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The ABC knobs control the parameters displayed on the screen.

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• Review

The PCM96 is a hardware reverb unit that also works as a plug-in. Out of the box it looks pretty professional and straightforward: from left to right you have input meters, a reasonably-sized OLED display, a couple of buttons and four knobs for parameter changes, followed by four more buttons and a flash memory slot.

Simple and uncluttered and pretty much what you'd expect if you've ever used a PCM unit before.

The back panel is pretty full. Aside from the stereo analogue ins and outs which are on XLRs, you have AES digital I/O, two FireWire ports, two Ethernet ports, MIDI In, Out and thru and a Word Clock input. Very comprehensive and in keeping with Lexicon's usual high standards.

Sound and control

Stick an analogue source through it and the PCM96 sounds just like you'd expect a Lexicon reverb to sound. That is, big and warm, and as you move from patch to patch, alternately bright and sparkling to deep and dark.

Lexicon has a vast vault of great-sounding reverbs to plunder and it's used it to very good effect here. There are some great new additions, such as an infinite reverb, which enables you to trap the 'tail' of the reverb, holding a chord or making a drone, from any sound.

There are all the old classics such as the Concert Hall and Room simulations, and even the Resonant Chord algorithm, which offers hours of fun.

When it comes to control, we're not massive fans of multi-function buttons and scrolling through hoards of parameters, so the fact that we can cope with using the PCM96 says a lot for the sensible way that Lexicon has devised its onboard navigation software and control layouts.

The three smaller knobs marked A, B and C give you direct control of the three parameters displayed on the screen, taking you away from the horrors of single knob operation.

Software

There was a time when this would have been the end of the review, but we live in an age when being a simple bit of hardware is no longer enough: we need 'added value'. Those FireWire and Ethernet ports offer exactly that.

The PCM96 comes with a CD containing software, which enables you to control the unit remotely from your DAW and stream audio through it via FireWire, giving you external DSP that provides reverb. This is a great idea, especially if you mix in the box and find that reverbs can be very processor heavy. However, remember that because this is an external unit you only get two installs for any given session.

Installing the software was, if not a nightmare, then pretty close to it. It strikes us that Lexicon didn't pay enough attention to this side of things as, even when we upgraded our system to the latest versions of Logic and OS X, it didn't work. We had to upgrade the firmware in the PCM96 itself and then re-install the software twice before it finally played ball.

Fortunately, once we got it going it worked exactly as it should. In Logic we had to run the system with the maximum I/O buffer of 1024 - with any lesser setting the latency was very big, so using it as a monitor reverb when overdubbing was nigh-on impossible.