Yamaha REV500
A single-rack-space reverb that borrowed the DSP engine of Yamaha's flagship digital mixer and sold for the price of a decent guitar pedal.
Overview
The REV500 arrived as a 1RU multiple-effect reverb. Yamaha's period advertising was blunt about where the processing came from: the 32-bit technology was, in the company's words, pioneered in its "world beating" 02R digital mixer and its ProR3 professional reverb. That is the whole pitch - a studio-grade engine in a rack unit aimed at home and project studios rather than post houses. Sound on Sound (July 1997, p.253) ran the same argument, describing the REV500 as delivering state-of-the-art DSP at what the magazine called a run-of-the-mill price.
The converters got equal billing in that advertising. Yamaha specified 20-bit A/D and D/A converters alongside the 32-bit internal processing. That spec is what separates the REV500 from the cheaper 16-bit boxes that surrounded it on dealer shelves. The same campaign leaned hard on "true stereo" processing, with the halls, rooms, plates and special reverbs all recalled instantly from the front panel. Mix (February 1997, p.179) picked up that front-panel recall as a selling point, noting that the true-stereo halls, rooms, plates and special reverbs come up immediately from the controls rather than through menu diving.
Price was the other half of the story. A UK dealer listing from the period put the REV500 Reverb at £329.00, in the same price band as the Yamaha A3000 sampler and well below the Ensoniq DP Pro at £529.00. The target buyer wanted a serious reverb but was not going to spend four figures on a dedicated processor.
One flaw in the record: the period material is almost entirely Yamaha's own advertising copy, reprinted across several magazines with near-identical wording. So the "unrivalled realism" and "state of the art" claims are marketing, not independent measurement. The magazines ran the copy. In the chunks available, they did not put the REV500 on a bench and publish numbers. The specs are manufacturer claims, and so is the enthusiasm.
What the REV500 did establish, according to Yamaha's own documentation, was a reputation solid enough that the company later used it as a quality benchmark for other products. A period write-up of the DS2416 digital mixing card described its two onboard effects processors as "equal in quality to Yamaha's REV500" — a small but telling detail. When a manufacturer starts citing a £329 rack unit as the reference standard for its computer-based mixer, the unit has earned its place.
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