The Room™

Positional room emulator — Six Walls

The Room is a convolution reverb you play by moving the microphone. Instead of an algorithmic tail, it convolves your signal with a bank of measured room impulse responses and lets you drag a mic around a top‑down view of the room. Pre‑delay, tone, and level all follow the mic position the way they do in a real space.

Installing

The Room (plugin) — the Get It! button on sixwalls.net asks your system, then how much of the room set you want, and gives you one file:

Minimal — the VST3 with the one built‑in dEchorate room. Nothing else to install.
Suggested — the above plus the C4DM Great Hall, a large stone hall with a long tail.
Full — every measured room (Great Hall, octagon, classroom, the dEchorate wall sweep, the FLAIR 6‑DoF room).
Portable — all rooms, no installer: unzip and drop The Room.vst3 into your VST3 folder yourself.

Click Yes on the one Windows security prompt; the installer drops the VST3 (and, for Suggested / Full, the extra room banks inside it) into C:\Program Files\Common Files\VST3\. Restart your DAW or rescan plugins and load The Room as a VST3 effect. If Pro Tools is installed, the installer also offers an AAX version for Pro Tools — tick Also install the AAX version for Pro Tools; it goes to C:\Program Files\Common Files\Avid\Audio\Plug-Ins\. Pro Tools picks new plug-ins up at its next launch. The AAX uses the rooms installed with the VST3, so there is nothing extra to copy. On macOS the .pkg shows a Pro Tools (AAX) checkbox (off by default) and installs the AAX to /Library/Application Support/Avid/Audio/Plug-Ins/.

All Rooms add-on (optional) — The-Room-Rooms-<version>-Windows.exe for when you installed Minimal and want the rest later. It installs for your user only — no admin prompt — and new rooms appear in the room selector next time you open the plugin.

Using it

Room selector	Top‑right. Picks which measured space you are in. The map, the source positions, and the mic grid all change to match.
Mic puck	Drag it around the room. The nearest measured impulse response is chosen and equal‑power crossfaded in as you move. You can only place the mic inside the measured area — the region the room was actually sampled.
Source	Which loudspeaker position in the room is playing. Rooms have between one and eight.
MIC selector	Under the room selector. Applies a microphone color to the room sound — Flat passes it through untouched. See Microphone models.
Readout	Under the map: distance to the source, the resulting pre‑delay, and the mic spot currently in use.

Controls

Control	Range	What it does
Mic X / Mic Y	0–1	Mic position across the floor. Both are automatable — sweep the mic from your DAW.
Height	Low / Mid / High	Mic height layer. Hidden for rooms measured at a single height.
Source	A–H	Source position; the plugin shows how many the current room has.
Mix	0–100 %	Dry / wet balance.
Output	±24 dB	Post‑mix trim.
Glide	5–400 ms	How quickly the sound moves when the nearest IR changes as you drag.
Normalize	on / off	On: evens the level between mic positions, for auditioning tone. Off: the natural loudness change with distance is kept.

The selected room, and any room‑name or description edits, are saved with your project.

Importing your own impulse responses

Import IR… (top‑right) loads a personal impulse response and adds it to the room selector, marked with a ▸. Supported: WAV (incl. BWF / RF64), AIFF, FLAC, Ogg, MP3, Waves .wir, and raw‑text sample dumps. Files are recognized by content, so an unusual extension still works.

An imported IR captured at one position can’t describe the reflections elsewhere in the room, so instead of the map it gets a Distance control — move toward or away from the source, with the direct sound re‑timed and re‑leveled and the tail held steady. Set Measured at to the distance the IR was captured at; Distance is relative to it. A Waves .wir also reads its .xps sidecar for the room name, dimensions, and RT60.

Waves publishes a large impulse‑response library free of charge — hundreds of real halls, churches, studios, clubs, and arenas, plus hardware‑unit and synthetic spaces. Download the .wir files and import as many as you like:
waves.com/downloads/ir-convolution-reverb-library

Imported IRs are copied to %APPDATA%\The Room\user-irs and reload with your project.

Microphone models

The MIC selector colours the room sound as if it had been picked up through a particular microphone. It is applied to the wet signal only, after the room; the dry path is never touched. Flat is the default and does nothing — the measured space exactly as captured. The models are frequency‑response only (no distortion, proximity, or off‑axis behavior), measured against a reference mic; above ~10 kHz they are uncalibrated and should be read as broad tendencies rather than exact curves.

Model	Character
Flat	No coloration; a clean reference. Use it to hear the room untouched, or to A/B what a model is doing.
Instrument Dynamic	Mid‑forward moving‑coil dynamic with a firm presence lift around 5–6 kHz and a gentle low‑end roll‑off. Tightens and pushes the room forward — the one to reach for on snare and guitar‑cab spaces.
Broadcast Dynamic	Large‑body dynamic with a wide, even response: full lows, controlled presence, a smooth top that rolls off gently. Warm and unhyped; tames loud, bright rooms.
Broadcast Dynamic — Presence	As above with added upper‑mid lift (~3–6 kHz) for articulation.
Broadcast Dynamic — Low‑Cut	As the flat voicing but with a shelf down below ~200 Hz for a leaner, closer sound.
Stage Entertainer	Vintage‑voiced dynamic: prominent midrange, thick low‑mids, a top end that closes in early. Adds an old‑record character — good when a capture sounds too hi‑fi.
Studio Condenser IV	Clean modern large‑diaphragm condenser: near‑flat mids, a gentle lift of air up top, extended, and low‑noise. The most honest of the coloured models — detail without an obvious signature.
’95 Iron Curtain LDC	Characterful vintage‑style large‑diaphragm condenser: warm low‑mids and a forward, slightly ragged brightness in the 8–12 kHz region. Not subtle — for when "flat" feels too clinical.
’95 Iron Curtain LDC — Low‑Cut	As above with its bass roll‑off engaged for a tighter low end.
Cab Dynamic — Bright / Neutral / Dark	Fast side‑address dynamic built for guitar and bass cabinets, with a tailored midrange and a switchable top: Bright pushes presence and attack, Neutral is its natural voicing, Dark rolls the highs off for a rounder cab tone.
Silver Age Vocal	Aggressively midrange‑forward vintage dynamic with a deliberately uneven 200 Hz–3 kHz response (including a narrow dip near 750 Hz) — that raggedness is the real mic's character, not a fault. Bracing and lo‑fi; an effect as much as a mic.

Import mic… (next to the selector) loads a personal .mic model made with the measurement tool. Imported models are copied to %APPDATA%\The Room\mics, are marked in the list, and reload with your project.

Where the extra rooms live

The Suggested and Full installers keep their room banks inside the plug‑in bundle (The Room.vst3\Contents\rooms\). The All Rooms add-on instead puts .bin files in %APPDATA%\The Room\rooms, and so do your imported IRs. You can also point the plugin at another folder by setting the THEROOM_ROOMS_DIR environment variable before launching your DAW. A built‑in way to relocate that folder is planned.

Credits & licences

Open About The Room (click the Six Walls logo in the header) for the version and the credits, and Third‑party licences there for the full texts. The same text is installed next to this manual as THIRD-PARTY-LICENSES.txt.

JUCE 8 — built with JUCE (juce.com) under the free JUCE Personal license; the “Made with JUCE” splash on the editor is part of that license.
dEchorate (built‑in room + “dEchorate …” room pack) — CC BY 4.0. Di Carlo, Tandeitnik, Foy, Bertin, Deleforge, Gannot, “dEchorate: a calibrated room impulse response dataset…”, EURASIP 2021. Resampled / trimmed / repacked by Six Walls.
FLAIR (“FLAIR Room” room pack) — CC BY 4.0. Converted from the original .mat by Six Walls.
C4DM / Isophonics room set (“C4DM …” room pack) — CC BY‑NC‑SA 4.0, Centre for Digital Music, Queen Mary University of London. Included because The Room is free; the derived banks are shared under the same license.
Fonts — Orbitron, Rajdhani, IBM Plex Mono, under the SIL Open Font License 1.1.