Magic Series

MAGIC:90

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

£39 £49Launch price

See the measurements

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

What it does

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

One oversized MAGIC macro, a Style selector covering 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

Every Advanced offset knob draws three marks — your offset, where the macro put the destination, and what source matching is adding. Turn the big knob and seventy-five small ticks travel while every pointer stays where it was put.

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 · reproducible with Magic90Validate

DSP checks: 117,859
Plugin-layer checks: 14,795
Parameters with permanent IDs: 108
Transparency at MAGIC 0: proven in all 48 Style × Era combinations
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
WCAG AA contrast: checked by test

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: Mgc9
Version: 1.0.0
Sample rates: 44.1 – 192 kHz
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.

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.
Every claim on this page is a measurement. No listening evaluation has been performed.