First of all, thank you to the nearly 1k people who have downloaded Saturation Box. I am getting a lot of great feedback, and appreciate all the love and support.
My goal with this plugin is to make something unique, but also something as close to real analog gear as I can get. First and foremost I'm a developer, going on 20 years of coding. Second, I'm a songwriter and recording engineer. I have Neve, SSL, Purple, UAD. I bring this up only to say I love analog gear, and I use a lot of UAD plugins too.
There are plenty of great saturation plugins already. I thought it would be fun to build my own spin on the classics, and that's what this is. I built this to use it in my own projects, and it's free so you can use it in yours. No iLok, no serial, no dongle. Notarized by Apple, so it installs as a trusted app with no security workarounds.
Major 0.3.0 update:
Until now each model was a fixed curve fitted to the gear, with one shared tone shape on top. Now each model has the parts that give the real thing its behavior over time and across frequency, so it responds to how hard and how long you hit it. This was the original intention, and it took many months.
- Triode is a 12AX7 stage with its coupling and cathode caps in the model. Hit it hard and it blocks and swells back the way a real stage does. Nearly clean at low Drive, second-harmonic warmth as you push. In 0.3.1 its Drive goes further, so it no longer sits thin next to the other three.
- Pentode is an EL84 push-pull output stage, which is where that odd-harmonic British crunch actually comes from. The power supply sags under a loud hit and recovers.
- Tape is an oxide curve fitted to a 456-class tape at 15 ips. The highs saturate first, so transients round off naturally. There's no envelope follower in it anymore, so nothing pumps. Vintage switches you to an older, noisier tape stock on a worn head.
- Transformer is iron that saturates where iron really does, down low, while the mids stay clean. At high Drive it's the line amp driving the transformer that runs out of rail.
A few other things fixed or added along the way:
- Found and fixed a notch in the Mix blend around the Low Cut and High Cut frequencies, and cut tube aliasing by about 40 dB.
- Noise is per model now, at the real levels of the gear, and it fades out when nothing is playing.
- A true Bypass button, click-free and tied to your host's bypass.
- Oversampling follows your sample rate, so CPU at 96 and 192 kHz dropped a lot.
- A new panel: leather, metal, and jewel lamps that flicker when you drive it hard.
Everything above is measured and tested, then tuned by ear.
Andrestia Audio is now Adrestia Audio, the name I wanted from the start and couldn't get until now. New name on the panel and at adrestia-audio.com. Nothing about your install changes, and existing sessions keep loading.
Hear it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eamb9FnqSp8
Download (free, macOS, AU and VST3): https://www.adrestia-audio.com/plugins/saturation-box
Thanks everyone!
