Magic Series
MAGIC:80
One-knob 1980s character for synths, keys, drums, bass and vocals — where the curves are the product.
- Formats
- VST3 · AU · Standalone
- Operating system
- macOS · Universal
- Version
- v0.1.0
What it does
Wide enough to notice. Never wide enough to disappear.
Turn one control clockwise and the sound becomes progressively more polished, wide, bright, animated and unmistakably of its decade. At zero the plugin is transparent — not “gentle”, transparent: fourteen destinations sit at exactly their neutral value, three of them asserted at compile time.
MAGIC drives twenty parameters across ten processing stages along individually shaped curves, and those curves are the product. Chorus depth arrives early and plateaus. Reverb stays silent until a third of the way round. High-frequency excitement rises gradually and never reaches its ceiling. Stereo width stops at 135 % while the parameter still allows 150 % — so the macro can never put you somewhere unsafe and the Advanced panel still can.
Every widening stage has an obvious implementation that sounds spectacular in stereo and collapses on a phone speaker. This one was measured instead.
Key features
Ten stages under one knob
Compression → transient shaping → saturation → digital-edge exciter → tone EQ → stereo chorus → micro-pitch → width and mono bass → gated ambience → look-ahead limiter → auto gain compensation.
Mono compatibility that was measured, not hoped for
Two fully decorrelated channels lose exactly 3 dB when summed. Across the whole macro range this chain loses at most 2.14 dB — so it widens without ever cancelling.
Edits become offsets, not overrides
Edit a stage in the Advanced panel and MAGIC then moves the whole curve underneath your edit rather than erasing it. One menu item puts everything back on the curve.
Forty-nine presets grouped by source, not by recipe
Essentials plus five each of Pads & Strings, Bass, Keys & Piano, Leads & Arps, Drums & Percussion, Guitar and Vocals. A user knows what they put the plugin on; they do not yet know which of seven 1980s recipes suits it, and asking them to is asking them to do the work the list exists to save.
No two presets resolve to the same sound
Asserted by test, compared as engine parameters — so two entries reaching the same place by different routes are still caught.
Auto gain measured against a corpus
A calibration tool runs programme material through the whole chain and measures the ITU-R BS.1770-4 gated loudness change at each knob position.
The interface
Audio
Audio demos for MAGIC:80 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 · through the full chain
- L/R correlation at MAGIC 0.0 / 0.5 / 1.0
- +1.00 / +0.40 / +0.22
- Mono loss at MAGIC 0.0 / 0.5 / 1.0
- 0.00 / −1.54 / −2.14 dB
- Mono loss for two fully decorrelated channels
- 3.00 dB (the theoretical worst case)
- DSP checks
- 1876
- Plugin checks
- 3877
- auval
- validates
- Build warnings under -Wall -Wextra -Wpedantic -Wshadow -Wconversion
- zero
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
- Mgc8
- Version
- 0.1.0
- Factory presets
- 49
Grouped by what you put the plugin on rather than by which recipe they use.
Worth knowing
- One auto-gain curve cannot serve every kind of material — at maximum the change spans 6.4 dB between a bass line and a drum loop. It is a fair-comparison aid rather than a loudness guarantee.
- All presets are original; nothing here is modelled on or named after any specific commercial instrument or factory patch.
- Every claim on this page is a measurement. No listening evaluation has been performed.
Also in these bundles
THE MAGIC COLLECTION
Get MAGIC:80 as part of THE MAGIC COLLECTION — 4 plugins worth £196 for £129.
£129
Save £67COMPLETE COLLECTION
Get MAGIC:80 as part of COMPLETE COLLECTION — 20 plugins worth £1,264 for £399.
£399
Save £865
