Magic Series

MAGIC:90

A 1990s production-character processor routed by what you actually put it on.

29 39SALE

Free 10-day trial. The download is the whole collection, 22 plug-ins in one installer, so you can try every one; start MAGIC:90'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
v1.0.0

What it does

The word length, the bandwidth, the room, the media.

One oversized MAGIC macro, a Style selector covering sixteen period families, an Era selector, a Dry Below / Dry Above pair that decides which frequencies the effect is allowed to reach, four trims, and an expandable Advanced drawer holding the offsets one page at a time.

A Source selector (Guitar, Bass, Drums, Vocal or Full Mix) routes the Grunge engines, because a guitar cabinet on a mix bus is a failure rather than a feature. Where the source is unknown it takes the conservative branch rather than guessing: no cabinet, no full-band fuzz.

Dry Below and Dry Above are not an equaliser. What falls outside them bypasses the whole chain and is summed back untouched, so a kick keeps its own weight while everything above it is processed.

Key features

Sampler Colour

Band limit, oversampled drive, anti-alias filter, decimation to an effective rate, companded and dithered quantisation, and a reconstruction stage: six personalities, all measured.

Digital Space

A four-line feedback delay network with six characters, whose decay control is measured accurate to 5 % from 0.5 s to 4 s and monotonic from 0.3 s to 6 s, plus a tempo-locked stereo delay with in-loop filtering, ping-pong and ducking.

Super-Spread, named honestly

A six-voice detune stage called Super-Spread, not “supersaw”, because it adds detuned and diffused copies of a signal rather than synthesising oscillators. Its mono-compatibility bound is algebraic, and measured above −3.3 dB across every Style and macro position.

A media layer with a silence gate

Tape compression and saturation as one curve with a moving knee, a cassette band limit that narrows from both ends, wow and flutter on a single wandering delay, hiss, hum, sparse dust, dropouts and stereo drift: every noise source behind a gate that stops it during digital silence.

Style routing measured, not asserted

Each Style is a five-flag routing plan, and each flag is measured: filtering before the converter produces more harmonic content at the resonant peak than filtering after it; Jungle's protected bass survives the chain undegraded; a room placed inside the degraded recording drops out when the tape does. Switching Style reorders the chain behind a 6 ms fade and is click-free.

The architecture, visible on the panel

On every Advanced page, a knob that MAGIC drives points at where its destination has actually ended up and carries a mark where MAGIC alone put it, so the gap between the two is your own offset. The number reads in the destination's own units; the offset you are dragging is in the tooltip.

A bypass and a latency that hold still

BYPASS, and the host's own bypass, return the input delayed by exactly the reported latency while the engine keeps running underneath, so releasing it rejoins the processed sound to the last bit once the 30 ms crossfade ends. The latency is one figure for each Oversampling and LATENCY setting, whatever the Style, Source or preset, so changing presets during playback never changes what the host compensates for.

The interface

The MAGIC:90 advanced drawer open on its Grunge page, exposing amp drive, fuzz, clean blend, layer spread, drum room, room crush, bass growl, bass anchor, vocal grit, vocal dryness, contrast and amp feedback controls. — MAGIC:90 · 1 of 1

Audio

Audio demos for MAGIC:90 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 release audit's measurements · 48 kHz

DSP checks: 117,863
Plugin-layer checks: 14,873
Parameters with permanent IDs: 108
Transparency at MAGIC 0: proven in all 48 Style × Era combinations
Reported latency across all 96 Style × Source pairs: one figure: 108 samples at the default settings
Bypassed output against the input delayed by the reported latency: 0.000 difference
Digital Space decay accuracy, 0.5 s to 4 s: within 5 %
Super-Spread mono compatibility: above −3.3 dB, every Style and macro position
Sample-rate range: 44.1 – 192 kHz

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: Mgc9
Version: 1.0.0
Sample rates: 44.1 – 192 kHz
Latency: 108 samples · 2.25 ms at 48 kHz on the default settings, whatever the Style, Source or preset; 27 samples · 0.56 ms at the shortest
Factory presets: 134

Across thirteen categories. Each preset is a Style, an Era, a macro position and a few signed offsets rather than a hundred and eight absolute values, so a corrected curve improves every preset instead of breaking it. Applying a preset resets every offset it does not name.

Worth knowing

An insert effect cannot turn arbitrary audio into a PCM piano, a ROMpler preset, a sampled break, or a true multi-oscillator supersaw. This product does not claim to. It reproduces the production fingerprint around those sources.
MAGIC MATCH and the Sample Lab are built and tested but are not reachable in this build. They are not features of this release.
The CPU budget stated in the product's own documentation is currently missed. Measured figures are in its BUDGETS document.
Auto Gain is a fair-comparison aid, not a loudness guarantee. On the Grunge guitar presets it now accounts for the amplifier and cabinet, measured on real guitar takes: the average error moved from −3.00 dB to −1.28 dB, 18 of 21 presets closer. The Grunge drum presets still come out about 1.7 dB loud with it on.
Every claim on this page is a measurement. No listening evaluation has been performed.