 What you're seeing and indeed what you're listening to here is a reimagining of one of the most iconic reverbs of all time, the Lexicon 224. Hi folks, I'm Mike and I hope you're well. Arturove just released the Rev LX24 plugin based upon one of the most famous reverb units of all time, the Lexicon 224. However they've improved upon it in a couple of significant ways, both in terms of features and also in terms of price, we'll get on to that in a moment. Now they sent this over to me to have a look at but I wasn't required to make a video at all but I decided to because I just enjoyed the plugin so much but they're not a sponsor of this video. However, I do have a sponsor for this video and they are DistroKid. If you follow the VIP link in the description down below you'll get 7% off an already amazing price to distribute your music. Before we have a listen to this reverb and the sound is the most important thing, let's just take a quick look at the background of the original Lexicon 224. The 224 originally sold in 1978 for $7,500 or more depending on the configuration but it was still half of the price of its nearest competitor, the EMT250. It took off and it was really well known for its smooth decay and its long lush deep tail and indeed that's still the reason why people use it today. Now if you look at the photos you'll see that it comes in two parts. We have the black box which is a rack mounted unit and that's where the guts of everything happens and then you've got this cream coloured remote control which would normally sit on a mixing console and that's what you'll normally see as the face of a plugin. Now Lexicon still make hardware reverb units that cost several thousands of dollars still and they also make some software versions which cost a few hundred dollars but you will be glad to hear that this Arturia version at launch will be selling for $69. So I've literally just thrown this onto some female and male vocals and some acoustic guitar just using the large hall B setting for all of them without making any refinements. Let's just have a quick listen to see how it sounds. Now if we just solo just that female vocal I'll start in the middle of the first phrase and have a listen to the tail and you can just hear how it's very long actually but you can just hear how rich it is and it's just got a really natural way of decaying there. Now it doesn't have to be that long there's lots of settings to change all that don't worry but that's really a sort of a nice example of the quality of the sound of this unit. But how does it compare to the original 224 where you can see on the interface it's got a very similar look to it yeah this kind of cream coloured remote control here but there's a little bit of difference to the layout. Now you'll see that it's sitting on top of this sort of desk with some reminders of the 1980s on here and I know that immediately some people are going to say yeah it looks very nice but that's a waste of real estate yeah and I sort of agree with that however this interface does change later on for some other parts of this and you'll see how it actually uses this space really really well but let's go through the front panel just so we can get an idea of what we can change here it's not a tutorial I'll just go through the basic features. In the original unit there was eight buttons which go across the top and they're mainly there to select the main presets for the algorithms ok well we've got the same settings but rather than have buttons for each of them it's just giving you this menu here when you click on it's just a drop down menu. They've got the same names as they originally had small concert hall B, vocal plate, large concert hall B, acoustic chamber, percussion plate A, small concert hall A. I'm not going to mention the next two because they were not on some of the original units there's a little bit of confusion on the versions there but usually in the software versions they have this format room A constant density plate. We've even got the original weird ordering here yeah I don't know why they had small concert hall B at the beginning and then small concert hall A later on no idea on that but they've kept that so just a different way of selecting that in case that confuses you from other plugins in the original version but we do have a row of buttons I'll go through those quickly. You would notice as you change from one preset to another I'll use these arrows up here that these slide has moved down here yeah to the sort of default configurations for those presets but you can lock that so once you've got a sort of a setting with these sliders that you like you can lock it with this button here now as I go from one preset to another the algorithms change but the settings are the same there okay so we can switch that on and off we've also got the ability to turn modulation on and off for the reverb tail we've got decay optimization which we can turn off and on that's the sort of decay optimization is a way that changes the decay time depending on the input source the amplitude of the input source so that's quite useful then we've got this button which is vintage 12 now the original unit and was had 12 a 12 bit converter in there sounds just terrible for today's standards but that's what it had and it was filtered and it had some sort of quirks with it some noise if you like with it because of the conversion okay so if you want that sort of original vintage sound you can have that setting you can also then choose vintage 24 okay now this is 24 bit conversion it's filtered and you don't get so much of that sort of noise that you got from the original and then you've got the modern unfiltered 24 bit converter which is just a very very clean sound so we still get the character of these reverbs but we get that sort of modern clean sound to them which is a nice addition there then moving down to the sliders at the bottom as I go through these sliders I want you to keep one word in mind okay that word is confusion if you feel confused by what I'm about to explain just hold that word in your head because it kind of leads us into one major feature of this plugin I'll go through it quickly decay okay so this sets the timing of the reverb nice long one yeah sorry you should have helped me from the start super long there even for a small hole okay so that was up there then we've got some which some things which relate relate to frequency and the behavior of different frequencies so we've got the bass offset okay so this offsets the decay time for lower frequencies okay now those lower frequencies are defined by this slider here which is the crossover slider okay so you select your frequency in kilohertz there for where you sort of want the so-called bass or low frequencies to end and the higher ones to begin with we then have a dampening control which sets a faster decay for frequencies above a certain point so if you find that you had something in the tail where there was lots of high frequencies and perhaps felt a bit harsh you can make sure that you know things above a certain frequency have a quicker decay time okay so those four sliders kind of have a bit of a relationship with each other if you will then we have a pre-delay here this is on many many reverb units and it sets a little bit of time between the original source sound and when the reverb starts that can just help to keep your original source a little bit separate sounding okay then we've got the distance slider I'm not sure if this is on the original 2-2-4 but then it may have been called a different name but basically this is setting the perceived distance okay so obviously further away closer as we can have it and then you have a wet dry mix which wasn't on the original okay but we have this on most plugins now it's expected to be there and very useful is I've got this on a bus at the moment so that's why I've got it up full all the time so that's the basic overview of you know you sort of you select one of these algorithms and then you adjust it with these sliders down here but you may have found all of that a little bit confusing which is why I'm glad to tell you about the next feature of this plugin on just quickly while we're talking about confusion let's talk about something which isn't at all confusing and that is releasing your music through DistroKid. By using DistroKid you get to release your music directly to some of the best platforms on the planet we're talking Spotify, iTunes, TikTok, Amazon you know all of the household names and you don't need to open any accounts there because DistroKid does all of that for you now once you've created your master and your album artwork it's as easy as filling in a friendly form, uploading them and DistroKid takes care of the rest all for one flat annual fee and DistroKid takes none of your royalties sign up with my VIP link in the description and you'll get an extra 7% off Arturia always seem to delight me with what they put in their advanced section in their plugins in this case I really think it helps with that confusion if I click on it now you'll see that we get a very different looking interface it uses up the space much better for a start of course but many of the controls we actually see here are actually the same controls we saw on the front page but represented in a different way in a sort of a more interactive way we can still select our basic algorithms at the top here and change that you know the type of converter we're using at the top here as well we've still got a decay slider we can see here we've got a wet-dry mix here and if we play something we'll see a representation of that happening so we can get a sense of what's happening with our reverb there now if we drag around this middle tool here we can see that we can both change the decay and the crossover frequency crossover as well yeah so we're changing where things are happening in terms of the lower and higher frequencies and we can also change our bass offset which we had but we can now see how it sort of sits in relationship to our decay and and how it's affected by our crossover as well okay so I think it's much more visually sort of what's easier for me to understand at least anyway so I find that very very helpful now there are some features that we don't have on the front page here but they're incredibly useful and they sort of improve upon the original 224 we do have this modulation tail control like we have on the front page but we actually have more control over here the same with the decay optimization we've got the pitch shift control happening here we've got a diffusion control happening here and down the bottom we've got an input drive control to add a bit more drive it doesn't make it louder as we're listening but it adds you know a bit more of that sort of drive that you would get from a transformer and we've got a high pass here which is just super super useful I always use a high pass as many as you will know I hope you're all using them as well on your reverbs let me know in the comments down below if you're not and why using a high pass helps get rid of the mud that you traditionally get with reverbs especially these types of reverbs as well okay now if you really want to sort of help get that reverb out of the way of your main vocal so it's not masking it we have a duck included okay so this is a way of using compression to suppress the reverb while the main source in this case a vocal is sort of happening okay so if we switch that on you would just set a threshold if I was now to play the the vocal it would be it would diminish the reverb it'll keep it much more quiet while she's singing you should have helped me from the start and then we get the tail of it when the singing goes away there so we've got ratio and release controls like you would on a compressor they're really nice to see a duck included with a reverb means you can get pretty much everything done here with one plugin with your reverb we've also got the ability to use a sidechain for that as well so another source in other words to determine when the reverb is suppressed okay as well as a ducker we have a gate which also has the sidechain ability and also this tremolo control okay so this sort of gives us some modulation sort of effect on the reverb okay so then we have on the master section we have the ability to add some brightness some stereo width and also just control the overall reverb level so there's not much point in a plugin like this if it doesn't represent the sound of the original unit now I don't have a lexicon 224 but I've heard it many times and I've also used the gazillion plugin versions of it as well and this stands right up there with them it does have that wonderful sort of rich sounding tail to it and that's what I'm after in a plugin like this so I'm very very happy with the sound of this now once you I've got the sound you want if you're going to use something regularly then usability is so important and I think that R2 really nailed it here with the usability okay I just think that they way they've sort of taken the original concept but just rethought it to help you is so good lastly if even if those things are good if you can't afford the plugin then well you won't have it will you I think this is very affordable at $69 in fact I don't even know why you're still here let me know in the comments down below if you've gone ahead and decided to buy this plugin I'll give you a thumbs up now I reckon you should watch this video next it's really really good