VirtualRoom AU 4+

Really interesting and does recreate ‘a space’.

Hard to feel well enough qualified to write this up, but there’s a bit of physics behind this, and I think it’s a darned good shot at the subject. First, the effect does do what you’d think, for front placement of the ‘listener’ and the icons of stereo speakers being positioned as you wish. Second, if they could do a massively convincing above/below/behind effect, nobody would buy a room-full of speakers for surround sound. Five stars though.

This area of sound processing is one of those things in life, where ‘it does what you tell it, but not what you wanted it to do’ sometimes. Like remote-controlling a toy car steering as it comes towards you. It’s good because it really works, for all the essentials, and because the closest I could get ever to sounds ‘behind the listener’ with just stereo earbuds, is trying some kind of ‘phase’ effect. It’s not at all easy although in theory surely this can be done - surely the ears and brain can be fooled by a totally ‘fake’ above-you sound?

I’d stab at it needing the air movement behind your ears, to some subliminal effect, or humans inherently understanding in a sub-conscious way micro-reflections from the particular surfaces they have around them - I mean, I literally hypothesised right left and centre what the reason was humans ‘know’ the sound is behind them, or above (sorry pun not intentional).

So, I grabbed this and started exploring ‘space’ and have realised, at the very least, this is a good tool to have in the box, for those lovely atmospheric intros, where a solitary piano or something carries the whole weight of holding the listener’s attention for a time. Without judicious use of reverbs and EQ and compression to bring out all the nuances, a single instrument has an uphill struggle to do much. If ever there’s a place for subtlety in sound processing, it’s surely when one instrument and musician is all there is on the track (at that moment at least).

There are many reverbs, some better than others on iOS/iPadOS, and I used this on my (used) iPad Pro M1 12.9” strung together with at least Apple’s GarageBand standard compressor and Reverb on the end, with this in the middle. Or at the end, whichever. For the price, it’s worth having just to explore - just don’t expect too much from the ‘Z’ (vertical positioning) component, or when placing the speaker icons behind the head icon. I’d treat that, more as a way of differentiating one side from the other, if you have say three tracks of the same trumpet and are creating a particular stereo/mono setup. I have no complaints, I like this, because I didn’t expect the impossible I think!