I use Audioease’s Altiverb on almost every song I create. I really like convolution reverb’s and Altiverb 6 is the king. When I first bought it I spent almost two weeks hunting down 1980′s digital reverb Impulse Responses. I even put photos of the original processing units into Altiverb! Often I will load Altiverb into a return channel, choose a Lexicon 480L reverb Impulse Response and pan the return hard right. Then on a vocal channel Ill turn up the send knob to get a nice thick shimmering reverb vocal in my right ear. Once and I while I will take an Impulse Response from a Neuman U87 microphone and run D16′s Nepheton Roland TR-808 emulator plug-in through it. This gives the Nepheton an extra boost of realism. It’s like you plugged in a real TR-808 in a room and recorded it to tape. Very nice.

A few weeks ago Altiverb released a much anticipated new plug-in called Speakerphone. According to the Audioease website it’s “270 speaker impulse responses powered by Altiverb, 30 Altiverb rooms, 5 gigabyte of ambiances and sound FX, conveniently presented to you in 500 presets.”. But actually it’s even more than that because inside the large faced plug-in you also have access to the following modules: distortion, compression, gate, eq, crush, phono, mod, codec, delay, and tuning.

This thing is right up my alley, an almost unlimited amount of vocal changing sound design. Of course you can run other things besides vocals through Speakerphone. True, you could probably hunt down some Impulse Responses like what they use in this plug-in and then add all the above mentioned effects yourself but Audioease’s package is class. There is a great video that showcases everything Speakerphone can do so do yourself a favor and head over to Audioease.com and check it out.

I think Speakerphone’s retail price of $495 USD is well worth it. I was about to purchase it this weekend when I came across this thread in the great Mac audio forum Big Blue Lounge. Apparently there is a Group Buy going on for Speakerphone by the Logic Users Group! A Group Buy basically means you pledge to buy the program and the more people who also pledge before a certain date the lower the final price each person has to pay. This Group Buy “will start at 0:01 a.m., Wednesday 31 October, Central European time, and run until Midnight, Tuesday November 14 Pacific Coast Time.”. If the maximum amount of people sign up (1000) the price of Speakerphone will be 40% off which is $297 USD. I signed up and if you make music more than one day a week you should grab this now too!