25/11/2025
So, I've had this Roland R-880 reverb since the early '00s. Before it became mine, it was sitting on the desk at Hotsound Studio in the 90's, where I learned the ropes of being a studio dude. Only much more expensive reverbs could do what it did, and when I left Hotsound Studio to start a new life in the late 90's some of the losses I felt was of the huge Genelec 1039 monitors, the big AMEK Rembrandt desk, the Lyrec 533 2" tape recorder, a Lexicon 300, and this Roland R-880 reverb.
I had already heard it at work in the Elsound studio where we cut some demos in the 80's. I thought it was kinda cool to have that remote sit on the desk.
When I worked at Hotsound Studio, the general consensus was, that the R-880 was Rolands attempt, to steal some market share away from Lexicon, by bringing this out as their version of the Lexicon 480L - one of the best digital reverbs of all time, and also one of the most expensive ones. The Roland R-880 was a bout half the price of the Lex 480, although Roland tried to insinuate that it must have been about twice as nice by naming it as they did.🤪 Well, it didn't quite reach the levels of those big Lexicon machines. For instance its long verbs wasn't very exciting. In Hotsound there was the Lexicon 300 reverb that was much much better at the big larger than life fairytale verbs. But the R-880 could do one thing really really well. Short ambient-ish reverb for percussive instruments (+ it has a quite cool Non Lin algorithm that let's you do exciting things. You can hear that on the "jungle drums" part of House Of Love on Pangea's Restrospectacular album. Other reverbs has that feature too, but it works very well with the R-880.)
When Hotsound closed down, all the gear was bought by a studio gear company, and when I learned that, I immediately went there and got this R-880 that I knew so well, and still had the presets in it that I and other engineers had programmed into it. Now my own studio started to feel right.
So, it's basically been with me since '92. I've repaired it a few times when I thought I lost it, but brought it back to life, and I still use it on everything I do here.
But I fear that we're going on borrowed time, so I gotta find a replacement. I have known about Relab's ambitious plans to recreate the Lexicon 480L in a plugin since before it was released ... almost 10 years ago ... maybe ... Well, it didn't strike me as being able to completely outperform my hardware reverbs (I had a couple more), so I didn't pull the trigger on it when it was first released. Later it was updated and Relab released an "Essentials" version that was certainly interesting enough for me to get that at least. I was able to make Valhalla Room give me what was close enough (quite close in fact)to the R-880, so I could use that during production, and then during mix I would replace it with the R-880. But then Relab released their latest version, and with a Black Friday offer and all, I decided to take the plunge the other day. (I did once before, but regretted because the R-880 was still working fine, so I cancelled the order.)
So now I'm fiddling with it to recreate the most important presets I have on the R-880 with the LX480.
Where before the world was whispering to me "Don't fight it - it's gonna happen!", I've now caved in and gotten the LX480. Now I'm whispering the same thing to the LX480 ... I will get there.
I'll soon shut it off but it'll probably be a good while before I get rid of the R-880 completely ...🥺
