Exponential Audio plugins in 2025?

[LDS]

Originally Posted by atticmike

Cinematic rooms is just way too expensive for me and can't believe I got the license for Stratus and Symphony 3D for 10 bucks.

To me, the exponential reverbs sound very polished, they sound like someone with deep knowledge and understanding of echos created them while most other reverbs have some abrasiveness to them that you have to polish out until they work with a source.

Seems like everyone just dropped everything and got cinematic rooms just because Hans Zimmer is using it?

I really didn't like the reverb on the Dune record btw, it's one of my least favorite ambience sounds of Hans'.

They were all expensive plugins at one point. Stratus 3D & Symphony 3D were $499 a pop originally, IIRC. They are still amazing reverbs, but I would suggest the current pricing reflects how much (or little...) iZotope values them. They obviously purchased Exponential Audio for the intellectual property rather than any intention of maintaining it as a product. A lot of users would have moved to Cinematic Rooms because Stratus 3D & Symphony 3D felt abandoned. It took them ~3 years to create an Apple Silicon native version, and it seems like it only happened due to mounting pressure from users like Marti Humphreys.

As much as I love them, I don't anticipate them going any further in terms of development. For better or worse, they've been replaced by Equinox.

[atticmike]

Originally Posted by LDS

They were all expensive plugins at one point. Stratus 3D & Symphony 3D were $499 a pop originally, IIRC. They are still amazing reverbs, but I would suggest the current pricing reflects how much (or little...) iZotope values them. They obviously purchased Exponential Audio for the intellectual property rather than any intention of maintaining it as a product. A lot of users would have moved to Cinematic Rooms because Stratus 3D & Symphony 3D felt abandoned. It took them ~3 years to create an Apple Silicon native version, and it seems like it only happened due to mounting pressure from users like Marti Humphreys.

As much as I love them, I don't anticipate them going any further in terms of development. For better or worse, they've been replaced by Equinox.

As long as Apple doesn't do some microcode update or DAW manufacturers change something radically about their engines, the native installers will still work for years to come.

[JFreak]

Originally Posted by atticmike

As long as Apple doesn't do some microcode update or DAW manufacturers change something radically about their engines, the native installers will still work for years to come.

Word is, next macOS drops Intel support. So anything that runs natively on ARM now, will run as you said years to come. What has not been updated is abandonware.

[Frank Kruse]

It seems like Equinox does not support mono-to-surround instances which pretty much rules out usage for me and since the post-world has moved on to Cinematic Rooms and other alternatives I'm not going to jump on yet another reverb.
I'm not a fan of IZ's recent "lets package the same algo in a different product and sell it again and again and burn all bridges with regards to automation"-policy. Sad to see these great sounding reverb algos being treated this way...

[Dizaineris]

I still like Stratus 3D. But I only use it to print my designs.

I prefer Cinematic Rooms Pro and Altiverb 8 for mixing.
As I can control how the reverb follows my pans(dialog, foley, etc)

Cinematic Rooms via crossfeed propagation
Altiverb via Cloud Size

Somewhat controllable with Fabfilter Pro R2 via crossfeed
Blackhole Immersive too.

[TOM@METRO]

Exponential are the most used reverbs in our studio.

[Cheesehead]

It seems like Equinox does not support mono-to-surround instances

That is very disappointing Frank. It makes me wonder who they have beta testing as it's a reverb that's used a lot in post and it's a standard configuration for many of us.

I've purchased it but couldn't put it in my session due to work pressures and now I find this out.
I emailed them about the routing issue a couple of days ago but as yet no reply, perhaps it's time to move on.

What are you using for good outdoor reverbs? That's mostly what I'm using the Exponential ones for. I can't find anything similar in Cinematic Rooms. Altiverb has some, but the Exponential ones are really nice.