Welcoming back an old friend: Yamaha REV-5

[compilerbitch]

Thanks to the wonders of eBay bottom-feeding, I’ve welcomed home an old friend this weekend. It’s a slightly beaten up but fully working Yamaha REV-5 digital reverb of late 1980s vintage. It’s not one of the better known or most sought after reverbs from that period — for that you’re looking at a Lexicon, probably a PCM70 or PCM80, but the REV-5 is an overlooked gem in my not so humble opinion. It’s a truism that everyone hates everything on the internet, so you can find plenty of people dissing this particular device, but I think this is inappropriate.

Back when I had my for-real studio in the late ’80s, a REV-5 was my main reverb, with a couple of SPX-90s and an Alesis as backup. For the uninitiated, the REV-5 is a bit like an SPX-90 on steroids — much, much cleaner sounding and capable of being dialed up to super-dense or down to being very thin. It does all the things you’d want of a high-end reverb, realistically. You can dial in early reflections separately from the reverb tail, with direct control over the first three initial reflections. You can edit the amount of diffusion, and dial between a very even sounding (Yamaha-ish) tail and a more coloured Lexicon-ish tail. It can also do most of the SPX-90 tricks like chorus, flanging, symphonic, delays, gated and reverse reverbs, pitch shifting, etc., but at far higher audio quality. The front panel has a 3-band parametric (peaking, fixed Q, variable frequency) EQ that makes it trivial to fiddle with the frequency response. The user interface adds a lot more buttons relative to the SPX series, making it possible to directly enter parameters. You can also get one-button access to the 7 most commonly used factory or user patches.

I got change out of $100 for this thing. Just as the turn of the ’90s was the right time to buy analog synths, right now is the right time to build up a collection of rack gear as all of the larger old-skool studios are closing and/or shifting over to in-the-box or hybrid ProTools setups. I doubt the recording world will flip back to the old days of large consoles, but I have a gut feeling that as more and more people (like me, as it happens) have tried a heavily in-the-box approach for a while, they will want to go back to using more hardware.

I have to admit that part of this is because of bit rot. If you have an in-the-box recording setup, you’re stuck with the computer industry’s obsolescence cycle, so you can expect your investment to be largely obsolete within 5 years and probably completely unusable in 10. However, here I am fiddling around with a nearly 30 year old rack mount reverb unit that not only works perfectly but sounds better than just about any plugin-based reverb I’ve used.

I’m not really entirely buying the whole analog summing thing — though it may make a (very) small difference in some cases, I don’t really subscribe to the idea that it’s a good idea to drop a ton of money on something you can barely hear. Far better to spend that on something you really can hear, which is why ancient outboard gear is such a steal right now, particularly if you’re looking to avoid sounding exactly like everyone else with a copy of Ableton Live and NI Massive.

PS: I still want a Lexicon PCM70 or PCM 80. The eBay bottom feeding continues…

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Please note: this was cross-posted from my main blog at http://www.mageofmachines.com/main/2015/11/15/welcoming-back-an-old-friend-yamaha-rev-5/ -- If you want me to definitely see your replies, please reply there rather than here.

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