Universal Audio: Plate 140 Reverb plug-in

As a long time Altiverb fan (largely because of the excellent EMT plate impulse response), I have to admit I was just a bit skeptical about whether the UAD-1's modeling-or algorithmic-reverb would stack up against a convolution reverb from a real EMT plate. Well, consider me won over. While I still love Altiverb for its huge library of acoustic spaces and reverb devices, after some careful listening tests to both, I have to admit that Plate 140 sounded just as good as the Altiverb EMT 140. Factor in the fact that it runs on the UAD-1 card, so it's less of a CPU hit to my Pro Tools LE system, and add in complete control over all the original EMT parameters and adjustments, and you'll get why Plate 140 was used extensively on a record I recently mixed. In fact, Plate 140 has three different sounding plates-bright, medium, and dark-modeled on three different EMT plates installed at the venerable Plant Studios in Sausalito, CA. You also have control of reverb time, EQ, gain, pre-delay, and width. As an indicator of the rich sound, Plate 140 uses a good chunk of the UAD-1's CPU resources, but it's well worth the extra load. In fact, one of the engineers who used my studio recently bought a second UAD-1 card just to dedicate it to Plate 140. If you have a UAD-1 card, you have to check out this plug-in. If you don't have the UAD-1 card but want a great sounding plate reverb, this may be the reason to get a UAD-1. ($149 direct; www.uaudio.com)