re: Steam Audio’s Reverb and consistency
In my experience, a lot of this comes down to the probe placement and density. Your probes interpolate, so if you have probes in walls or doing weird things, sometimes you can get strange results. I suggest carefully placing your probes in your level.
re: Native Reverb
It is an algorithmic Plate style reverb. Using Audio Volumes, you can set a Master Reverb which will interp values as you transition from Volume to Volume. Additionally, Audio Volumes have Distance based send parameters which allow you to modulate the wet amount based on distance. The effect is quite convincing:
In-Game Reverb Demo from our 4.15 Preview Stream
re: Resonance Economy, PSVR, and Signal Chain Considerations
As I understand it, Resonance mixes source audio to Ambisonics and then applies a single spatialization process to the mixed-down audio (this creates a fixed cost on a single HRTF process instead of a per-source cost on multiple HRTF processes). In this way, spatialized Resonance audio would not be able to benefit from arbitrary submixing or submix effects (e.g. submix compression on some mixed sources, etc.). Another example would be PSVR’s A3D , which does its spatialization pass in hardware, so once you want to spatialize the sound, it leaves the Engine entirely, never to return.
For those cases, Aaron has implemented the option to split those sources off before spatialization so you can send them to the Master Reverb Submix, but there are obviously more complicated submix scenarios that would be impossible once you’ve decided to spatialize completely on hardware (dynamics in particular).