SIGNATUREALGORITHMS

About

We would rather show you the measurement than the adjective.

How these are built

Every plugin here starts as a question about a mechanism. Why does a push-pull valve stage sound different from a single-ended one? Because its topology cancels even harmonics as a matter of algebra. Why does a transformer saturate the bass first? Because flux is the integral of voltage. Model the mechanism and the character follows; model the character and you get a curve someone liked.

The audio engine in each of our 20 plugins is plain C++ with no plugin-framework dependency at all. That is not tidiness — it means the test suite compiles and runs in about a second, which is what makes it practical to measure every claim instead of asserting it. It also means the tests can replace the global allocator to prove the audio path never allocates, rather than putting a comment in the code saying it does not.

When a measurement disagrees with the design, the measurement wins and the disagreement gets written down. Our reverb ships without antialiasing on its saturation stage because we implemented it, measured it making aliasing 41 dB worse at the drive that tank actually reaches, and removed it. Our delay keeps a linear interpolator that is six decibels worse than the good one at 16 kHz, because a bucket-brigade device really is doing linear interpolation in charge packets and that top-end movement is the sound rather than a defect.

What we will not do

We do not claim to have modelled a specific piece of hardware unless we have modelled and validated that circuit. Our amplifier simulator names its voicings descriptively and says plainly that none is modelled from measurements of a specific product. Our period-character plugins recreate the technical fingerprints of an era — the bandwidth, the compression behaviour, the harmonic structure, the noise, the stereo conventions — and say plainly that they do not reproduce any named console, tape machine or record.

We do not publish reviews, ratings, user counts or endorsements we have not received. If you find a quote on this site, it came from our own documentation.

And we do not publish audio demos we did not record through the plugin. Where a product page says demos are not published yet, that is because they are not, and we would rather tell you that than fill the space.

Pricing

One honest price per plugin, and a published floor no promotion goes below. We run two sales a year. We do not list at a price nobody pays so that a discount can look larger than it is.

Bundles do the work that deep discounting does elsewhere: if a curated bundle covers what you have put in your basket for less, the store tells you and switches you to it.