VINAIstereo — Manual

01Overview

VINAIstereo opens the stereo field two ways from a single DELAY knob. The Spatial Decorrelation Engine runs either WIDE — M/S decorrelation with a right-channel polarity flip, for a very wide, phasey image that cancels back to the original in mono on mono sources — or HAAS, a right-channel precedence delay that gives natural, transparent width. WET sets the perceived width; DRY keeps the centre intact.

On top of the engine sits a routable wobble LFO and ±20 cents of dual-tap detune, so the image can move and supersaws can thicken. Every change is plotted live on a goniometer and checked against a correlation safety bar, so you always know how the mix folds down. The delay is the effect, so latency is zero.

02The interface

• Goniometer (centre) — real-time vectorscope plotting the field; dry in lava orange, wet in core blue, so you can watch the image open.
• Correlation safety bar — green/blue for in-phase, through amber, to red when anti-phase — the honest mono-safety readout, sitting under the scope.
• Engine & width controls — MODE (WIDE / HAAS), DELAY, DETUNE, DRY, WET and OUTPUT.
• Wobble panel — the LFO section: SHAPE, SYNC, DEPTH, STEREO swing, ROUTING and its ON/OFF.

03Knobs & buttons

Engine & width

Wobble LFO

04The two engines

05Under the hood

Signal flow

The widening core is a pair of per-channel delay lines feeding a dual-tap detuner. Audio splits into a dry path and a wet path: the wet path runs through the active engine, gets levelled by WET, and is summed with the DRY-scaled centre before the OUTPUT trim. There is no filtering, no gain staging beyond the level controls, and no look-ahead — the delay itself is the effect, which is why the plugin reports zero latency and adds no processing delay to the host.

• Delay lines — one fractional-delay line per channel, fed by the DELAY knob (1–100 ms) and reinterpreted by the engine: a short decorrelating delay in WIDE, a precedence delay on the right channel in HAAS.
• WIDE engine — M/S decorrelation built from a short delay plus a right-channel polarity flip. On mono sources the wet image cancels back to the original in a mono fold-down, so it stays mono-safe; on stereo material it reads as a very wide, phasey field.
• HAAS engine — a right-channel precedence delay, i.e. an inter-channel time difference (no polarity flip). Natural and transparent in stereo; combs in mono, as any Haas delay does.
• Dual-tap detuner — two taps pitched ±20 cents to thicken supersaws and pads without a separate pitch-shifter, riding the same delay-line infrastructure.
• Wobble LFO — sine, triangle or smoothed-random, tempo-synced or free-running, with an L/R phase offset (the STEREO swing). It is a control-rate modulator routed to any combination of delay, width and detune; routing is multi-select.
• Metering pipe — the goniometer and correlation reading are fed from a lock-free FIFO, so the audio thread never blocks on the GUI and the scope can drop frames under load without glitching the audio.
• Latency / smoothing — zero reported latency, no latency compensation needed. Level controls (DRY, WET, OUTPUT) ride parameter smoothing so moves don't zipper; the delay-time change is the audible gesture, not an artefact to be hidden.

06Measured

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

07Specifications