Convology XT

User Manual

Copyright © 2022, Wave Arts, Inc. and Impulse Record.

Last revision: v1.25, April 26, 2022

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Contents
1. Quick Start..................................................................................... 3
1.1 Installation and Registration ......................................................... 3
1.2 Overview ................................................................................... 4
1.3 True Stereo ............................................................................... 4
1.4 Exploring the Library ................................................................... 4
2. Controls......................................................................................... 7
2.1 Time ......................................................................................... 7
2.2 Freq ......................................................................................... 7
2.3 Image ....................................................................................... 8
2.4 Status Display ............................................................................ 8
2.5 IR Settings ................................................................................ 9
2.6 Modulation................................................................................. 9
2.7 Scale and Predelay .................................................................... 10
2.8 Master .................................................................................... 10
2.9 Preferences.............................................................................. 11
3. Exploring Further .......................................................................... 12
3.1 User Presets ............................................................................ 12
3.2 Preset Export and Import ........................................................... 13
3.3 File Browser ............................................................................. 13
3.4 Purchasing Additional Library Content .......................................... 14
4. Copyright Notices .......................................................................... 16

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1. Quick Start
1.1 Installation and Registration

On Mac OS-X, Convology XT supports AU, VST2, VST3, and AAX plug-in
formats. On Windows, Convology XT supports VST2, VST3, and AAX formats.
On Mac, the installer is a “.dmg” file which reveals a “.pkg” file when opened,
and on Win the installer is a “.exe” file. After running the installer, open your
DAW, then open an instance of Convology XT on any track or instrument
insert.

When the plug-in is first opened in your DAW, it will ask to be registered.
While the plugin is totally free, it still needs to be registered.

Clicking Register will bring up the registration dialog:

Enter your serial number, name, and email address. You should have
received a serial number when you first received the installer. Serials look
like IR-CVXT-XXXXX-XXXXX, where X is a hex digit. You may also register
Convology XT using any Convology XT Library serial number, these look like
IR-PROD-XXXXX-XXXXX, where PROD is a three to five letter code identifying
the library.

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1.2 Overview

The Convology XT plug-in and the Convology Complete library was years in
the making and currently includes 126 different pieces of sampled vintage
gear. Think about that – that’s a huge number of vintage outboard studio
gear at your fingertips. In fact, Complete includes 17 different physical
plates, 39 of the 80s and 90s most treasured pieces of DSP gear, 36 different
spring reverb units from bright, boingy to rich and warm sounding, 17
vintage amps, 10 different pieces of tape delays, oil can delays and other
unique gear, along with the early vintage German DSPs, that include the
highly regarded 245, 246, 248 and the 250. While that’s a dizzying number
of pieces of gear to list, the sound and flexibility of Complete is both
unparalleled from the ease of auditioning 3,200+ presets and setting them
on the fly, to the actual sound of the plugin.

With broad studio partnerships across the globe, many of these sampled
units, have actually been used on countless hit records within our studio
partnerships.

1.3 True Stereo

With Convology XT v1.22, we introduced True Stereo libraries. True stereo

processing is an exciting new feature for Convology XT. The Convology
Complete library is a set of stereo impulse responses, consisting of L->L and
R->R responses. This means that a sound panned hard left will produce
reverb in the left channel only, which sounds unnatural. One can work
around this by panning the send bus to mono (or near mono) prior to reverb
processing, at the cost of losing some spatial information. In practice, stereo
effects units produce output in both channels even when the input is panned
to one side. To capture this, it is necessary to sample not only the L->L and
R->R responses, but also the cross-channel responses L->R and R->L. The
resulting "True Stereo" response is a 4-channel response file which
reproduces both the direct and cross-channel responses. Convology XT
supports user provided True Stereo responses, with channel layout L->L, L-
>R, R->L, and R->R. When a true stereo response is loaded, Convology XT
runs four separate convolution processors. Hence, processing true stereo
responses takes roughly twice the processing power of stereo responses.

1.4 Exploring the Library

The Convology XT plug-in ships with a Factory library containing 70 impulse

responses spanning the range of gear available in the broader set of
Convology XT libraries. The Convology XT Library is divided into 10 major
sections: 80s and 90s DSP gear, divided into Basic, Classic and Pro. Echo
Space is where you will find tape delays, oil can and miscellaneous type gear.

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Plates includes 17 different physical plates. Springs are divided into Boingy,
Bright and Warm categories. Vintage Amps include tone, reverb and various
amp settings. Finally, Vintage German DSPs include the highly regarded 245,
246, 248 and the 250 vintage DSP units.

The plug-in allows you to rapidly select impulse responses while you are
listening to your tracks. You may click on any preset, from any piece of gear,
and repeat that until you have zeroed in on the specific vibe that you are
looking for. It’s really that simple and convenient.

There are a number of ways to get around and browse the library. First, if
you click “All Presets,” then (assuming you’ve purchased all libraries) all
3,200+ presets will show up on the right side of the browser.

Second, you can click on any library from the left tree view (shown in the
image above) and you will notice that every preset and unit from that library
is listed on the right-hand side. But let’s say you want to browse through
specific pieces of gear inside a section of the library. In this case, if we click
the arrow next to the library section we want to explore further, then all of
the units from that library will now show directly underneath. At this point,
you just click a piece of gear and all of the presets from that specific gear will
appear in the right-hand list.

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By clicking the disclosure triangle next to any library, the triangle now points
down, showing all of the available gear in that section.

After clicking the exact piece of gear, go to the right side and click on any
preset from that unit. You may also use the up/down arrow keys to step

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through the list of presets. To audition another piece of gear, simply click the
chosen unit from the left-hand side and then again click on any preset from
that new unit, on the right-hand side. You may wish to collapse the libraries
to see all of the available library content. To do that, simply click on the
arrow of the section you want to collapse and it’s done. All of the library is
this effortless to use. The easiest way to audition effects is to place your
DAW in a loop mode soloing your drums, vocal, guitar, etc., and then just
click through the different presets from any of the 126 units of the library.

2. Controls
2.1 Time
The Time display shows the time response of the impulse response and
provides envelope controls to modify the contour of the response.

The envelope is a simple Attack/Hold/Release envelope with the following

controls:

 Start. Crops the start of the response, useful to skip over early echoes.
 Attack. Controls the attack time of the response.
 Hold. Determines the time after attack for the release segment to
start.
 Release. Controls the release time of the response.

The default settings of the envelope do not modify the impulse response.

2.2 Freq
The Freq display shows a dynamic spectrum of the wet reverb output and
provides controls to affect the equalization of the response and the frequency
dependent decay time of the response.

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Clicking the EQ button enables EQ editing and a set of 11 control handles
appear at the top of the graph. The handles let you draw an EQ curve, with a
large range of -24 dB to +24 dB. Clicking the reset (circular arrow) button
resets the EQ to no modification, i.e., 0 dB at all frequencies.

Clicking the Decay button enables decay editing and a set of 11 control
handles appear at the bottom of the graph. The handles let you draw an EQ
curve which affects the decay time on a frequency basis. At each frequency
the decay time can be scaled up by a factor of 2 or scaled down by a factor
of 10. Clicking the reset (circular arrow) button resets the Decay curve to no
modification, i.e., scaling by 1 all frequencies.

2.3 Image
The Image section shows an image of the current piece of gear.

2.4 Status Display

The Status display shows the currently selected preset in large orange text.
Below this to the left is the name of the actual impulse response file. To the
right is information about the IR: the file sampling rate and the current
sampling rate of the plug-in, the total time of the IR file, the number of

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channels in the IR file and the number of channels of convolution being
processed, the gain applied by normalization if normalization is selected, and
the True Stereo indicator (lights green when a True Stereo response is
loaded). Clicking on TS gives a popup control that lets you disable True
Stereo processing on a preset basis if for some reason you don’t want to use
the CPU.

2.5 IR Settings
The IR settings controls provide some controls over the IR response.

Normalize will automatically apply gain so that the wet reverb sounds equally
loud as the dry sound. If Normalize is off, you can dial in the gain yourself
using the IR Gain control. The IR Gain control has no effect if Normalize is
enabled. The Reverse control time-reverses the IR.

The Mono Input control, when enabled, mixes the stereo input to dual mono
(i.e. pans everything to center) prior to reverb processing. This avoids the
problem of hard panned inputs producing reverb in only one channel with
stereo IRs.

2.6 Modulation
Convology XT comes with a stereo modulator that can either stay very
relaxed to emulate early DSP reverb, or can be applied to a guitar, electric
piano or any other sound source for a gorgeous sounding stereo chorus.

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The 90 degree option modulates the stereo channels in quadrature (sin/cos)
phase. The Depth sets the amount of modulation, and the Rate sets the rate
of modulation.

2.7 Scale and Predelay

The Decay control allows you to scale the decay time of the response by
applying an exponential envelope to the IR. The Stretch control lets you
stretch or dilate the IR. Because the stretch control works by resampling the
IR, it also affects the perceived pitch of the response.

Predelay is a standard reverb control that simply delays the wet response.

2.8 Master
The Master section contains the output meters and controls to affect the
output. The Mix parameter sets the wet/dry mix, 100% means all wet, 0%
means all dry. The Output control sets the output gain of the plug-in. The
Width parameter lets you control the stereo imaging. At the minimum
setting, Mono, the stereo output signal is mixed to mono. At the default
midpoint setting, Stereo, the normal stereo signal is output. Increasing the
Width control beyond stereo applies a shuffler circuit to increase the
apparent width.

The Master Lock control is enabled by clicking the lock icon. When master
lock is enabled, the settings of all master parameters are locked and will not
change when changing presets. When inserting Convology XT on a master
effects bus, you will probably want to set the wet/dry Mix to 100% and also
enable the lock control. This prevents the Mix control from returning to its
default setting when changing presets.

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2.9 Preferences
The Preferences control is accessed through the Settings->Preferences
menu. The Settings menu is the gear icon to the left of the Save button.

The top section sets the internal block size and latency of the convolution
engine. The default setting is a compromise between fast performance (low
CPU usage) and low latency. Clicking the “Zero latency” button enables zero
latency mode, which means the plug-in does not delay the output at all. Zero
latency consumes more CPU.

The custom library directory option allows the user to specify an additional
directory to scan for libraries. Convology XT already supports installing
libraries to external drives, but the installation path is standardized:
"\ProgramData\Impulse Record\Convology XT Libraries" on Windows and
"/Library/Application Support/Impulse Record/Convology XT Libraries/" on
MacOS. If you want to use a directory of your choosing you can move the
library folders from the install directory to your custom directory and specify
this custom directory in the preferences (you then need to close and re-open
the plug). Most users will not need to use this option.

Interface scale lets you increase the size of the user interface. The knob drag
mode lets you tailor how knobs react to mouse drags. The default is to move
the knob as you drag the mouse up and down. Some users may prefer left-
right or circular motions.

The “Set default parameters on IR/preset change” preference controls

whether parameters are reset to their default values when you select a new
factory preset. By default this parameter is off, meaning controls are sticky

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and will persist through preset changes. For example, you can set an EQ
shape, say to roll off the low frequencies, and this EQ will persist through
factory preset changes. Enabling this parameter means that all controls will
reset to their default values when selecting a new factory preset.

Note that user presets always set all parameters, regardless of how this
preference is set. The exception is the Master Lock control, which locks the
master section during factory or user preset changes.

The “Change preset when selecting new category” preference causes the
preset to change when you select a new category in the left-hand tree view.
Disabling this lets you browse to new categories without changing the current
preset.

“Allow mono layouts” allows the plug-in to be created in mono->mono

configuration. This option is enabled by default, however Convology XT
advertises to the host that it prefers a stereo->stereo configuration. Disable
this if your DAW is creating Convology XT as a mono plug-in and you really
want stereo. You’ll have to delete and recreate the insert for the change to
take effect.

3. Exploring Further
3.1 User Presets
You can save your tweaks to any of Convology XT’s library content by
making your adjustments and then clicking Save As. This will open a dialog
to name the preset. Give your preset a name, click OK, and it’s now stored in
User Presets.

Should you want to make further changes to the same preset, create the
changes and then click Save and that will update your preset. If you decide
you no longer need a specific user preset, simply find it in User Presets and
then click the Delete button. A dialog box will ask you to confirm that you
want to delete the file, press OK to confirm.

To rename a user preset, double-click the preset in the right-hand pane and
the naming window will appear.

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3.2 Preset Export and Import
The Preset Export and Import options are found in the Tools menu. They
allow you to migrate your users presets from one machine to another. Preset
Export lets you select a file and then writes the presets to the file. Preset
Import lets you select a file and then reads the presets. If naming conflicts
are detected, you have the option to keep your existing presets or replace
them.

3.3 File Browser

With Convology XT you have the ability to load any WAV or AIF file. If you
have a favorite IR, simply locate it by clicking on the File Browser tab located
near the top of the left tree view. This causes a file browser to appear in the
right-hand pane.

Clicking on any IR file will load the IR and you will see the filename appear in
the status display.

At the top of the file browser is a popup menu showing the currently selected
folder. Clicking on the menu lets you navigate to your home directory and
also lets you navigate to different hard drives on your system. The up arrow
button moves up a directory. Double clicking on a folder moves into that
folder.

When loading an impulse response from a WAV file, Convology XT will look in
the same directory for a PNG or JPG file with same name and will use that for

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the image. More specifically, an image name which matches the start of the
IR name will be used, so for example "Room.png" would be used as the
image for "Room.wav" but would also be used for "Room Front.wav" and
"Room Rear.wav". You can also put images in a subdirectory named
“images”.

3.4 Purchasing Additional Library Content

To purchase additional library content, go to www.ImpulseRecord.com and
under products click Convology XT.

You can also navigate to the store from inside the plugin. In the left-hand
tree view, click Online Content. That will bring up products on the right-hand
side and you can click on any product, which will take you to the Convology
XT online store.

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Our online store is used by many companies and is highly regarded with
great secure hosting and user purchasing experience.

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4. Copyright Notices

VST is a trademark of Steinberg Media Technologies GmbH

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