Yamaha REV-1
A digital reverb that lets you see the sound as well as hear it. Finding one that still works is the hard part.
Overview
The REV-1 is Yamaha's digital reverberation system from the mid-1980s. Its big idea was a remote control unit with an LCD display. The display showed your settings, and it also drew a graphical picture of the reverb characteristics you'd dialed in. Yamaha's own advertising made a lot of this, promising the ability to "look" at the sound as well as hear it. Nothing else in a reverb did that at the time.
The engine underneath used specially developed Yamaha LSIs to generate up to 40 early reflections and up to 99.9 seconds of subsequent reverberation, according to the company's period advertising in Recording Engineer (October 1985, p.15). Nobody uses 99.9 seconds as a musical reverb tail. It's a sound-design number, so the REV-1 was clearly pitched at effects work as much as conventional studio ambience. The same advertising claimed the sound was "far superior to any other digital reverb." That's marketing copy, not a measured verdict.
In use, the REV-1 was all about control. Almost every reverberation parameter could be individually tailored. The remote unit gave what Yamaha described as instant "one-touch" access to memories, along with fine parameter adjustment. Studio Sound (February 1986, p.37) ran a piece in which engineers at Battery Studios praised both the REV-1 and the REV-7 as excellent and in constant use. That's a working-studio endorsement, not a bench test.
The REV-1 also appears in Yamaha's broader time-domain advertising alongside the YDD 2600 delay system. There it is described as a sophisticated digital reverberation system, with the LCD-display remote showing both settings and a graphical analogue of the reverb characteristics. That advertising ran through 1985 and 1986 in Mix, DB, and Recording Engineer, so Yamaha put real promotional weight behind the unit.
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