Everything on this site ultimately traces back to one obsession: audio. So it feels right to start this little retrospective series where my public work started — with VST plugins, written in Object Pascal, one filter and one waveshaper at a time.
My very first plugins were learning exercises that escaped into the wild. Toadstunnel, a bit-crusher, existed mostly to prove how easy writing a VST plugin could be. Christortion was more ambitious: a Chebyshev polynomial waveshaper where every single harmonic can be adjusted in level and phase — a surprisingly wide palette of distortion from one simple mathematical idea. And HRTF 3D convolved the signal with head-related transfer functions so that sounds could virtually fly around your head; I rewrote it three times over the years.
Filters, filters, filters
The project I am probably still best known for in that era is Electri-Q. It began as a lecture-inspired prototype of a “transistor EQ” with the wonderfully absurd working title Posihfopit (the name came from a friend’s crashed notebook — long story), and grew into a serious parametric EQ that our small company AIXcoustic creations sold until 2013. The freeware posihfopit edition is still downloadable today, and the plugin still has friends out there in the forums.
Collaborations
Not everything was a solo effort. With the folks at BetaBugsAudio I built the Betabugs plugins — Bugpass, PhaseBug and the Leslie-style Spinbug. A mysterious gentleman named Leonardo Lasagne contributed the Pushtec 5+1A, a six-band midrange and program EQ that I hosted here. And I was responsible for the entire VST plugin series of the vendor Audiocation.
Spatial experiments
The spatial plugins were where DSP met psychoacoustics: Simple Crosstalk Cancellation turned stereo speakers into a headphone-like experience, Headphone Mix did the inverse and fought in-head localization on headphones, and Quadropolis simulated a quadraphonic setup over ordinary headphones via HRTF convolution. Ideas from these plugins kept resurfacing in my work for the next twenty years — more on that in a later post.
All of these are archived on this site with downloads intact. They are old, some may struggle with modern hosts, but they document how digital signal processing became my home domain.