Describing reverb details with words where a reader will understand what I mean is a tricky business and I don’t have the time to think hard enough about it that I’m likely to be successful, but I’ll try… It sounds harsh, grainy, has a weird flavor of reverberating as it builds that the better units don’t have. You can lessen the impact of that by making them really dark, but then you just have a pile of mush that recedes you in the mix not an ambient reverb that an audience can hear as a positive attribute.
There’s no amount of adding filters, delays, or other foolery onto a parallel path that cures what ails the dynamic reverbs at their core.
Can you get a cloud-esque thing by putting the auto vowel thing into a helix reverb in parallel? Yes, I’ve done it. Is it as good as strymon or fractal? No, and the difference between them isn’t subtle in an A/B. Can you do other fun things with a reverb in parallel? Yes, but you can do that in fractal too with far more control and a reverb algo that sounds amazing at its core before you add any extra sauce.
If you enjoy or use ambient reverbs much, you really owe it to yourself to try the good stuff and see what you’re missing out on. Or don’t and just stay happy with what you have. But without having A/B’ed these things to really know the differences, you just don’t know. Hands on experience is the only way I’ve found to really know this stuff, surfing some clips online doesn’t get you very far as users do weird things, services compress or alter things somehow, etc. Hook things up and A/B them, and this stuff gets really clear and simple.
How did I figure out what worked for me for a big reverb sound? I bought a meris m7, an empress, and a Ventris at the same time. I A/B’d them with each other and with the Helix models. In less than an hour I knew more than you could learn in 10 hours of reading about reverb pedals on forums and listening to clips (which I had no doubt already done before I broke down and bought all those damn pedals).
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