Magic Series

MAGIC:60

An intelligent insert effect that makes modern audio sound as though it was recorded, processed, bounced and mixed in a 1960s studio.

£39 £49Launch price

See the measurements

Formats: VST3 · AU · Standalone
Operating system: macOS · Universal
Version: v1.0.0

What it does

The room, the desk, the tape — and the generations between them.

One oversized MAGIC knob coordinates a complete period recording chain — preamp, console, tape, generation loss, ambience, tape effects, movement and stereo placement — through Style-dependent nonlinear mappings.

Twelve Styles, three Eras, four Recording Formats and a continuous Tape Generations control compose in a documented order. At MAGIC 0 the chain is bit-exact: not “gentle”, but transparent, asserted by test.

Behind ADVANCED, all sixty-four destinations appear across nine groups, each showing the four contributions that produced its value — Style base, MAGIC, Match and your own offset — read from the same function the audio uses, so the display cannot drift from what you hear.

Key features

Twelve Styles, three Eras, four Recording Formats

Composing in a documented order over sixty-four macro destinations.

Dry Below and Dry Above

They bracket what MAGIC is allowed to reach: outside them the audio passes through clean, delayed to stay in step and otherwise untouched. Measured, a 12 kHz tone left dry with Dry Above at 4 kHz comes out at −0.04 dB, where the same tone through the chain loses 49 dB to the tape.

Reverse offered as three honest things

Reversing audio requires knowing the end of a segment before emitting its beginning, so buffered mode reports latency equal to its whole segment — 24,000 samples for the default 500 ms. Envelope mode applies a reversed amplitude swell, reverses nothing, and reports no latency. The suite asserts both.

A fuzz section held back structurally

Four structural limits rather than a cautious default: the macro cannot reach a serial fuzz at any position in any Style, the low band never enters the circuit, a crest-factor detector backs the circuit off on dense material, and the result is blended.

Measured across every Style

At MAGIC 0.5 and 0.7, a bass, a vocal, a drum bus and a full mix each keep their low end within 4.1 dB and their dynamics within 9.0 dB.

205 controls, all keyboard-reachable

Every one carries a tooltip, and every Advanced row carries reset-to-Style.

The interface

The MAGIC:60 advanced drawer open on its Tape page, with record level, tape saturation, tape compression, head bump, HF loss, hiss, wow, flutter, dropouts and generations controls drawn over reel-to-reel artwork. — MAGIC:60 · 1 of 1

Audio

Audio demos for MAGIC:60 are not published yet.

We would rather show you nothing than show you a demo that was not recorded through this plugin.

Measured

DSP and plugin suites · 12 Styles × 4 MAGIC positions × 4 oversampling factors × 4 sample rates

DSP suite: 881,875 checks
Plugin-layer suite: 878 checks
pluginval strictness 10, VST3: SUCCESS, no warnings
auval: AU VALIDATION SUCCEEDED, 0 warnings
Audio-thread allocations: 0, across every combination tested
Reported vs delivered latency: exact to 1e-6 at every rate and factor
Alias suppression at the default 2× setting: 96 dB
Chain at MAGIC 0: bit-exact
Mono sum at MAGIC 0.4: 0.01 dB loss

Figures are produced by this plugin’s own test suite and benchmark, on the hardware and sample rate named above. They are not estimates.

Technical details

Formats: VST3 · AU · Standalone
Operating system: macOS 10.13 or later
Architecture: Universal — Apple Silicon and Intel
Plugin code: Mgc6
Version: 1.0.0
Factory presets: 55

Across seven categories.

Worth knowing

It recreates the technical and perceptual fingerprints of period recording and mixing: bandwidth, compression behaviour, harmonic structure, noise, modulation, stereo conventions and generation loss. It does not reproduce a specific singer, musician, arrangement, room, microphone technique, instrument, or any named console, tape machine, amplifier, effect unit or record.
MAGIC MATCH and the Loop Lab are built and tested but are not reachable in this build. They are not features of this release.
Auto-gain holds typical programme material within 3.2 LU and the worst single source within 5.2 LU. It is a fair-comparison aid, not a loudness guarantee.
Every claim on this page is a measurement. No listening evaluation has been performed.