Quantec QRS/XL Room Simulator

After recording many albums in Denmarks internationally recognized “PUK” Recording Studios in the 1980s, and using the many devices in tha studio, I fell in love with one of the first professional digital reverberators – the Quantec Room Simulator. It featured some wild ambiences and reverbs, which could sound both very natural and very artificial depending on the settings.

Upon establishing my own professional studio in 1985 I therefore wanted such a unit. But the Quantec company had then just released a new version of the unit – the Quantec QRS/XL. So I invested a serious sum of money (equalling more than € 6.000 in 2016 money) in the QRS/XL, which indeed is a fine reverb unit. It lacks however the hands-on experience of the original, and is only programmable via external software (available for the Atari 1040 ST). But on the other hand it features 127 programs of very high quality, which made it instantly useable in for a wide range of applications. This had an obvious place in the my rack for more than 15 years, before I finally sold it. Especially for believable ambiences it performed very well.

With the Atari ST application you could construct some truly bizzarre effects by means of the digital FIR filters, but it was a quite cumbersome and arcane system, that was far from intuitive. So I only used the software on special occasions, to generate new banks of interesting patches.