VINAIott Manual

01Overview

VINAIott is the multiband move behind loud electronic drops, built as one instrument. Two crossovers split the signal into LOW, MID and HIGH, and every band runs through two compressors in series around one level, its THRESH. The upward stage comes first: the further the band falls under THRESH, the more it lifts it. The downward stage then takes the band as the upward one left it and pulls back whatever rises over THRESH. Quiet detail comes up, peaks come down, and the band gets dense.

Three knobs per band set the treatment. THRESH is the level the band is held around, AMOUNT is how much of the two stages acts, and GAIN is the make-up after them. On the side strip, MIX blends the compressed bands against the dry ones, TIME sets how fast both stages move, and IN decides how hard the whole engine is hit. At the defaults, music peaking at −24 dBFS or above comes out within 2 dB of its input level, so inserting VINAIott changes the density of your mix far more than its level. Quieter material comes up more, as an upward stage should. There is no look-ahead, so latency is zero.

02The interface

• Top bar: the name, the line "3-band upward + downward", the version and a CPU readout. To the right sit the CROSSOVER and FILTER switches, INIT and BYPASS.
• Analyzer: the spectrum of what leaves the plugin, in core blue, over a faint filament of what came in. The two crossover handles stand on it with their frequency chips, and a dashed THRESH line runs across each band. A muted band darkens; a soloed band lights up while the others go dark. In silence no trace is drawn.
• Band cards: BAND 1 LOW, BAND 2 MID and BAND 3 HIGH, each with its live range in the header and the PROC light in the corner. Below come MUTE and SOLO, the two-way GR meter, then GAIN, THRESH and AMOUNT. SOLO lights the card from within, MUTE shades it, and with PROC off the knobs dim and lock.
• Side strip: IN, OUT, MIX and TIME, with writable value boxes, and SAFE CLIP at the foot.

03Knobs & buttons

Per band

Global

Gestures

04Meters & analyzer

The GR meter on each band card is two ladders back to back around a zero line. On the left, in blue with ▼, is what the downward stage takes. On the right, in lava with ▲, is what the upward stage adds. Each ladder has eight segments of 3 dB for a 24 dB full scale, and the segment at the edge glides with the reading. The numbers at the two ends print the true value in tenths of a dB, past 24 dB as well.

The readings are the dB you hear at the output. Each stage is measured in signal order (the upward one against the band at rest, the downward one against the band as the upward one left it) with MIX, AMOUNT, GAIN, FILTER, PROC, MUTE, SOLO and BYPASS all in the count. A band nobody hears reads 0, and the static make-up from GAIN, which is there even at rest, is left out of the gain reduction. Lift and cut add up to what the two stages do to the band's level. Each reading covers 50 ms of audio, weighted by energy, so the numbers hold steady on a sustained sound and read the same at any buffer size. When the host stops processing, the meters come to rest at 0.

The analyzer runs a 2048-point FFT on what leaves the plugin and draws it in core blue, over a faint 1 px filament of what came in. Its log axis spans the plugin's own ten octaves, so a handle sits exactly where its split is. Peaks are placed between the FFT bins by interpolation, so at 44.1 and 48 kHz a 50 Hz tone draws at 50 Hz. The dB scale on the right reads 6 dB above dBFS: a tone peaking at −16 dBFS draws at −10, and so does a THRESH line set to −16 dB. The display reads the mono sum of the two channels.

The dashed THRESH line in each band is drawn as a peak level: a tone whose peak sits on THRESH touches its line, and that tone leaves the band at unity, so its output trace stays on the line too. Read the line against the output trace: what sits under it is being lifted, and what rises over it is being cut.

05Under the hood

Signal flow

The input is cleaned first: non-finite samples become silence, and absurd values are bounded at +120 dBFS. IN drives a two-point crossover into three bands. Each band runs the upward stage, then the downward stage, both scaled by AMOUNT, then the optional FILTER containment and the GAIN make-up. The compressed bands are summed and blended by MIX against the dry sum of the same three bands, then come OUT, the optional SAFE CLIP and the bypass crossfade. There is no look-ahead anywhere in the chain, and the plugin reports zero latency.

• Upward stage: its detector follows the power of the band, and the further the band sits under THRESH, the bigger the lift, easing in over the first couple of dB and topping out at 15 dB. Below about −84 dBFS of band level the lift starts to fade, and by −96 dBFS it is gone, so the noise floor never blooms. The detector keeps running underneath, so when the music returns the stage is already where it should be.
• Downward stage: it listens to the band after the upward lift and pulls back whatever rises over THRESH, easing in over the same couple of dB. Neither stage reaches across THRESH, which is why a band sitting right on it passes at unity.
• GAIN: the make-up comes after both stages, where no detector hears it, so it adds exactly its own dB to the compressed band and never changes how hard that band is compressed.
• Speed per band: every attack and release on the LOW band is two and a half times longer than on MID and HIGH, which keeps low notes clean. TIME stretches all of them together.
• Crossover: in DIGITAL the low branch passes through an allpass matched to the upper crossover, so the three bands recombine flat at any spacing of the handles. Every filter in the engine runs in double precision. Both banks run all the time, so a flip never wakes a cold filter, and every cutoff is held under Nyquist at any host rate.
• FILTER containment: feedforward only, after the gain stages, so switching it never changes what the compressor does. Its filters run all the time, and at ANALOG their blend is simply skipped.
• Stereo link: each band reads the power of left and right together and moves both channels by the same gain, so the stereo image never wanders.
• Smoothing and ramps: GAIN, THRESH, AMOUNT, MIX and TIME glide over 10 ms, and the splits over 15 ms. IN, OUT, SAFE CLIP, BYPASS and the band switches ramp over 10 ms, and a CROSSOVER or FILTER flip crossfades over 10 ms on a smooth curve. A session restore lands at once, with no fade.
• Bypass: a 10 ms crossfade to the untouched input. The engine keeps running underneath, so the return is click-free. Fully bypassed, the plugin is bit-exact.
• Self-heal: if a filter or gain state ever goes non-finite, the engine clears itself at the end of that block, so a bad sample costs one block at most.
• Metering pipe: the analyzer and the GR meters read lock-free buffers, so the audio thread never waits on the GUI. The input tap sits before IN and the output tap after the bypass stage, so the display shows what really comes in and what really goes out.

06Measured

Measured in-house on the real binaries: headless bench on the processor and the editor, plus the installed VST3 and AU in a plugin host.

07Specifications