Spring Reverb Tanks Explained and Compared

There's a singing group from Portland that used impulse-response recordings from Hagia Sophia to recreate old church music as it would have sounded back when it was controlled by the Eastern Orthodox church.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cappella_Romana

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VrJ8XOwJzw

I helped to create one of the first low latency convolution reverb plugins and the most fun part of it was the cool performance spaces, nuclear cooling towers and massive underground storage tanks we visited to record different impulse responses.

>Can they please document all the circuits I need for my work instrumentation next?

You'll probably have to wait until those instruments get as popular and then stand the test of time well enough over as many decades.

For each alphabetical tank type on the tables (like where you see two different impedances in the top row for Type 1 & 4 vs. Type 8 & 9, but the second row for that alphabetical type shows a single lower ohm reading for both), the lower ohms are about what you get when you manually measure the DC resistance at the input or output jacks of a disconnected reverb tank, using a regular ohmmeter. The higher ohms in the upper row are the much higher working AC impedances that the signal encounters under operating conditions.

This is referenced in the asterisked comment under each sub-table.

There may be a corresponding asterisk in the lower rows that is not displaying in my browser.

Also look at where it says "Avoid mounting the outer channel of the reverb tank directly to the mounting surface by using grommets, rubber standoffs, reverb tank bag and liner or other products designed for mechanical isolation." To me that should probably be changed from "avoid mounting" to "always mount" since the mechanical isolation is the preferred way.

Interestingly, about 25 years ago when Google first came out, you could easily find a link to a posted picture of a much-older vintage Accutronics tank showing the factory label which once proudly related that they were built by beautiful women in a climate-controlled environment.

Today's Google not so much.

A really, really, really long cable?

All kinds of things can be a reverb tanks. I've tried using a grand piano as a reverb tank with some mixed results. There's also a trick of making a weird reverb with a bunch of garden hoses of different lengths with a speaker at one end and mics taped to the ends.

If you dig fun reverb stuff, check out Stuart Dempster's recordings. His underground overlays album has trombonists in a large underground cistern with a natural 40 second decay.

I use a pedal based DSP stereo reverb to simulate spring and plate. (Ventris) My instrument make for playing with reverb. It is two strings with stereo pickup and played using a computer controlled rotary magnetic bow. (Electroduochord)