Nugen Paragon ST

NIGEL JOPSON resynthesises his impulses

Nugen Audio have followed-up their immersive Paragon reverb plug-in (reviewed Resolution V21.3, £419) with Paragon ST — a stereo version at £209. Paragon is a true convolution reverb ‘with the flexibility and control of a classic algorithmic reverb’. Via re-synthesis, Paragon offers full control of the decay, room size and brightness of reverbs modelled on recordings of real spaces — with no time-stretching. The technology is based on research undertaken by Dr. Jez Wells at the University of York.

As an industry-veteran, I can recall how impressed I was when I first heard convolution reverb: the Sony DRE S777 hardware reverb had the most realisticsounding acoustic space simulation I had ever heard — even if it had the look of a walnut Mercedes dashboard — and cost the same as a Merc C-Class back in 1997. I was less impressed to learn I couldn’t just reach out and dial up a much shorter or longer reverb time! Paragon circumvents this inherent limitation by resynthesising the IR (impulse response) based on user adjustments, before applying these to audio to generate reverb.

Impulsive tweaking

Firing up a guitar-heavy track, I decided to put Paragon ST to the test in generating some ambience. I loved working in classic recording rooms like Sunset Sound, and that’s what I’m trying to generate virtually when I instantiate a reverb plug-in on a dry guitar track. As I twiddled the sliders on a church IR using the no-nonsense interface, my first reaction on grabbing the Size and Mic Distance adjusters was — serious tonal interaction going on! The Mic Distance control, which the manual soberly defines as “Adjusts the balance of early reverb reflections to late reflections” — in fact has a dramatic timbre and tone effect, which interacts beautifully with smaller Size settings. I got an amazing amount of grit and attack (and a level increase) on a distorted guitar by pulling back the Mic Distance to around 25% with a room size around x0.35. You can play with the two controls in the same way you can balance in/out of phase guitar pickups. And the “oomph” on that room is super realistic.

Switching from the Main panel with its circular radar type display to the IR page takes you to where the sound really begins in this plug-in — in more ways than one. There are a series of test sounds (Singing, Harmonica, Jangling Keys) which can be triggered from within the plug-in to test settings —this is definitely going to be some engineer’s idea of a wind-up for a late-night vocal session!

Nugen supply 65 ready-made presets, selected using the extremely small document icon to the right of the central preset window at the top. If you’re being creative, you may as well just dive straight into the IR page, and choose one of the 19 supplied responses, which range from Summer Forest, through Cave and Church to Small Theatre. It’s easy to see from the Spectogram plot which IRs have a rich spectrum (such as the Church) and these are tailor-made for further tweaking. Clicking the Modifier button (top left) opens up a panel to tweak the frequency response by EQing the reverb model and altering the frequency-dependent decay rate. Up to four parametric EQ points can be added and adjusted.

Versatile

I’ve noticed that many production pros treat reverb plug-ins as one-trick ponies — one preferred for snare — another for vocals. Nugen Paragon is unusually versatile, possibly because of the real IR spaces at its heart. The Car Interior IR was weirdly beguiling on Tablas, and a touch of added modulation gave a ‘Roland Dimension D’ feel to the sound. The modulation effect includes individual controls for Rate, Depth and Mix, with the ability to lock the effect to the project tempo.

The Cave Mouth IR really brought out the sparkle on some percussion, and I liked a touch of Small Tiled Room on fretless bass. I found the Hotel Corridor IR suited some backing vocals which I wanted to add a touch of ‘gang’ vibe to, although they’d actually been sung quite cleanly. And finally — a ‘Zeppelin Drums’ reverb preset (using the Stairwell IR) — that somewhat lives up to the promise of its name!

When adjusting Decay time, and twisting and turning Stereo Width and Mic Distance, the Paragon can sometimes sound a bit tonally odd, especially with vocals and acoustic instruments which have already been EQd and compressed extensively. I found I preferred to choose a suitable IR, and then play with the Size and Mic Distance controls, while leaving the Decay time control alone. I eventually discovered the Small Theatre IR (used on the Slapback Long preset) was nice for adding depth to vocals without making them too boomy.

The Paragon reverb is obviously going to be fantastically useful as a post-production reverb, adding tuneable natural ambience to foley and sweetening location sound. I set out to test if it was useful for music as well, and it shone as an incredibly versatile reverb for music mixing — especially on percussion and electric guitar.

VERDICT

PROS Quality sound, incredibly versatile. The realism of convolution but infinitely adjustable

CONS It would be great to have the ability to import IRs