UTOPIA Review

ADPTR Audio sent me a copy of their latest plugin Utopia to test and demo. Utopia is a spectral reverb with some unique ducking to keep your mix clear. I don’t normally review reverbs as there’s not much to say, they either sound nice or don’t. However, I did find the spectral settings on Utopia to offer some new sound design potential allowing for glassy and smooth reverb tails. The decay eq combined with the spectral block size can shape interesting icy ambience and even produce distant haunting wails.

The shimmer is simple, but a pleasant inclusion, but the auto clear control is where I think most people will find Utopia to be useful. From my understanding, auto clear will  spectrally duck and remove reverb frequencies that are present in overlapping incoming audio. This avoids the layering of too many similar reverberations from consecutive notes. Utopia also includes a buffer reset, allowing you to clear the reverb every so many measures. There’s also a pump/gate/ducking effect for more traditional modulation based methods of reverb removal. Combining the pumping and buffer with some tempo synced pre-delay can make for some creative motion based effects. I utilized this technique in a few of the included presets I created.

I found Utopia to be most useful as a creative reverb. While the spectral processing is subtle, it does give it a unique flavor. I think the sound from Utopia is very smooth and capable of lush ambient decay. One of my favorite features is the “decay time” slider found in the preset browser, this hides any presets with tails longer or shorter than your specified range. There’s also an expanded A/B switcher that includes C and D for swapping different ideas to really find what works best for your mix. It’s also worth pointing out that there is a freeze toggle and the decay can be tempo synced as well. If I had any request, it’d be a spectral de-noiser control, to give the tails that watery mp3 quality as well.

you can pick up Utopia from ADPTR Audio’s website here: https://adptraudio.com/product/utopia/