Introducing The Asylum Analogue — Tape Emulation That Doesn’t Stop at the Machine
A dual-path tape and cassette emulation plugin that follows your mix all the way home — from the mastering deck to a worn-out portable player. Launch price £29.99 (usually £59.99).
Beyond the machine. Into the memory.
Most tape plugins stop at the mastering machine. The Asylum Analogue goes further — it models the complete journey a piece of music took in the 1980s: recorded onto a studio master tape machine, duplicated onto cassette (sometimes several generations deep), and played back on whatever deck you owned, through whatever speakers you had.
It’s out now for Windows (VST3), and for launch we’re offering it well below its normal price.
Two machines, one plugin
The Asylum Analogue models the whole chain as two independent, crossfadable paths:
- The Record Path — a studio mastering machine, with Drive, Bias, Speed (1.875–30 IPS), Warmth, Glue compression and tape formulation, built on a full magnetic hysteresis model, not a simple waveshaper.
- The Playback Path — the consumer cassette side of the story: generation loss, tape age, dirty heads, a weak battery slowing the motor, azimuth misalignment, and the noise floor of a deck that’s seen better days.
Engage either path independently, or run both for the full journey from studio to bedroom stereo. Disabled paths cost zero CPU.
It doesn’t stop at the tape
Past the transport, the signal passes through a Listening Environment stage that models where the music was actually heard — foam portable headphones, a bedroom hi-fi, a boombox, a car stereo, a mono radio, a TV speaker — each with its own device colouration, speaker drive saturation and room reflections.
Turn the CHAOS knob for component tolerance drift, or drag the glowing INSANITY lamp and watch the machine overheat: extra drive, wow, flutter and modulation noise, all live.
Built to be played, not just dialled in
- Five factory presets, from a barely-there 30 IPS mastering polish to a worn, wobbly, occasionally-dropping-out mixtape.
- Every knob, switch and menu has a mouseover tooltip.
- Four quality modes (Eco / Normal / High / Render), so you get full fidelity for bounces and a light CPU footprint while you write.
- Full undo/redo, click-free bypass, and live IN/OUT metering.
Quick demo of it can be seen here:
https://youtu.be/vvvnXeakqsc
Launch pricing
£29.99 for a limited time — regular price is £59.99.
[ BUY IT NOW ]
Full user manual available here:
AsylumAnalogueUserManual
Runs as VST3 on Windows x64 (macOS planned at some point in the future, when I can buy myself an M series Mac 🙂 ), 44.1–192 kHz, mono or stereo. No license activation, no device limit — install it on every machine you own.
The Asylum Analogue. Beyond the machine. Into the memory.
