My first digital reverb was a used Alesis MidiVerb II in the late ’80s. I'd previously built a Radio Shack echo kit, messed around with spring reverb tanks, and owned analog and digital delay stompboxes, but I wanted those cascading, long reverbs and gated drums I'd heard on then-current releases. Combined with my 4-track cassette recorder, the Alesis helped spice sounds up but didn’t get me very close to sonically competing with those Dead Can Dance or Cocteau Twins albums I enjoyed so much. I still have that unit, though it sees little use these days. It turns out that Temecula DSP's John Wheeler created a plug-in, MDV-II, based on the MidiVerb II, plus the MCV-1, based on the earlier Alesis MicroVerb. Both sound just like those vintage devices and are completely free, but we're here to talk about something even more important.
In Tape Op #41, we reviewed Seven Woods Audio's Ursa Major Space Station SST-206, designed and released by Christopher Moore [Tape Op #65], who had updated the SST-206 based on the original SST-282 Space Station, which he'd designed and built in 1978. Chris had been an engineer at Lexicon and left to start Ursa Major, Inc. in 1977. The original Space Station SST-282 sold for $2,000, quite a bit less than competing, studio-quality digital reverbs at that time.
Both of these reverbs are now quite rare, many artists and engineers swore by their lush sounds and usability, and the original patent expired, so John at Temecula DSP decided to engineer the SST-206 plug-in, based on Chris' updated version from 2003 but with the ability to mimic the original SST-282.