iZotope Equinox—A Mix Product of the Week

New York, NY (April 17, 2025)—What does a product need to make an impact in the competitive reverb plug-in market? Excellent sound is one way to get noticed; the other is compelling features and controls. Equinox, the new reverb from iZotope (distributed by Native Instruments), offers both.

Sonically, it provides stellar algorithms from iZotope subsidiary Exponential Audio. It also includes comprehensive adjustments of reverb parameters, dynamics, chorus and iZotope’s Dynamic Adaptive Unmasking technology.

Equinox is designed for both music and post-production. For the latter, it supports popular surround and Atmos/immersive formats. According to iZotope, Equinox can “naturally place dialogue and sound effects within scenes, enhance sound design with creative reverb textures, and manage complex surround and immersive mixes with ease.”

The plug-in comes with a vast collection of 1250 presets, designed for vocals, instruments, sound design and more. Thanks to a keyword and tagging system, you can easily find the presets you’re looking for.

The GUI is broken into several main sections. The Main controls include a Reverb Type menu that’s comprised of halls, chambers and plates in both Natural (realistic) and Color (experimental) versions.

You’ll also find controls for Time (decay time) and Space (room size), which interact with each other. The Pre-Delay controls offer you the choice to sync to tempo, which makes it simple to create echoes that are in time rhythmically.

Other Main-section controls include a Freeze button, a Mix slider, and numerical fields for Early (reflections) Gain and Reverb Gain.

The Tone slider provides a fast way to change the EQ balance of the reverberated signal. If you want deeper control, the EQ section of the plug-in lets (one of the Additional Control areas to the right of the Main section) lets you individually adjust the frequencies of the input, early reflections and tail of the signal, and offers a variety of filter types and even a Q control for specific filters.

Other parts of the Additional Control area provide adjustments for Attack, Tail and Early reflections, and the Chorus effect. For each, you get several parameters, and you can dive deeper by opening a selection of Advanced Controls.

Below the graphic EQ display are the Dynamics controls, which comprise three different and individually bypassable sections for creatively adjusting the reverb signal: Drive includes controls for Type (Warm 1, Warm 2, Crush), frequency and even simulated bit-depth (Character).

Comp lets you adjust Threshold, Comp (amount), Knee, Attack, Release and Gain. Another parameter, Cut, controls the low compressor threshold, which lets you set the compressor to ignore low-level sounds. The third section is Gate, which allows for adjustment of its Threshold, Range, Attack, Release and Hold time.

Near the top of the GUI are two other key sections, Balance and Unmasking. Balance provides individual channel controls for surround and immersive instances of Equinox. Included are adjustments for Early and Tail levels, Reverb Time balance, Extend Height (adds height in meters), High/Low Filter and even additional delay. The Unmasking effect helps the dry signal cut through a reverb signal. It offers Amount, Sensitivity, Attack and Release parameters, among others.

Equinox is available for an introductory price of $149.20 until April 30. After that, it reverts to its normal MSRP of $249.