room can be generated.
The Ambience algorithm is very useful for adding a room
sound to recorded music or speech, making it easy to
match a studio recording of dialog to a typical room envi-
ronment. At delay settings of roughly 100 to 500 millisec-
onds, it can be used to simulate the ambience of very
small rooms without the colorations often found in actual
spaces of that size. When set to deal with the first 50 m/sec
of the signal, the range perceived as being part of the ini-
tial phone, it can be used to realistically add distance to a
close-miked signal without diminishing clarity. If an ensem-
ble has been recorded with close miking and pan pots,
Ambience can provide the missing blend and depth,
increasing apparent distance while preserving the appar-
ent positions of the instruments. It is also useful in matching
a closely miked accent microphone to the overall ambi-
ence of the recording; this allows a soloist's level to be
increased without changing the apparent distance.
The Ambience algorithm does not include extensive provi-
sions for modifying the characteristics of the late reverber-
ation; the Shape, Spread, and Bass characteristics are
fixed. However the apparent size of the late reverberation
is adjustable with the size control. High settings of the Size
control can be very effective at generating the sound of
a large space with high clarity. The lack of the BassMult
control can be compensated by adding a low frequency
shelving boost of 2 to 6dB below 200Hz to the reverbera-
tion sends or returns. This type of boost is often very useful
when working with music that includes both vocals and
instruments.

Ambient Chamber

Ambient Chamber is a hybrid of the stereo Ambience and
Chamber algorithms. It applies front left, center, and right
signals to the ambience algorithm and front LCR plus rear
signals to the chamber algorithm. This can be used to
change the apparent microphone distance of the front
signals or to provide different acoustics for the front and
rear (e.g., a stage house in front and a more reverberant
auditorium behind it) that join into one integrated rever-
berant field.
The advantage of Ambient Chamber over the Ambient
Surround is that there is more control over the late rever-
beration, with the inclusion of the Shape, Spread, and
BassMult controls. However the early reflections generat-
ed by Ambient Chamber are more limited. There are no
early reflection generators for signals coming into the rear
inputs of the Surround version of this program, and the
early reflections generated by the ambience section of
the program are directed only to the front three loud-
speakers. Later reverberation is provided to all the loud-
speakers, and all inputs will generate appropriate late
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