Well in my experience, reducing the higher frequencies will make the instrument feel farther away. Don’t know the science about it, but it seems to work. High crisp sounds, feels “in your face”, while things back in the hall gets a rounder tone. That rounder tone is what I want to get with my SWAM instruments. Right now I get that annoying layering effect of “dry sound + wet reverb”, instead of actually hearing the instrument placed in a sound stage.
So, I experimented a bit with VirtualSoundStage vs 2CAudio Precedence + Breeze, used as spatial mixing stages, feeding into an instance of Spaces II. I used Ravenscroft 275, SWAM Trumpet 1.5.1, and Infinite Brass 1.5 Trumpet 1, all configured to bone dry mono.
In short:
- Both solutions do a much better job of spatial mixing than just pan + EQ.
- Both have instance linking, for managing the whole mix through one window. (Precedence can also link to Breeze, so that the actual reverb also responds to the spatial position.)
- Both seem easy enough on the CPU that processing instruments separately should be fine on a decent DAW machine.
- I’m very impressed with the spatial positioning, stereo compatibility, and sound quality of Precedence/Breeze, and quite disappointed with these aspects of VSS.
- Breeze is also a REALLY nice reverb for general use, and may well be all you need (as in, no master IR reverbs), possibly even for orchestral work. My first impression is that it sounds better than Pro-R, and possibly even better than TC VSS2, is more capable than both of those, and has a pretty nice and easy to use GUI.
More specifically, the problem I have with VirtualSoundStage is that it sounds like it basically just does pan + a few slapbacks, and even with diffusion enabled, it sounds very synthetic, and creates bursts of harsh, metallic echoes when confronted with harsh transients. With enough reverb added, these artifacts can be masked more or less, but at that point, there isn’t much more than the pan left of the spatial positioning.
Meanwhile, with Precedence + Breeze, I can set up a small, dry room, and place instruments very accurately in it, and it still sounds smooth and natural, even on harsh sound sources. Thus, I can set up a really defined sound stage, and then just feed that into a tail reverb - or just use a hall preset or something in Breeze and be done with it, or anything in between, and it sounds nice and smooth no matter what. Exactly what I was looking for!
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I feel a bit silly for missing this, but Logic Pro has a feature called binaural panning. I never messed with it, but since it is native on each track (simply change from stereo pan to binaural) it would be great if it works as the primary staging stage, before the reverb.
PS. I also just found another staging plugin which works from binaural acoustics but also with reverb in the same plugin. Could this be interesting David:
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here’s a another option/sound design on how to plays a dry signal in a room.
On the insert channel on first slot you place a reverb with hi and lo cut built in.
set the mix knob to taste 2 - 8%
Lo cut 400 - 600
Hi cut 2000 - 4000
Reverb 2
Same reverb on a send channel to taste with the same settings except lo-cut, Hi-cut and mix
I use to have a separate eq for lo pass and hi pass before the reverb/reverbs.
If you want to go deeper
Put 2 reverbs instead of one as send reverbs
Pan one hard left the other hard right and send them to a bus.
On the bus: a stereo plugin to experiment with
Use mid eq to pan them even further
On the insert channel you mix with how much of left and right reverb you want you want to send.
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Cubase has some different panning modules as well, though the interesting ones seem entirely focused on various surround formats - which might actually be interesting, provided one can set up master reverbs and whatnot that can actually handle surround input properly. I’d like to research that a bit as well, as I’m interested in doing actual surround mixes as well. (I mean, if the sound effects in games and movies are surround, why should music and soundscapes be plain stereo?)
I have dearVR Music, and indeed, it has a lot of options and output formats, and the spatial positioning is quite effective. However, it sounds like it’s “just” straight Haas (left/right phase), pan, and early reflections, without any attempts at ameliorating the side effects of these methods. The result, apart from mono compatibility issues, is a tendency towards harsh and/or boxy sound.
The dearVR reverbs are not to my taste either (like real rooms with unpleasant acoustics, and some sound a bit metallic), and seem to be mono-in, as they’re completely unaffected by both spatial positioning and mono/stereo sound sources - which is perfectly fine for tails in most cases (there’s virtually no spatial information left at that stage anyway), BUT in this case, it results in the mono compatibility artifacts of the spatial positioning ruining the reverb tail!
It’s better to disable that and use an external stereo reverb setup. I tried using a stereo pair of TC VSS3 instances with slightly different settings, with dearVR “panning” + reflections, and that actually sounds pretty good. Of course, that loses the distance-to-dry/wet link, so unless dearVR has dedicated outputs for external reverb that I can’t find, that will have to be adjusted manually in the traditional way.
So all in all, out of the options I’ve tried so far, the Precedence/Breeze combo completely blows everything else out of the water. It’s easy to use, does exactly what I want out of the box, sounds amazing, with none of the issues and artifacts of the other solutions, and the modules can also be used for panning and reverb together with other plugins.
If anything, it would be nice to have smooth automation (to have sound sources moving around, at the expense of higher CPU load - seems like that’s something they consider doing eventually), and I’d say the GUIs feel a bit bulky, but they get the job done, and you can control all instances from two windows anyway, so no big deal. And, they’re themable and scalable! 
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I totally agree with what @olofson is saying. There’s so much information you need to replicate to get a dry signal to fit in a “realistic space”. I use quotation marks there because actually, you shouldn’t be going for realistic… this is a common mistake when it comes to reverb. Reverb actually makes a sound larger than life, and that’s what you are after… because a natural room reverb tail actually does so many different things because the sound is actually traveling through the space. For instance, you don’t only have the reverb tail, you also have a secondary delay followed by at least 7 other delays of the signal from your primary and secondary reflection points, then because that sound is traveling the pitch warps… so for every few feet the sound gets fuller and flatter. Then there’s stereo spread which is 3 dimensional (your 2 speakers can’t do this). Finally, the sound also changes phase in the space as the waveform loses energy, again… this part of the process can’t be mimicked. So all of this is going on and guess what, it all changes over time, there’s o logical decay rate for natural reverb…
So if you want an extremely detailed reverb that sounds somewhat natural, you’d need at least 4 reverbs at varying lengths, plus another 4 delays at varying delay times with the volume between them automated for each section, the pitch would need to be automated at the time of the first reflection point returning to the mic and all of this would then need to be sent to another 8 busses to be automated over the span of the piece, dependent on the volume of the source. Oh and all of that would need to be in true stereo 
Some verbs do a lot of that work for you… Valhalla products for instance are great… black hole does this well too… and the spaces plugin from EW is probably one of the best. I’d add a slapback delay to the dry instrument in your case though, this will get you 90% of the way there and then you can overlay your reverb and maybe automate the verb time dependent on velocity. 
And Binural panning works well if you are using a stereo signal. Otherwise it’s a bit pants.
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