Esoteric Signal Processing

Download Torus

VST3, AU, AAX, CLAP

AAX requires Pro Tools 2021.3 or later

macOS

Windows

Linux

Torus Torus

Ships in VST3, AU, AAX, CLAP for macOS, Windows, and Linux.

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Torus is one signal chain, end-to-end. Five DSP stages — an eight-order harmonic exciter for color, a crossover to aim it, transformer saturation for warmth, soft-knee dynamics for glue, and an anti-aliased clipper for the ceiling — composed in series and run inside an oversampled signal path. Tune each stage independently, or let the presets do the talking.

Torus is built specifically for mix and post engineers who want to take a source from a quiet shimmer to a hard ceiling without juggling plugins. But it’s also intuitive enough for hobbyists to get wonderfully lost in. In other words: Torus can handle everything from precise mastering to total annihilation.

Features

Harmonic Exciter

Eight harmonics, tuned by hand

Generate the first through eighth-order harmonics of any source, each on its own fader. Amp Response and Threshold tie excitation to input level, so quiet passages stay clean while loud ones bloom into color. Brightness tilts the spectral balance from warmth to air while phase shifts every harmonic against the fundamental for reinforcement or split-open width. Normalization preserves dry amplitude — you’re sculpting tone, not pushing level.

Crossover

Aim the color

A single high-pass or low-pass filter decides which part of the spectrum the exciter touches. Sweep from 20 Hz to 20 kHz and pick a mode — let the high end shimmer while bass passes clean, or warm the low end without smearing transients above. Everything outside the crossover stays dry, so excitation lands exactly where it’s wanted.

Saturator

Iron, bias, heat

The heart of the plugin, painstakingly modeled after a custom Western Electric (circa 1950) passive transformer box. This stage is essentially a drive built on the soft-knee curve of transformer saturation. Push Bias off-center and the curve goes asymmetric, weighting toward even-order harmonics — the musical kind that thicken without harshening. A leveling envelope pulls quieter passages into the saturation zone so the distortion character stays consistent across dynamics, and Auto-Gain holds output level steady while Drive sweeps from clean to crushed. The optional DC filter cleans up the bias offset before it leaves the stage.

Custom Western Electric passive transformer box, circa 1950

Dynamics

Compression by blend

A soft-knee compressor tuned for body and control. Threshold sets where reduction begins; Knee (0–100%) controls how gradually the signal crosses into compression; Release spans 0.1 ms snap to 1-second slow. Link blends from independent L/R reduction to fully tied stereo — preserve image, or lock it down. Amount is a wet/dry blend rather than a ratio, which makes glue easy to dial in without crushing transients.

Clipper

Density, not damage

An anti-aliased clipper that operates inside the oversampled chain, so hard ceilings don’t pay the usual aliasing tax. Hardness blends from soft saturation to true brick wall on a single knob — “warm limit” at zero, “wall” at full. Pre-clip Gain pushes signal into the ceiling for density and perceived loudness, while the anti-aliasing keeps high-frequency content musical even at extreme settings.

Download Torus

VST3, AU, AAX, CLAP

AAX requires Pro Tools 2021.3 or later

macOS

Windows

Linux

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