Creative Effects

VOID:SPACE

An original algorithmic reverb in the spirit of 1970s–1990s digital hardware, designed from first principles.

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 VOID:SPACE'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

Ten spaces, measured into existence.

Lush, dense, smooth, musical and slightly coloured: built out of published DSP technique rather than reverse-engineered from anything. Early reflections feed a sixteen-line feedback delay network with an all-pass inside every loop, damping filters and modulation, and DRIVE puts a level-normalised valve stage inside the feedback path itself.

A mode is not just a set of knob positions. It also sets the tank's shortest and longest delay, so the spread is structural: a plate is short and tightly packed, a cathedral spreads across tens of metres. Size scales the whole set from there.

Wet level varies only 5.9 dB across all ten modes, so switching between them is not a volume jump. Over the top sit three character controls, each running the engine of another plugin in the range: DRIVE inside the loop, CRYSTALIZE and TAPE on the way out. All three are bypassed at zero.

Key features

Ten modes with structural differences

Room, Chamber, Bright Plate, Dark Plate, Hall, Concert Hall, Large Hall, Cathedral, Vintage Digital and a seeded Random Space. Measured ITDG runs from 3.8 ms on the plates to 46.5 ms on the cathedral; mid-band decay from 0.48 s to 6.30 s.

A decay time you can trust

In a parallel comb bank the slowest line dominates the late tail, so measured decay is set by whichever line happens to ring longest: 13.7 % high with gains nominally matched, 18.5 % with them fanned. Cross-coupling averages every line into one common rate: 0.7 % and 2.7 %.

DRIVE is a valve inside the loop

Saturation inside the feedback path is not a tone control: the tail crosses it on every circulation, so harmonics build as it decays. DRIVE runs SATURIFT's class-A triode there, normalised against a slow envelope with a 256× ceiling so the drive holds roughly steady down to about −66 dBFS instead of fading with the tail. It is zero on every mode and zero is verified bit-identical; a mode sets only how far it goes, so a plate takes more grit than a cathedral.

A card behind each character control

Click DRIVE, CRYSTALIZE or TAPE and a card opens with what shapes it: the valve's character, warmth, bias, presence, harmonics, even/odd balance, sag and tracking; the grain cloud's pitch, grain, frost and snow, from GRAINFREEZE's grain engine and an octave up by default; TAPERECALL's wow, flutter, stock and wear. Every one is a parameter, so a host can automate it and a session remembers it.

EARLY and LATE, apart

The reflections and the tail have a dial each. They were always two separate gains inside the tank, set from one crossfade; now they are set directly. A session or preset saved before the split reopens bit for bit.

A 5.8× speedup from 64 bytes

The tank's sixteen delay lines cost 62 ns per sample for nothing but sixteen reads and writes. The cause was cache set aliasing: a power-of-two capacity meant every line shared its low address bits. Padding the stride by a single cache line took it to 10.79 ns.

The interface

VOID:SPACE with TAPE raised to 50 % and its card open over the right-hand controls, showing WOW and FLUTTER at 0.500, STOCK on FERRIC and WEAR on USED, with the mode set to Hall and the Default preset loaded. — VOID:SPACE · 1 of 1

Audio

Audio demos for VOID:SPACE are not published yet.

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

Measured

Stage test benches, Tools/Benchmark and the release audit · Apple Silicon · 48 kHz

Whole reverb, character controls at zero, run to run: 119–157 ns/sample · 0.57–0.75 % of one core
Decay accuracy, mid-band T60: within 1.3 %
Tank delay lines, before and after stride padding: 62.44 → 10.79 ns
Wet level spread across all ten modes: 5.9 dB
Early reflection spread across input correlation: 0.01 dB
Mode-switch discontinuity once the tank has flushed: 0.0016
Reported latency: 0 samples
auval · pluginval strictness 10, AU and VST3: SUCCEEDED · SUCCESS

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

Controls

The space

PRE-DELAY: 0–250 ms.
SIZE: Scales every delay in the machine at once, reflections, diffusers and tank together.
DIFFUSION: Drives the input diffusers and the tank's in-loop all-passes.
EARLY · LATE: The reflection pattern's level and the tail's, each on its own dial.
DECAY: 0.1 to 100 s, specified and tested as mid-band T60.
MIX: Dry against wet, as an equal-power blend.

Tone and movement

LOW CUT · HIGH CUT: 0 Hz–1 kHz and 200 Hz–20 kHz, both inside the feedback loop, so they shape how each band decays.
DAMPING: How much faster the top decays than the middle.
MOD RATE · MOD DEPTH: Sixteen decorrelated LFOs moving the tank's delay lines, 0.01–5 Hz.
WIDTH: Mono at 0, as generated at 1, exaggerated at 2. Level-compensated, so it is not a fader.
COLOUR: WARM, NATURAL or AIR: a tilt on the wet signal. NATURAL is exactly bypassed.

Character

DRIVE: Inside the loop. Its card: CHARACTER, WARMTH, BIAS, PRESENCE, HARMONICS, EVEN / ODD, SAG and TRACKING, which at zero turns the normalisation off and leaves a plain level-dependent saturator.
CRYSTALIZE: A grain cloud fed from the wet signal. Its card: PITCH, ±24 semitones and continuous, an octave up by default; GRAIN, the grain length; FROST and SNOW, the cloud's two scatter axes.
TAPE: Transport wobble, head response and magnetic compression on the tail. Its card: WOW, FLUTTER, STOCK (Ferric, Chrome, Metal) and WEAR (New to Ruined).

Output and session

OUTPUT: −60 to +12 dB.
MODE: The ten modes, also offered to the host as programs. Choosing one writes its tuning into the controls and takes at once; choosing Random Space again rolls a new space.
PRESET · SAVE: Default comes first and returns every control to a fresh instance's; your own presets follow, one plain file each. A preset or a restored session takes at once rather than gliding there.
BYPASS: Takes the wet path out while the tank keeps running, so the tail is still in progress when it comes back and an A/B lines up. Right-click it for POWER, which passes audio through untouched and clears the tank.

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: Sgvb
Version: 1.0.0
Latency: 0 samples.
CPU: 0.57–0.75 % of one core at 48 kHz with the character controls at zero, across the benchmark's run-to-run spread

Worth knowing

The plugin binary ships under the product name VOID SPACE. The colon is a brand mark used on this site.
There is no level meter. The approved artwork draws none, so none was invented.