Choice of Lossless Feedback Matrix

As mentioned in §3.4, an ``ideal'' late reverberation impulse response should resemble exponentially decaying noise [317]. It is therefore useful when designing a reverberator to start with an infinite reverberation time (the ``lossless case'') and work on making the reverberator a good ``noise generator''. Such a starting point is often referred to as a lossless prototype [154,434]. Once smooth noise is heard in the impulse response of the lossless prototype, one can then work on obtaining the desired reverberation time in each frequency band (as will be discussed in §3.7.4 below).

In reverberators based on feedback delay networks (FDNs), the smoothness of the ``perceptually white noise'' generated by the impulse response of the lossless prototype is strongly affected by the choice of FDN feedback matrix as well as the delay-line lengths in the FDN (discussed further in §3.7.3 below). Following are some of the better known feedback-matrix choices.