The Room
Positional room emulator — Six Walls
The Room is a convolution reverb you play by moving the microphone. Instead of an algorithmic tail, it convolves your signal with a bank of measured room impulse responses and lets you drag a mic around a top‑down view of the room. Pre‑delay, tone and level all follow the mic position the way they do in a real space.
Installing
The Room (plugin) — run
The-Room-<version>-Windows-Setup.exe. Click Yes on the
one Windows security prompt and it installs itself. Restart your DAW (or rescan
plugins) and load The Room as a VST3 effect. The base install
includes one room and needs no other files.
Extra Rooms (optional) — run
The-Room-Rooms-<version>-Windows-Setup.exe for the full set of
measured spaces (a large stone hall, a domed octagon, a classroom, a shoebox
studio at several liveness settings, and the FLAIR 6‑DoF room). It installs
for your user only — no admin prompt. New rooms appear in the room selector
next time you open the plugin.
Using it
| Room selector | Top‑right. Picks which measured space you are in. The map, the source positions and the mic grid all change to match. |
|---|---|
| Mic puck | Drag it around the room. The nearest measured impulse response is chosen and equal‑power crossfaded in as you move. You can only place the mic inside the measured area — the region the room was actually sampled. |
| Source | Which loudspeaker position in the room is playing. Rooms have between one and eight. |
| Readout | Under the map: distance to the source, the resulting pre‑delay, and the mic spot currently in use. |
Controls
| Control | Range | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Mic X / Mic Y | 0–1 | Mic position across the floor. Both are automatable — sweep the mic from your DAW. |
| Height | Low / Mid / High | Mic height layer. Hidden for rooms measured at a single height. |
| Source | A–H | Source position; the plugin shows how many the current room has. |
| Mix | 0–100 % | Dry / wet balance. |
| Output | ±24 dB | Post‑mix trim. |
| Glide | 5–400 ms | How quickly the sound moves when the nearest IR changes as you drag. |
| Normalise | on / off | On: evens the level between mic positions, for auditioning tone. Off: the natural loudness change with distance is kept. |
The selected room, and any room‑name or description edits, are saved with your project.
Where the extra rooms live
The Extra Rooms installer puts its .bin files in
%APPDATA%\The Room\rooms. You can also point the plugin at another
folder by setting the THEROOM_ROOMS_DIR environment variable before
launching your DAW. A built‑in way to relocate that folder is planned.
Credits
Measured impulse responses: the FLAIR dataset; C4DM / Isophonics (QMUL) room set (CC BY‑NC‑SA); and dEchorate (CC BY 4.0).