ANWIDA Soft has introduced DX Reverb Light 3, the latest version of their lightweight freeware reverb effect for Windows and Mac based hosts.
DX Reverb Light is a truly old school plugin that was first introduced to the market back in 2005 (according to the info available on DontCrac[k])! Back when I made my first steps in the world of music production, it was considered as one of the best freeware reverbs around, mainly due to its fairly decent sound, stable performance and extremely low CPU consumption.
See also: Free Reverb SOLO VST/AU Plugin By Acon Digital!Throughout the years, the plugin’s functionality hasn’t changed all that much, however the developers have decided to keep it up to date in terms of compatibility with the current platforms. The latest version of DX Reverb Light doesn’t bring any significant improvements apart from 64-bit host compatibility. Granted, that’s quite a big improvement in its own right, if we take into account that more and more users are making the leap of faith to 64-bit DAWs nowadays.
Now, the fact that the functionality hasn’t changed at all isn’t a problem (the old bit of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” wisdom definitely applies here), however the user interface could definitely benefit from a substantial overhaul. For starters, the GUI should be at least twice its current size in order to make it more compatible with higher resolution displays. The labels below the knobs and buttons are barely readable on my HD monitor. The one knob layout still works fairly well, though, but I’m also not liking the sound dropout which occurs while adjusting the decay and pre-delay parameters.
On the other hand, DX Reverb Light 3 still sounds very good and it can cover a wide range of reverb flavors, from small rooms to huge halls. It hits that perfect balance between versatility and ease of use, which is one of the reasons why it still remains fairly popular among its users, more than ten years after the release. And of course, the CPU usage is as low as ever, making it the perfect reverb to use throughout your mix without worrying about overloading your processor.
DX Reverb Light 3 is available for free download via ANWIDA Soft (2.76 MB download size, EXE installer, 32-bit & 64-bit VST/AU/SAWStudio plugin formats for Windows & Mac).
Last Updated on September 16, 2016 by Tomislav Zlatic.
