New Music Gear Monday: UAD AKG BX-20 Reverb Plugin

It may be hard to believe but in the days before hardware digital reverbs and plugins there were few inexpensive ways to generate ambience during a mix. Not many studios had the room or the expertise to build a live chamber and plate reverbs were expensive, leaving the lowly spring reverb as the only low cost alternative.

That being said, there was a very well made high-end version of the spring reverb that found its way into many studios - the AKG BX 20.

Many an engineer loved the BX 20 sound, but there weren't many originally made and there are even fewer around today. That's all been changed with the introduction of Universal Audio's plugin version of the famous reverb. UA emulated what they felt was the best currently working example of unit, one owned by producer Jon Brion.

While the plugin has all the parameter controls of the original unit, UA also included a few "digital-only" features like decay, volume and pan, link, dry/wet blend, predelay and low cut filter, none of which are found on the hardware version.

The UAD BX 20 spring reverb plugin works on UAD-2 hardware and Apollo interfaces and is endorsed by AKG Acoustics, the original maker of the hardware unit from the 60s. The price is $199. Check out the video below to hear what it sounds like and go to the UA site for more info.

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