Electronik Sound Lab has released Voltus FX, a free hybrid saturation and vintage BBD delay plugin for Windows.
Voltus FX is a raw, hardware-inspired multi-effect designed to go far beyond polite digital processing, focusing on authentic analog unpredictability and chaotic intermodulation. It targets producers, sound designers, and musicians who want anything from subtle tape-like warmth and dark echoes to screaming industrial distortion and total sonic devastation.
At its core, Voltus FX uses a custom-modeled Bucket Brigade Device (BBD) delay engine featuring Hermite interpolation for artifact-free time glides and adjustable lo-fi analog circuit noise. By intentionally bypassing clinical digital oversampling, the algorithm allows the delay and drive circuits to fold back naturally, preserving the raw harmonic character and unpredictability of overdriven vintage hardware.
The overall character is heavily defined by its dual-stage saturation architecture that fundamentally changes the internal harmonic response. The Tube module delivers asymmetric triode-style saturation, providing musical soft-clipping on positive peaks and harder clipping on negative peaks for vintage warmth, while the Diode module provides relentless algebraic germanium soft-clipping built for aggressive, hard-hitting bite and complex industrial textures.
Beyond the delay and drive core, Voltus FX includes a highly optimized, click-free LFO engine to breathe life into the echoes. The modulation system offers six selectable waveforms—Sine, Triangle, Saw, Square, a smoothed Sample & Hold, and a tape-style Analog Drift mode—allowing for organic unpredictability and dynamic animation of the delay time without digital zippering artifacts.
Voltus FX also features an adaptive filter system built around a Chamberlin State Variable Filter (SVF) topology. It includes built-in dynamic stability limits, allowing users to aggressively push the resonance and sculpt the output tone—from taming harsh high frequencies generated by extreme distortion to burying dark, lo-fi echoes deep in the mix—without risking internal audio engine blowups.
On the control surface, the custom exponential Input Gain stage acts as the main expressive hub: offering a massive sweep from -12dB up to +48dB. This allows users to effortlessly push massive amounts of signal into the saturation circuits, enabling smooth transitions from clean unity gain to roaring, intermodulated distortion with a single knob turn.
Voltus FX ships with a preset system that includes over 30 factory patches for common use cases, user preset saving via XML files, and an automatic dirty-state indicator. Audio processing is carried out in 32-bit floating point with support for sample rates from 44.1 kHz to 192 kHz, stereo in/out configuration, custom anti-denormal protection, and true zero-latency performance.
Pricing & Availability
Voltus FX is available now as a VST3 plugin for Windows 64-bit only, and has been tested in major DAWs including FL Studio, Ableton Live, Reaper, Studio One, Bitwig, and Cubase. A macOS version is currently in development and will be released at a later date.
The plugin requires Windows 10 or later (64-bit), a VST3-compatible host, a dual-core CPU (quad-core recommended), 4 GB of RAM (8 GB recommended), and 50 MB of free disk space.
Voltus FX is available immediately as a free download from the Electronik Sound Lab website.