Magic Series
MAGIC:80
One-knob 1980s character for synths, keys, drums, bass and vocals: where the curves are the product.
Free 10-day trial. The download is the whole collection, 22 plug-ins in one installer, so you can try every one; start MAGIC:80's trial from inside the plug-in when you are ready. Downloading does not start it, and trying one plug-in does not start the others.
- AU (macOS)
- VST3
- AAX
- macOS Universal
- Windows 64-bit
- v1.1.0
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: fifteen destinations sit at exactly their neutral value, three of them asserted at compile time, and with oversampling off decorrelated stereo nulls against the input below −120 dB under every Style.
MAGIC drives thirty-eight parameters through the chain 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, and the echo arrives later still, in the upper half of the knob, because repeats are production rather than polish. 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
The whole chain under one knob
Compression → transient shaping → saturation → digital-edge exciter → tone EQ → sampler and tape character → stereo chorus → micro-pitch → double-tracking → width and mono bass → echo → gated ambience → look-ahead limiter → auto gain compensation.
The decade's repeats, brought in per Style
An echo in three characters: Digital, clean and bright; Tape, darker with every pass, saturating and wandering; Analog, darker still, with chorused repeats. Stereo or ping-pong, synced to the host's tempo by default, with Tone and Low Cut inside the loop, Duck to step the repeats back while the source plays, and To Reverb to send them into the space. Each Style brings its own in over the upper half of MAGIC: a ping-pong eighth for Neon Poly, a dotted eighth for Stadium, a slapback for New Wave. Gated Glory keeps its drums clear of repeats.
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 on one of the eight Advanced pages and MAGIC then moves the whole curve underneath your edit rather than erasing it. “Re-align Advanced Controls to MAGIC”, at the foot of the preset menu, puts everything back on the curve.
A hundred and fifty-three presets grouped by source, not by recipe
Essentials, Pads & Strings, Bass, Keys & Piano, Leads & Arps, Drums & Percussion, Guitar, Vocals, Brass & Stabs and Mix & Bus, each its own submenu in the browser. 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. A factory preset starts from every parameter's default, so it sounds the same whatever was loaded before it.
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 and the bundled benchmark · through the full chain · Apple Silicon · 48 kHz
- 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)
- MAGIC 0, oversampling off, decorrelated stereo against the input
- null below −120 dB, every Style
- CPU, worst case measured (4×, MAGIC 100, High quality)
- 2.55 % of one core; the echo adds 0.2–0.28 % in every configuration measured
- DSP checks
- 4,025
- Plugin checks
- 22,613
- pluginval strictness 10, VST3
- passes
- 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, macOS
- AU · VST3 · AAX
- Formats, Windows
- VST3 · AAX
- Operating system
- macOS 10.15 or later · Windows 10 or later, 64-bit
- Architecture, macOS
- Universal: Apple Silicon and Intel
- Architecture, Windows
- 64-bit
- Plugin code
- Mgc8
- Version
- 1.1.0
- Latency
- 104 samples · 2.17 ms at 48 kHz and the default 2× oversampling (72 with it off, 120 at 4×)
- CPU
- 2.55 % of one core, the worst case measured
- Factory presets
- 153
In ten categories grouped by what you put the plugin on rather than by which recipe they use, each its own submenu in the browser. The forty-nine of 1.0 keep their host program numbers.
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, including of the echo's three characters and the presets added with it.
Also in these bundles
COMPLETE COLLECTION
Get MAGIC:80 as part of COMPLETE COLLECTION, 22 plugins worth 708 for 199.
199
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