VINAIclip Manual

01Overview

VINAIclip is a final-stage clipper built for the very end of the chain: after your dynamics, before (or instead of) the limiter. It clamps the signal to a hard ceiling and turns the overshoot into harmonics rather than distortion you didn't ask for. The whole thing runs on the Transparent Ceiling Engine: a ceiling you can trust, with a morphing knee that goes from a clean brick-wall corner to a rounded, musical curve.

You pick the harmonic signature from three algorithms (Hard, Warm and Tube), set the threshold by ear with Delta listen soloing only what's being removed, and land your peaks right at 0 dBFS with a native ceiling. Oversampling runs up to 16× to keep aliasing out of the harmonics you just generated.

Why we kept it transparent

After rounds of internal testing we made a deliberate call: push VINAIclip to the most transparent a clipper can be, and stop there. It is tuned for electronic music, where the groove lives in the transients and the detail, and where a clipper on the master touches every one of them. Nothing in the default signal path is there to add character you didn't ask for.

Transparent here is not a slogan. It is how the engine is built. The clip is a memoryless waveshaper with no time constants, so it never smears an attack the way a limiter would. Below the ceiling the path is bit-exact, so anything that is not clipping passes untouched. The ceiling itself is a native-rate clamp with zero added latency, so engaging it never shifts your timing or your phase. There is no always-on filtering tilting the waveform, and HARD stays a true brick wall instead of a rounded curve, so what you see on the scope is exactly what leaves the plugin.

We made that call knowing the tradeoff. Chasing the lowest possible aliasing number can round a transient or bend a flat top, and for this music that costs more than it buys. So we chose fidelity to the waveform and to your transients over a spec-sheet contest. When you do want weight and colour, TUBE is right there for it. But the spine of the plugin is to get out of the way: the maximum transparency a DSP can give you, no compromises, with sonic latency kept to the minimum.

02The interface

• Scope (centre): pre / post / delta clip view showing the flat-topped waveform and exactly how much is being shaved.
• Algorithm selector: Hard · Warm · Tube, each its own clipping kernel.
• Gain & clip controls: IN, OUT, THRESH and SOFT, with the LINK toggle that mirrors IN/OUT for instant makeup.
• Ceiling & quality: CEILING and the OVERSAMPLE selector (1×–16×).
• Metering (right): LUFS / RMS loudness meter with gain-reduction indicator, plus the DELTA listen toggle.

03Knobs & buttons

Gain & clip

Ceiling, quality & metering

04The three algorithms

05Under the hood

At its core VINAIclip is a memoryless, per-sample waveshaper. It has no time constants, so it can clamp a transient peak instantly without the attack/release smear of a limiter. The "Transparent Ceiling Engine" is everything wrapped around that shaper: oversampling, anti-aliasing, the native ceiling and metering, all phase-linear on the audio path.

Signal flow

IN gain → upsample (polyphase FIR) → per-sample waveshaper (one of three curves, with the Softness knee blended in) → downsample/decimate (matching FIR) → OUT trim → optional native 0 dBFS ceiling clamp → meters & scope tap. With LINK on, the OUT trim tracks IN automatically so loudness-matched comparison is the default, not an afterthought.

• Waveshaper kernels are three static transfer curves applied per sample: a hard clamp (brick-wall limiter on amplitude), a symmetric tanh soft clip, and an asymmetric tanh that breaks even and odd harmonics differently for tube-style colour.
• Softness knee: a continuous 0–100% control that morphs the corner of the active curve from a razor-sharp brick wall to a progressively rounded knee, trading peak-catch precision for harmonic gentleness. Applied to WARM and TUBE; HARD is a fixed brick-wall clamp, so softness has no effect on it.
• Oversampling, polyphase-FIR up/downsampling at 1× / 2× / 4× / 8× / 16×, pushes the harmonics generated by clipping above the audio band before they can fold back as aliasing. The FIR pair is linear-phase, so the clip stays phase-transparent regardless of oversampling factor.
• Ceiling: an optional native-rate clamp on the output that pins the sample peak exactly at 0 dBFS. It runs at the native sample rate, so it adds no latency, and it holds full level right at the ceiling without pulling the signal down. The symmetric Hard and Warm curves leave no DC; Tube's asymmetry keeps its own, part of its intentional colour.
• Metering internals: loudness is measured as LUFS and RMS off the post-clip signal; the scope taps pre, post and delta in parallel so the delta path shows precisely the residual the shaper removed.
• Bypass is time-aligned against the active latency (oversampling) so A/B is click-free and sample-accurate, never a jump in level or phase.

06Measured

Measured in-house (headless host + numpy/scipy), 48 kHz.

07Specifications