Vintage studio sound · Modelled from the real gear

Roll up for the
mystery tone.

We hunt down the studio hardware that shaped the records you grew up on, then model every ounce of its character from the real units on our bench. No approximations. No emulations of emulations. The real sound, in your DAW.

Browse Plug-ins What's Coming

Gated Compressor / Mixer · Early '80s

ME-30 — a broadcast box with a dirty secret.

It was built for field recording and broadcast: three inputs, one compressor, a meter, and nothing fancy. Then engineers found out what happens when you drive it hard. Run gently, it levels voices smooth and steady. Pushed, it turns drums grainy, dense and wonderfully lo-fi.

ME-30 plugin — cream and black gated compressor/mixer with three inputs, response rate knob and compression meter

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Inputs 1 · 2 · 3

A Mixer Up Front

Blend up to three sources into the compressor, each with its own lo-cut switch. Great for squashing a drum kit's room and overheads together.

Gated Memory

No Pumping, No Rush

When the signal drops below the gate, the gain freezes where it is, so noise doesn't swell up between phrases. The red light shows when it's holding.

Response Rate

Fast to Slow

One knob sets how it reacts, from quick and grabby for snappy drums to slow and smooth for steady spoken word and vocals.

Output · VU Range

Push It Into Grit

Turn the inputs and output up and it starts to break up. That crunchy, saturated compression is what made it a cult favourite.

$29

Vocals, drum rooms, parallel crush, or anything that needs attitude. Stereo mode included. DRM-free, VST3 / AU, free updates for life.

Full Details Buy ME-30

VCA Compressor / Limiter · Early '80s

mbx 165A — all the punch, none of the squash.

A fixture in studio racks through the early '80s, this was the compressor engineers reached for when drums and bass had to hit hard and stay clean. Its soft-knee curve eases into compression and rounds peaks off instead of flattening them. We modelled ours across its whole range, from barely-there levelling to all-out limiting.

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Threshold

Watch the Lights

The Below and Above lights show exactly where your signal sits against the threshold, so you can set it by eye as well as by ear.

Compression

Gentle to Brick Wall

One big knob from 1:1 up to infinity. Low settings level a vocal without anyone noticing; turn it all the way and it becomes a limiter.

Attack · Release · Auto

Set It, or Let It Decide

Dial attack and release by hand, or press Auto and the timing follows the music, fast on transients and slow on sustained notes.

Stop Level

PeakStop Ceiling

A separate hard ceiling above everything else. Anything the compressor lets through gets caught here before it can clip.

$29

Drums, bass, vocals or the mix bus. Stereo Coupler links both channels for bus work. DRM-free, VST3 / AU, free updates for life.

Full Details Buy mbx 165A

Coming soon · Vari-Mu Tube Limiter

Ourchild 660 — twenty valves of pure glue.

The most revered tube limiter ever built sat in a London control room in 1966 and quietly shaped the sound of popular music. We got our hands on one, modelled it end to end, and we're putting every last valve of it in your DAW.

Input Gain

Drive the Valves

Push the input to work the tubes harder. More gain means more compression and more of that thick, harmonically rich saturation the original is famous for.

Threshold

Set the Grip

Ten positions of makeup and sensitivity, modelled at every detent. From transparent level control to unmistakably squashed and forward.

Time Constant

Six Classic Voicings

The heart of the machine. Positions 1 and 2 grab fast for drums and percussion; 3 through 5 breathe slower for vocals and bass; position 6 is the famously program-dependent setting that mix engineers guard like a secret.

Zero & Bal

True Stereo Behaviour

Link both channels for rock-solid bus compression, or run them independently. The DC balance and zero controls are modelled just like the hardware, wobble and all.

Coming soon

Drums, vocals, bass, or strapped across the whole mix. Pairs beautifully with the 517. DRM-free, VST3 / AU, free updates for life.

Get Notified at Launch

More From the Bench

New release Dr.Revolver plugin — black amp head on a diamond-grille two-speaker cabinet with chrome trolley stand, in a dim studio

Guitar Amplifier · DSP + NAM Hybrid

Dr.Revolver

The rare hybrid head behind the guitar sound of 1966 and '67. It came out of a short, experimental moment when a British amp maker put a transistor preamp in front of a valve power stage. Few were ever sold, but the world's biggest band took them into the studio, and that sound is all over their two most adventurous albums: thick, singing mids, a glassy top end and a crunch nothing else quite gets.

A hybrid, just like the original: hand-coded DSP for the circuit and controls, plus NAM captures of the real amp for the raw tone
Head and matching cabinet, straight from the original stack
From sparkling clean through edge-of-breakup to full, fuzzy crunch
Built for backwards solos, droning rhythm parts and anything that wants to sound like 1966

$22

Learn More Buy — $22

Coming Soon

The next release is on the bus…

Something with four tracks and a lot of tape is threading up right now. Take a look →

In development · Coming soon

Four tracks.
Infinite bounces.

Something big is threading up in the workshop: a complete four-track tape machine and valve console app, modelled on the one-inch recorder and tube desk that captured the most famous records ever made at a certain London studio.

Four independent tape tracks with authentic saturation and head bump
Bounce and reduce like they did in '67 — each pass adds real generation loss
Wow, flutter, hiss and print-through, faithfully modelled, fully dialable
Varispeed, tape delay, and yes — full reverse playback
15 and 7½ ips speeds with different head voicings

Plus · The Valve Desk

The 51-series console, modelled too.

A tape machine is only half the story. The four-track runs into a painstakingly accurate emulation of the all-valve recording desk that sat beside it — the last and greatest of the tube consoles, built in-house in 1964 and used on every record that mattered for the rest of the decade.

Every channel's mic amp, the passive tone controls, the routing matrix, the quad monitoring section and that unmistakable transformer-loaded output stage — modelled stage by stage, then wired straight into the tape path exactly as it was in the room. Push the faders and the valves push back.