Hey there,
Yeah, constructive critiques, tips, requests are always welcome
It's a work in progress, and we are always working to improve where we can.
[In my other life I edit a science journal, so I'm pretty immersed and comfortable/brow beaten with the world of critique].
Agreed Bowie - every reverb has a different level to an extent compared to to others.
Factors to consider in relation to that are that we have used parity of the manufacturers settings (e.g. mix set at 30%).
Nice as it would be to have actual industry standards, there sadly often aren't (and don't get me started on compressors!
).
i.e. to have one form of parity removes another more often than not
So in a case of doing that as a reference standard it provides parity in one sense (e.g. manufacturer belief of mix %) but not of course in the case of exact dB levels in all cases.
Moving to the future 'best case scenario reverb shootout' measuring tails (at the moment) and setting that close enough (e.g. within 0.5dB) would sadly take much much much more time than we could afford to spend at the moment as a free site (anyone wanting to throw us some $$ so we can torment ourselves on super high end details is more than welcome
).
If anyone has an insight into how we can do this an still maintain some form of social life that would be truly excellent.
We aim, for the site, to be what we call 'semi-scientific', i.e. we do the basic achievable level within time/budget constraints.
If we were going for a full academic journal peer review type level we would of course have 3-6 months for each experiment (and still probably expect a 50% rejection rate at the end. . . science...).
With reverbs (even in the case of differing mix levels by manufacturer) you can (I think), still adequately determine the 'tone' of the plugin, which is the main thing to check.
If anyone does spot a particular plugin that they would like the mix level to be higher or lower we'd welcome a heads up and estimate of how much to adjust by and will have a blast on it as soon as we get time to do it and repost for approval by the hive mind.
Re Confirmation Bias - depends what aspect of confirmation bias we consider, we aim to remove as many potential biases as possible, but yeah, it's definitely a work in progress.
For the moment, just focus on the tone.
Thanks in advance for any wisdom, we'll keep on working and improving as time and ideas arise.