User Guide

Waves IR-1 software guide page 37
CPU MODE SWITCH
The CPU Mode switch at the top left allows switching to low CPU mode. This can cut peak
consumption by a third. This mode gives excellent results, and the quality difference will be
negligible for most applications. It is not the purist path, but it is a fine way to convolve the
original sample with good accuracy.
COMPONENTS
Efficient Stereo consumes the same amount of resources as the Mono to Stereo, and about
half of what the Full Stereo consumes. While it presents a compromise on the purist natural
reverb, the overall sound quality isn't compromised in any way, and it is often a more
practical choice. You may like Efficient Stereo as much as the Full Stereo in most cases.
CONVOLUTION LENGTH
You can set the convolution control to a shorter time. While the compromise is obvious
(shortening the Reverb Tail decay time or gating it at a certain level where it would naturally
continue to decay), please note that the noise floor in IR-1 is around –92dB to
-106dB, and there is no compromise in sound quality.
The original convolution length shows in the IR properties display. Sometimes shortening by
a bit presents negligible compromise on sound and meaningful savings in CPU, but the
savings is in steps.
In other words, while not every millisecond will free some CPU, every 100ms should. You
can get great results by using a shortened convolution length and using the envelope to
smooth the slope so that it doesn't sound gated. On continuous material it
sounds like the rich reverb that it is, and it is a “mix-friendly” optimization. It is important to
distinguish between Reverb Time RT60 and Convolution length. The ear is more sensitive to
the slope at the higher gains, so while shortening RT60 will sound like a smaller reverb,
shortening the Convolution length will simply sound less linear at the lower IR gains.