Depth-Xpander & JVC

Team ARCADiA | 06 January 2026 | 670.51 MB

Two tube-driven spring reverb units were extensively sampled for this library. The first has a degree of notoriety (I’m calling it “Depth Xpander”) and was marketed for use in home stereo systems, and people even had them in their cars, to apply some reverb to the music they played on their system. It’s mono and is said to have been used by King Tubby in his dub mixes. The unit itself is really just a tube amp for driving a spring tank. The second unit (a JVC Nivico) was aimed at the same market, but actually contains the springs inside the case, with the tube amp. This one is stereo. The Depth Xpander has the main reverb, and 4 ‘bionic’ reverbs, which were made using a sampling technique I’ve been using for years now- playing/recording the sampling tones at faster and slower, which results in shorter or longer reverbs, with their frequency responses shifted up or down. The JVC has 3 very similar versions of its main reverb, and 5 bionic ones. I also sampled it in combination (running into) with some eurorack synthesizer modules, including lots of interesting filters (filter banks, formant filters, low passes, etc) and some other modules. There were 8 modular patches, which produced 8 more reverbs. Some of the JVC bionic and +modular reverbs are actually in mono- that’s how they were sampled.