THE LEGACY of the M30

Here’s a bunch of Reverb IRs for you, sampled from the unobtainable TC M30 Plugin.
I believe that plugin was one of the very first VSTs i ever grabbed after i started getting into Ableton Live. I remember it being some sort of time-limited temporary free offer. After years of not thinking about it, i recently realized i still had a working 32-bit copy of the plugin, and so took some IR snapshots of it, because why not.

>>> DOWNLOAD M30 IRs <<<

Back in the day, i remember being impressed that the M30 had a super-lush and rich sound quality, and now in retrospect, while it’s certainly a good reverb, it does have a bit more of evident digital grain and stuttering to its sound than i recall, not quite standing up to the lushness and realism of various more cutting edge reverb plugins that have hit the market since. Technology advances over time, so go figure. However, M30 does have a unique sound and is certainly worthy of usage in certain situations. With these IRs you can emulate a selection of its potential capabilities.

~`~

THE SOUND of the M30

I noticed that the M30 Reverb has a fairly solid attack to it even when fully wet, so it might be a good choice on drums or instruments with percussive transients that you want to add some denseness to, but don’t want to soften all too much.

The decay time ranges from 100ms to 10s. I think it sounds quite nice at minimum, with a small/medium room size type character. Dialing in higher decay times seems to add longer delay lines overlapped on top of the early reflections, resulting in more of a large hall style and also revealing the somewhat unnatural-sounding stuttering to a progressively greater degree.

Another main parameter is “Hi Color”, which on most reverb units would be labeled as “Damp”, since it dampens the brightness of the extended decay portion of the signal, while leaving the tone of the short reflections unaffected.

As far as predelay, i almost always leave it at zero when using reverbs. However, on the rare occasion that i’ll increase a predelay parameter, it’s most often in the range between zero and two milliseconds, so i appreciate that the M30 has the resolution to dial in values of less than 1ms.

Having only a few adjustable parameters, the M30 is somewhat restricted in scope; however, its sound being of a fairly rich, full-range timbre and due to the character changing at different decay values due to its “algoflex” algorithm, it is indeed versatile enough for a myriad of possible reverb applications, as demonstrated by the plenteous assortment of included presets.

Since it tends on the longer decay range and has a quite dense vibe, i generally use the M30 on a return send, feeding very small amounts of tracks to it — or, if inserted on individual tracks, at very low wet percentages (like < 10%).

~`~

THE IMPULSE RESPONSES

I’ve sampled a true stereo impulse response of each of the M30’s twenty-three primary presets using the frequency sweep method at 88.2kHz (the highest the plugin runs at) for theoretical ideal fidelity. I also neurotically made sure each was sampled as close to 0dB without clipping to minimize truncation of the lowest-level bits. Wav format for widest software compatibility.

The IRs do not sound identical to the plugin presets (they do not phase-cancel at all). To my ears the “stuttery” sort of quality is a bit smoothed out in the IRs, and the sense of dimensionality seems slightly flattened. The results are definitely subtly different, but the overall character when used in a mix should come across the same.

The lengths of the IRs range from half a second to almost ten seconds long.

>>> DOWNLOAD M30 IRs <<<
(23×2 88.2kHz wav files in a 54.2 MB Zip File. 76.7 MB uncompressed.)

Impulse Response Name	Length in Seconds
Spoken Room	0.50
Tight Bright Hall	0.51
Tight Dark Hall	0.52
Guitar Room	0.78
A Touch of Hall	1.12
Hall 2	1.67
Booth Medium	1.67
Booth Favourite	2.13
Hall 1	2.22
Booth Bright	2.28
Bright Female	2.35
Bright Male	2.35
Vocal Ensemble	2.70
Favourite Dark Vocal	3.02
Guitar Strum Hall	3.17
Favourite Vocal	3.58
Hall 3	3.62
Favourite Bright Vocal	3.67
Gentle Vocal Booth	3.78
Dark and Long	3.78
Vocal Hall	7.43
Airy Space Solo Instrument	9.24
Orchestral Hall	9.77

If you find value in these impulse responses, maybe consider purchasing something from TC, because without them these IRs could not exist today. If you want a recommendation i’m a hugely massive fan of their Polytune plugin, which is the best guitar tuning VST i’ve used, by far. You can strum six strings and tune them simultaneously… and it actually works extremely consistently. It’s crazy cool!

If you feel like supporting me on the other hand (with the other hand??), you can peruse my premium packs, which range from super affordable $1 Zinglez racks, to mid-price packs such as the recent IR collection DankVerb, to ultra-epic mega bundles featuring hundreds of innovative & useful effect racks.

Enjoy!

Oh, and…
don’t be a jackass!