If you grew up in an era where you actually needed to go to a shop to hire movies, the acronym VHS might stoke the flames of nostalgia in your heart. Baby Audio knows this all too well and has created Super VHS to bring the tone of the videotape back to life.
Now, VHS wasn’t especially lauded for its technical performance. The tapes were warbly, plagued by static, plus you had to rewind the damn things. In this plugin though, these flaws are harnessed for the power of good, bringing analog warmth to DAW-based productions.
The glorious VHS tape. Crackly, prone to pitch drift and just plain inconvenient. Super VHS resurrects this ancient technology, ready for fresh productions.
Much like their recent (and excellent) I Heart NY parallel compressor, the interface of the Super VHS couldn’t be easier to navigate. It features just a handful of simple controls for dialling in that ’80s magic.
Heat will add an analog-style tape saturation to any signal that passes through it, Wash, described by Baby Audio as “bad hall reverb” dishes up a lo-fi, boxy ambience, while Drift is truly where it’s at if you want the authentic VHS experience – it’s that classic start-up warble went you press play on a VHS tape machine, but controllable.
The Mix slider controls the mix between dry and effected signals, Out is the overall output, Shape is a sample-rate reducer – but under the hood, there’s also a bitcrusher and limiter present. Magic is a button for injecting a dark chorus.
Special mention has to go the Static control. It’s a noise generator, which sounds like a mixture of static and an earth loop – the resulting sound is so authentically VHS it’s like stepping into an audio time machine.
For more details, visit the Baby Audio website.
