When we're inside a concert hall we experience not just the on stage performance but also the room we're in. Taken a bit further the same can be true for our stereo systems.
Sound + Room.
But what happens when an artist is in the acoustic deadness of a studio? Their instrument or voice are perfectly captured but, when played back, we cannot mentally place them in an acoustic space.
Enter the idea of artificially creating a space using reverb.
In the early days of recording small studios used acoustic springs to delay the audio and provide enough of a timing difference to make it sound live. The bigger studios built entire rooms called echo chambers to get an even more realistic sound.
Today, we have a lot of fancy digital reverbs that can simulate just about any room in the world.
Artificial? Absolutely.
There's nothing that can ever replace the capture of a live room. But, handled with skill, one can get awfully close.
Artificial means in service of sounding live. Doesn't sound exactly audiophile but done right, it can make magic.
