Waves Audio officially launched Atlas Reverb, a new flagship algorithmic reverb plugin tuned by ear to create depth, movement and musical space inside real mixes.

The company said that Atlas was developed around an all-new algorithmic engine and draws from DSP reverb units, as the solution aims to provide both realism and musical intention. Atlas aims to offer a curated collection of distinct reverb programs, each designed from scratch and tuned by ear for tone, density, reflection behavior, modulation, depth and feel.

“When I found out that the Waves team were tuning this by ear, I was very intrigued, because that’s very much how the great reverbs came to be,” said mix engineer Chuck Zwicky (Prince), who has served as consultant and program-designer in the creation of Atlas. “You can trust the fact that each space on Atlas has been created by someone who really knows what they’re doing. You might put it across something and then realize a whole new way of looking at a song.”

Waves Audio said that instead of recreating a static space with impulse response, Atlas works to generate reflections in real time and allow its reverbs to move, react and evolve with the source.

“Convolution reverb can capture a moment in a room,” said Shai Mantzur, Atlas product manager at Waves, “But with Atlas, we weren’t just chasing the sound of a room. We wanted its behavior — reflections that move and modulate as the music moves.”

The company said Atlas is also built to support the way producers and mixers choose reverb – by feel. It features a streamlined program browser in an effort to make it easy to audition dramatically different spaces without leaving the song, as well as a focused set of controls that allows users to blend each reverb naturally into the mix. It also includes a deep algorithmic architecture of hidden parameters, allowing producers to make musical decisions instead of engineering the reverb.

“We wanted every program in Atlas to feel like a different musical decision, not just a variation on the same reverb,” Mantzur said. “The process was mainly listening – thousands of hours across songs, rooms and classic hardware devices – then refining until the reverb felt like it was part of the music. The goal is not for the listener to say, ‘The reverb is beautiful.’ The goal is for them to say, ‘I love that song.’”

Atlas Reverb includes a collection of original programs for all types of vocal and instrument applications, offering both realistic-sounding spaces including Halls, Rooms, Chambers, Plates and Springs, as well as imagined spaces including Signature Halls and Dreamscapes. The solution also features low-latency architecture and efficient CPU performance.

“Mixing in front of 60+ thousand people every night, I need tools that do what I need without a lot of fuss, and Atlas does that easily. It’s CPU friendly; you can have several of them and not notice. It sounds great, and the preset list has some really amazing starting points,” said FOH engineer Sean “Sully” Sullivan (Beck, Bruno Mars).

Atlas Reverb is available as a standalone plugin. It is also included in the Waves Ultimate plugin subscription, and in the Mercury, Pro Show and SD7 Pro Show bundles.

“Having done many reverbs, this one stands out as a milestone, mainly due to (Product Manager) Shai’s work. He brought a creative layer beyond the purist math, making this reverb simply majestic,” said Waves Audio CTO Meir Shashoua.