User Guide / Owners Manual

Waves Abbey Road Reverb Plates

User Guide

Unlike the reverb chambers, these plates had a damper system that allowed adjustment

of the reverb decay time. The damper system consisted of a fiberglass panel suspended

parallel to the plate, which could move towards or away from the plate sheet. The

damper could control variable distances, ranging from 1/8” away from the plate for a

one-second reverberation time, to 2” away from the plate for a five-second decay. This

system let the user tune the decay time with whatever precision was required to meet

the needs of the particular recording or mixing session.

To this day, Abbey Road Studios house the four reverb plates – labeled A, B, C and D.

Plate D has all-valve amplifiers on both the input and output stages, consisting of E81L,

E80CC and EF804ES valves. Plates A, B and C also have an all-valve amplifier on the

input, but on the output stage EMI Central Research Laboratories custom-built hybrid

solid-state/valve amplifiers, in an attempt to keep the noise floor to a minimum. The

sound of the plates is generally considered smoother than that of an echo chamber, if

not entirely natural. Most Abbey Road engineers initially preferred the more organic-

sounding chambers, but this became less of an issue when bands started to experiment

with psychedelic sounds and ‘natural’ sounding recording techniques were becoming

less in vogue for pop music. Due to the nature of analog valve equipment and

manufacturing techniques (plus the EMI custom-built amps), no two plates sound the

same: each has its own distinctive sonic characteristics. From the mid-1960s onward,

ever since the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band era, these four plates have seen

significant use on nearly every pop recording done at Abbey Road Studios – from the

Beatles and Pink Floyd, to Radiohead, Adele, James Blake, Florence + the Machine

and Frank Ocean. The plates even started being favored by some of the classical

engineers, and before long were being used on a wealth of films scores – so much so

that the plates would often have to be booked well in advance of sessions to guarantee

their availability.