New Music Gear Monday: LiquidSonics Seventh Heaven Professional Reverb Plugin

If you’ve ever used the Bricasti M7 reverb, you know how spectacular it sounds, so much so that it’s spoiled many an engineer when it comes to using anything else. While there are some excellent sounding reverb plugins available, if you’re a fan of the hardware M7 then you know that they don’t quite cop the exact sound or parameter control. LiquidSonics’ Seventh Heaven Professional breaks the mold, however, as it’s the first plugin to really come close (some say its spot on) to the Bricasti sound.

Seventh Heaven Professional uses LiquidSonics’ Fusion-IR processing technique that involves thousands of stereo samples to convolve the reverb, as opposed to the algorithms used to create the reverb in the M7. That would seem to give the edge to the Bricasti in terms of editability, butSeventh Heaven Professional seems to have that knocked, since just about anything that you’d want to adjust is available, and over a wide range as well.

For instance, when you call up a present you’re presented with a set of very simple parameter controls, including a large size Decay Time control, a medium size Mix control, and a smaller Gain control, along with general and specific preset category and input, output, early, late and VLF (very low frequency) meters. On the bottom you have sliders for Very Low Frequency Reverb and Early/Late reflections. Simple right?

If you go to the Advanced Control tab on the lower right, another panel opens up showing Reflection Pattern, Pre-Delay, Delay time and level, Roll-Off of reflections and reverb, and a two band Frequency Dependent Decay Time control featuring frequency and multiplier controls for each band. Also available from another selection on the bottom right of the plug is a master 5 band equalizer to further tailor the frequency response of the preset (there are over 200 presets, by the way).

While all this may seem like another complex plugin with way too many parameters to tweak when there’s little time to do so during a mix, the fact is that the layout is very simple and logical so that tweaking is much easier than the description of how to do it. Well done, LiquidSonics.

The LiquidSonics Seventh Heaven Professional reverb plugin is currently available at an introductory price of £199 (about $257 US) until May 14th when the price goes up to £249 ($322 US). There’s a 14 day trial available.

It requires an iLok 2 or 3, is available for Mac or PC, and all popular plugin formats. It does require 10 GB of hard drive space and a computer with at least 8 Gigs of RAM and a dual core i5 processor, which shouldn’t be problem in most professional applications but should be noted for those with older machines. Check out the website or the video below for more details.