New Software Review: Cinematic Rooms by LiquidSonics

Cinematic Rooms employs LiquidSonics’ powerful X-Feed technology for even deeper control of your space.

I know, I know… do we really need another reverb plugin? With so many options on the market to fit any possible application, it’s hard to imagine a producer or engineer whose reverb needs aren’t being met.

Having said that, I’ve never found the absolute perfect reverb for me, and the truth is that each reverb effect is so unique that picking the “right one” is almost impossible—how can one plugin cover all your needs? Plus, film composers like myself also run into the issue of sometimes needing surround compatible reverbs for scoring, and that heavily limits our options for reverb processors.

LiquidSonics has designed some reverbs that I really enjoy, and when I heard they put out a surround reverb called Cinematic Rooms, I knew I needed to check it out. And when I saw Hans Zimmer in a forum note, “It’s now all I’m using for reverb in Cubase”, I got even more excited to try it.

At $199 for the standard version and $399 for the professional version, is this plugin worth the price? Let’s find out.

Features

Cinematic Rooms has channel count support for up to 7.1.6. Of course, you can also run it in Stereo, LCR, Quad, and 5.1. The decay control goes up to 45 seconds/infinity. The standard version comes with 80 presets, while the professional version offers a total of 300 presets, including 50 post-production rooms. Additionally, the pro version has surround plane parameter editing, reverb echo, an enhanced reflection engine, width control, and crossfeed disparity definition. For this review, I’ll be using the pro version.

I wasn’t familiar with some of the aforementioned features before trying out Cinematic Rooms, so I’d love to provide some information on the more unique features before we go any further.

Surround plane parameter editing allows you to adjust parameters in the front, rear, center, or elevated planes, relative to the master preset. This means you could extend and filter the reverb tail just in the sides if you wanted to. You could also just widen reflections in the side channel.

The crossfeed (X-Feed) disparity definition is interesting because early stereo reverbs would mix down stereo sources to mono, then create a stereo image from the mono source to save DSP resources. Cinematic Rooms stands out for having this control over X-Feed in the reflections and in the reverb independently. This control can almost create a slapback effect with reflections to help localize a sound and place it in the stereo or surround plane.

So how do some of these special features fare within Cinematic Rooms?

In Use

LiquidSonics has explained that their goals for this reverb were to create a best-in-class sound, to provide innovative, creative tools for use in complex surround mixes, and to make it simple and intuitive enough for fast workflows.

The UI for Cinematic Rooms is very user-friendly and incredibly easy to navigate. It takes mere seconds to create anything from a small closet-style reverb, all the way to a 3.2s hall verb. Cranking up the decay time past the 6s mark was very useful for sound design, and I found myself throwing low pass filtered kick drums through the long reverb to create subsonic booms that shook my studio. LiquidSonics have managed to create a versatile reverb processor that’s easy to use and so detailed and realistic that it has quickly become my go-to effect on every session.

To give an example of how wonderful this plugin is, I’ll mention a time where I was having difficulty mixing an orchestral cue for a film. I found healthy amounts of Neve compression and some subtle multiband processing helped, but still didn’t get me to where I needed to be. I quickly (perhaps lazily) threw an instance of Cinematic Rooms on my orchestra bus and turned down the dry/wet knob to find that the strings, brass, and woodwinds glued together immediately! I tried tweaking the settings but found that the default preset just worked so great that I loaded it back up and sent the cue out.

While the standard version of Cinematic Rooms is more than substantial for my needs, the professional version allowed me control over the width of reflections in the front and side channels, which helped me craft the perfect ambiance. With the pro version, you can even apply tempo-synced pre-delay and echo in the tiers and elevations, which I found helpful for recreating the sound of clapping in a tunnel. It’s interesting to set the pre-delay to a musical grid value and then hear that tunnel echo appear on a syncopated beat; it adds that extra little bit of complexity and depth to the groove of your music!

The professional version also includes an independent EQ section for both the reflections and reverberation; I found it very useful to easily roll off some high frequencies using this feature.

To Be Critical

Needless to say, I really like this plugin. I actually think that its price perfectly represents its value. In my opinion, Cinematic Rooms outperforms hardware worth 2 to 3 times its price.

Having said that, the $399 mark may be too high a price of admission for some. It’s also a bit hefty on CPU resources; I couldn’t load more than 15 instances on my 8-core MacBook Pro 2019 without running into some DAW hiccups. That being said, if you need more than 15 reverbs in your mix, you may want to rethink your approach.

The only other feature that I wish Cinematic Rooms offered is a pitch function so you could craft massive shimmer effects. That would be a huge ask from a reverb however, and I have no qualms continuing to reach for my Eventide ShimmerVerb for that task.

Summing it Up

When I first started reading about Cinematic Rooms, I thought it would be a game-changer for post-production houses and composers with surround setups, but I’ve quickly seen how this plugin will also greatly aid producers, engineers, mixers, and music makers who work in stereo.

The plugin’s valuable X-Feed functionality allows you to place instruments in a way that leaves so much space for the other elements in your mix to shine. If you’re working with audio in post, I’ll go as far as to say you need this reverb. If you’re a composer, producer, mixer, etc., it will make your mixes come to life!

Matthew Wang is a guitarist, songwriter, and jingle-writer from New York City. He is actively gigging, recording, posting guitar-related videos on his YouTube channel, and recently graduated from his studies in music production at the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music at NYU.

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