SPU-94

32-BIT CONSOLE DIGITAL REVERB

macAU · VST3 · AAXApple Silicon · IntelwindowsVST3 · AAXx86

32-bit console digital reverb · owner's manual — v1.0

ROOM
SMALL STUDIO
MEDIUM STUDIO
LARGE STUDIO
HALL
SPACEEKKO

Why this exists

I went down a rabbit hole trying to recreate a sound from a video game.

Xenogears is a game I've played more times than I can count. It's the kind of game you can pick up and put down over years, and because the story is so good you always know exactly where you are. There's a track on it called "Cage of Remorse and Relief" (sometimes called "Ship of Regret and Sleep"). It's beautiful and simple, essentially just harpsichord and choir, but the tone of that harpsichord and the reverb around it are what make it perfect. The deeper I dug into what Yasunori Mitsuda actually had to work with on that hardware, the more I wanted to rebuild it myself. It came together fast. Then I left it alone and moved on.

I came back to it once LATEFIELD was sonically finished. LATEFIELD is what I reach for when I want a space. This isn't exactly the same thing. The SPU is closer to some forgotten 80s rack unit sitting unloved on eBay. You don't reach for it because it's clean, you reach for it because it does one strange thing nothing else does. That's when it clicked that it could earn a place in the catalog, if I put the work in.

And that work wasn't just exposing the parameters and widening their ranges. It was tuning: killing the metallic comb filtering that shows up on large parameter moves, and holding everything together as I pushed the decays far past anything the console could do. Reverb is dangerous that way — runaway feedback is always one move away. Turn decay all the way up in here and it stays a reverb. All of it while leaving the stock defaults exactly where they've always been.

So you get the console as it was, and somewhere to take it: a real algorithmic reverb for modern production and sound design, still running at the original 22 kHz and the original playback algorithms. I didn't bring all the algorithms over; some just aren't useful. These six are the best of the research project and should get you where you want to go.

Visually I kept it simple, with a few nods to the console. It's faithful to the original, and every default is marked so it's easy to get back. The new Reflections section is where you shape the sound: ER Tilt, Motion, and ER Time. None of them exist on the hardware. They mainly affect the early reflection taps, so there's a visualizer showing how they relate to one another. Dial decay and diffusion back and you get slapback and flanging, plus modulation you could never get out of the original.

Underneath, it's still the real thing: band-limited, saturating into 16-bit rails inside its own tank, heard through the console's reconstruction filter. Those aren't flaws to work around. They're the sound.

— Ryan Wardell

Start here — 1 of 2

What a mode is

A mode is an emulation of one of the best preset reverbs on the console. Each is a fixed network with its own memory footprint, its own baked pre-delay and its own tail. You pick a mode; you do not build a room. DECAY, DIFFUSION, ER TIME, ER TILT and MOTION lean on whichever mode is loaded.

Mode	Reflections	Tail
ROOM	A short gap, then four reflections packed close together	Dense and short — a texture, not a distance
SM STUDIO	Almost no gap; the wet arrives on top of the note	Tight and dark, with the widest DECAY range
MD STUDIO	A normal gap, reflections spread a little wider	A little longer than ROOM — the everyday one
LG STUDIO	Reflections spread wide enough to read as a room	The first real room, and the most musical DECAY
HALL	Two loud reflections 140 ms apart — the flam ER TIME removes	Long and fixed; DECAY barely moves it
SPACEEKKO	The longest gap, then a slow bloom	The longest and brightest tail in the set

MODIFICATIONS

ReflectionsA gap, then four comb taps per side. Both are baked into the preset — ER TIME, ER TILT and MOTION move them, but the mode sets where they start.

TailWhat follows and how long it stays. DECAY scales the wall gain, DIFFUSION smooths the wash; this is what you get before you touch either.

Size is not length

HALL is the biggest mode but not the longest, and DECAY barely moves it. SPACEEKKO waits longest to start, then outlasts everything. Page 14 says which modes respond to which knob.

Start here — 2 of 2

The three sections

The controls group the seven knobs the way the reverb is built: what happens to the tail, what happens to the first reflections, and how the result leaves the plugin. Each knob has a home marked on its track; at home, the console preset is untouched.

The control slab — the seven knobs in three sections

TAIL

The wash

DECAY
Scales the wall-reflection gain. 100 is the console; above it is longer than the hardware could go, and the tank starts to saturate — SMALL and LARGE STUDIO break up nicely. 1 is never silence.

DIFFUSION
Scales the two all-pass gains. Lower is fluttery and discrete; higher is a smoother wash. At 0 the reflections act more like a multi-tap delay. Texture, not level.
REFLECTIONS

The first sound — four comb taps per side

ER TIME
Scales all four tap delays together. Below 100 the reflections close up and HALL's flam disappears.

ER TILT
Tilts the taps against each other by age, level-normalised. Below leans late and soft; above, early and tight. The centre is home.

MOTION
Drifts the tap reads slowly through the console's own interpolator. Wider and warmer — the swirl the hardware never had. Zero is home.
OUTPUT

How it leaves

MIX
Equal-sum crossfade, not a send. 70 is deliberately wet so the plugin reads as on. At 0 the engine does not run at all.

OUTPUT
A post-blend trim, so MIX never has to be a level control too. Read by the OUTPUT LEVEL meter.

The plugin — 1 of 2

The interface

SPU-94 interface — mode list, wet spectrum, reflections display and controls

MODE Six slots down the left, each with its icon and its name. The loaded one reads SELECTED and is edged in its own colour. Switching fades through zero over 12 ms.
WET SPECTRUM The wet signal as a receding waterfall: frequency across, history into the distance, in the loaded mode's colour. Nothing ever appears above the ~11 kHz ceiling.
REFLECTIONS Four comb taps per side on a 0–140 ms axis, left above the line and right below; height is gain. ER TIME slides them, ER TILT re-weights them, and with MOTION up they drift.
CONTROLS Three groups: TAIL (DECAY, DIFFUSION), REFLECTIONS (ER TIME, ER TILT, MOTION) and OUTPUT (MIX, OUTPUT). A tick on each track marks the home; the knob flashes bone when the pointer lands on it.

The plugin — 2 of 2

How sound moves through it

Dry path
1. IN — undelayed, untouched, full bandwidth. Nothing on this side is ever sample-rate converted or saturated.
2. MIX
Wet path — 22.05 kHz
1. 1 · PRE-DELAYBaked into the preset table: 10–55 ms depending on the mode. It is not a control, and it is not latency — the host is told zero.
2. 2 · WALLSThe recirculating reflections. DECAY scales this gain and nothing else — which is why HALL, whose length lives in the network itself, barely responds.
3. 3 · FOUR COMB TAPSThe only bridge out of the walls. ER TIME slides the reads, ER TILT re-weights them, MOTION drifts them. All feed-forward: nothing here can destabilise the tank.
4. 4 · TWO ALL-PASSThe wash. DIFFUSION scales both gains, clamped below unity so the loops are always stable. Lower is discrete and fluttery; higher is smooth.
5. 5 · 16-BIT RAILSSaturation inside the tank and on the wet output. Loud, dense input distorts in the tail; that grit is the hardware.
6. 6 · 39-TAP FIRThe console's own reconstruction filter, bringing the wet path back up to your session rate. This is where the ~11 kHz ceiling comes from.
Then
1. MIX — equal-sum crossfade, 12 ms smoothing. At 0 the wet engine is not ticked at all.
2. OUTPUT — trim, 12 ms ramp. Reported latency stays at zero.
3. OUT + meter

ROOM

The six modes — 01 · the default

Short, dense and obviously artificial: a corridor rendered in 16-bit.

The smallest of the closed spaces you would call a reverb, and the one the plugin boots into. Its 43 ms pre-delay keeps your attack clear, and the tail arrives as a dense block rather than a bloom — you hear the room as a texture, not as a distance.

DECAY travel is modest: a little over two to one across the whole knob. ROOM is a colour you place, not a length you shape.

Measured

Quantity	Value
Pre-delay	43.1 ms
Tail at DECAY 100	0.50 s to −60 dBFS
DECAY travel	0.32 → 0.73 s · 2.3×
Tail tone	4.5 kHz centroid · mid-bright
ER TILT response	About 0.3 dB either way — the least of the six
ER TIME at 20 %	Closes the four taps up from a 43 ms onset; at 20 % the room is almost a slap.

Reach for it when you want a short, synthetic ambience on drums, chip-tune leads, dialogue, or anything that should sound like it was rendered inside a game.

SMALL STUDIO

The six modes — 02 · the darkest, the widest range

A tight, dark booth that DECAY turns into a four-second smear.

The only mode with a near-zero pre-delay: 9.6 ms, so the wet arrives almost on top of your note. It is also the darkest of the six, with the least energy above 8 kHz — useful when a brighter mode would fight the source.

Its DECAY range is the widest in the plugin by a distance — thirty to one. The name describes the space at 100 %, not at 125 %.

One knob, two instruments Sweep DECAY from 1 to 125 on a held chord and you travel from a dry booth to the murkiest wash the plugin can make. Nothing else in the set moves like this.

Measured

Quantity	Value
Pre-delay	9.6 ms — the shortest
Tail at DECAY 100	0.54 s to −60 dBFS
DECAY travel	0.14 → 4.30 s · 30×
Tail tone	3.7 kHz centroid · darkest
Energy 8–20 kHz	−9.2 dB against 1–4 kHz
ER TIME at 20 %	Little to close — the taps already sit nearly on the note. Use it for flanging.

Reach for it when you want tight, dark and near-instant — or, with DECAY up, the plugin's murkiest wash.

MEDIUM STUDIO

The six modes — 03 · the everyday one

Balanced, a little longer than ROOM, still clearly a console.

The middle of the studio trio, and the normal reverb of the set: a comparable pre-delay to ROOM, and the latest first peak of the three studio modes at 73 ms. If you are not sure which mode a part wants, start here and move outward.

Tone sits at the bright end of the set's middle, and DECAY travel is modest — a shade over two to one.

The studio trio SMALL STUDIO, MEDIUM STUDIO and LARGE STUDIO are the same idea at three sizes. Their icons are three nested boxes for exactly that reason — if you like the character but not the size, move along the trio before you leave it.

Measured

Quantity	Value
Pre-delay	41.5 ms
Tail at DECAY 100	0.67 s to −60 dBFS
DECAY travel	0.43 → 0.95 s · 2.2×
Tail tone	4.6 kHz centroid · mid-bright
First peak	73 ms after the impulse
ER TIME at 20 %	Pulls the 73 ms first peak in toward the attack without changing the tail.

Reach for it when you want the everyday setting: a little more room than ROOM, without leaving the console behind.

LARGE STUDIO

The six modes — 04 · the first real room

The first mode that reads as a real room rather than an ambience — and the best DECAY travel in the plugin.

A 1.42 s tail at default and five to one of musical travel on DECAY. This is the mode to reach for when you want the reverb to be a place the part sits in, rather than a colour applied to it.

It takes DIFFUSION well too: at 125 % the tail smooths without losing the band-limited character.

The one to automate If you want DECAY as a performance control, use this mode. SMALL STUDIO's range is bigger but changes the instrument; here the whole sweep stays musical.

Measured

Quantity	Value
Pre-delay	44.4 ms
Tail at DECAY 100	1.42 s to −60 dBFS
DECAY travel	0.59 → 2.97 s · 5×
Tail tone	4.5 kHz centroid · mid
L/R correlation	0.00 — fully uncorrelated
ER TIME at 20 %	Tightens the spread that makes this read as a room; the tail stays long.

Reach for it when you want a real room with room to shape: the most musical DECAY in the set.

HALL

The six modes — 05 · size you pick, not shape

The largest true reverb in the set — and the one DECAY barely touches.

A little over a second of tail and a slightly dark tone. Across DECAY's entire travel the tail moves from 1.26 s to 1.48 s: a ratio of 1.2 to 1. Its length lives in the comb and all-pass network, not in the wall gain DECAY scales.

So treat HALL as a fixed decision. Pick it for scale; if you need to shape a length, use LARGE STUDIO or SMALL STUDIO instead.

Where the reflections controls show best Because its length is stable, HALL is the clearest place to hear DIFFUSION, ER TIME, ER TILT and MOTION doing their work.

Measured

Quantity	Value
Pre-delay	46.4 ms
Tail at DECAY 100	1.27 s to −60 dBFS
DECAY travel	1.26 → 1.48 s · 1.2× — almost immune
Tail tone	4.5 kHz centroid · slightly dark
MOTION at 100 %	Centroid 4.5 → 3.7 kHz, level −1.6 dB
ER TIME at 20 %	45 / 92 / 137 / 185 ms → 9 / 18 / 27 / 37 ms at 20 %. Removes the flam.

Reach for it when you want the biggest mode with a fixed length — chosen for its scale, not for shaping.

SPACEEKKO

The six modes — 06 · the showpiece

The longest pre-delay, the longest tail and the brightest top in the plugin — a slow bloom rather than a wall.

The biggest of the six tables, and a first peak that waits until 128 ms. You hear the gap, then the space opens. It is also the brightest of the six by a clear margin, so it survives on pads and vocals where darker modes disappear.

The name is ours — the console called it Space Echo. It is a reverb rather than an echo tap, but the one mode where you can hear the delay-line lineage.

Cutscene-scale swells Defaults, MIX 70 %, a held chord: the 55 ms gap then the bloom is the signature move. Add MOTION and it becomes the widest, warmest thing SPU-94 can do.

Measured

Quantity	Value
Pre-delay	55.1 ms — the longest
Tail at DECAY 100	2.75 s to −60 dBFS
DECAY travel	2.44 → 4.59 s · 1.9×
Tail tone	5.3 kHz centroid · brightest
First peak	128 ms after the impulse
ER TIME at 20 %	Shortens the 55 ms wait before the bloom; the bloom itself is untouched.

Reach for it when you want the showpiece: pads, vocals and swells that need room to open.

Reference

Tail and reflections

Tail

DECAY1–125 % · home 100

Scales the wall-reflection gain of the loaded mode, and nothing else. 100 % is the console's own value; above it the tail runs longer than the hardware could, clamped internally so the loop stays stable. At 1 % the network still receives input and you get a short, dry-ish room.

Depends on the mode. Huge on SMALL STUDIO, musical on LARGE STUDIO and SPACEEKKO, almost nothing on HALL.

DIFFUSION1–125 % · home 100

Scales the two all-pass gains. Lower gives a more discrete, fluttery tail where individual reflections are audible; higher gives a smoother wash. Clamped below unity so the all-pass loops stay stable at any setting.

Texture, not level. On HALL the full travel moves the tail level by about 1.4 dB and the centroid by about 100 Hz. Hear it in the grain of the tail, not on a meter.

Reflections

ER TIME20–100 % · home 100

Scales all four comb-tap read delays together — the onset and spread of the first reflections. At 100 the reads sit on the console's own addresses; at 20 % HALL's four move from 45 / 92 / 137 / 185 ms to 9 / 18 / 27 / 37 ms.

Removes the flam. HALL's two loudest taps sit 140 ms apart; ER TILT can rebalance them but cannot bring them together. The 20 % floor keeps the four from collapsing into one, and every setting is safe.

ER TILT0–200 % · home 100

The four comb taps are the console's only early-reflections path, so this tilts them against each other by tap age, energy-normalised so loudness holds within a few dB. Below 100 leans later — more wash, softer attack. Above 100 leans earlier — tighter and more direct.

A fine adjustment. About 1.5 dB and under 100 Hz across its travel on HALL, less than half that on ROOM. At exactly 100 it is bypassed.

MOTION0–100 % · home 0

The console's reverb is completely static. MOTION drifts the four comb read positions slowly — two detuned sines per tap and channel, 0.11–0.42 Hz — so it never repeats audibly. At 100 % the drift reaches about 2.7 ms per tap and about ten cents of pitch.

Chorus, and darker. The drift is read through the console's own Gaussian interpolator, a low-pass: on HALL at 100 % the centroid drops from 4.5 to 3.7 kHz and the level falls about 1.6 dB. Warmth is part of the effect.

Reference

Output, meters and the host

MIX0–100 % · default 70

An equal-sum crossfade between dry and wet — not a send. 50 % is equal gain; the default 70 % is deliberately wet, because a reverb should sound on when you insert it. Smoothed over 12 ms. At 0 % the engine is not ticked at all: bit-exact bypass.

MIX LOCKon / off · default off

The LOCK button under MIX holds MIX where you set it, overriding the value in any preset you load. Use it to keep a blend you like, or to stay at 100 % wet on a send while you browse presets.

OUTPUT−24 … +12 dB · default 0

A post-blend trim with a 12 ms linear ramp, so MIX does not have to be a level control as well.

INPUT / OUTPUT LEVEL−60 … +12 dB

Per-channel peak meters at 30 Hz. OUTPUT LEVEL is read after the trim: what leaves the plugin.

In the host

Quantity	Value
Latency	Reported as 0 samples. The dry path is undelayed; the wet path carries the console's pre-delay plus 1–2 ms of resampling. No compensation is wanted.
Tail declared	20 s, so bounces and transport stops keep the tail. A bound, not a promise: the longest measured tail is under 9 s.
Sample rates	8 kHz to 768 kHz, always running the reverb at its own clock. Pull-down rates snap to the nearest standard rate.
Channels	Stereo in/out, mono in/stereo out, mono in/mono out. The engine is true stereo; mono input feeds both sides.
State	All eight parameters, PRESET included, automatable. A PRESET change cuts the tail and fades through zero over 12 ms. Plus the standard STORYBORED preset browser.
Formats	VST3, AU and Standalone, on macOS and Windows.

Wet peaks can pass 0 dBFS by up to about 5.6 dB on full-scale noise — reconstruction overshoot of the saturated wave, bounded and harmless inside the plugin's headroom.

Reference

Every STORYBORED plugin

The things that work the same way in SPU-94 as in everything else we make. None of it is specific to this reverb, so it is written once here and not repeated on the control pages.

Controls

Quantity	Value
Type a value	Double-click a knob to enter a value directly. On a slider or fader, double-click the displayed value instead.
Back to default	Option-click (Alt-click on Windows) any control to return it to its default. On SPU-94 the default is the console's own setting.
Knob speed	How far a drag moves a knob is set in the settings panel, behind the gear in the header. It applies to every STORYBORED plugin at once.

The window

Quantity	Value
Resizing	Drag the corner to resize. The whole interface scales; nothing is hidden or rearranged at any size.
Remembered	The size you leave a plugin at is the size it opens at next time, per plugin, in every host.
Original size	Open settings and choose the reset option to return to the size the plugin shipped at.

DEMO MODE AND AUTHORIZATION

Every STORYBORED plugin starts in demo mode. To authorize it, open settings, enter your serial number and confirm. An internet connection is required for that step — the plugin checks the serial once, then runs offline. Your serial is in your STORYBORED account and in the email that came with your purchase.

The settings panel

The gear at the right of the header. Knob speed, window reset and authorisation all live here, alongside anything a particular plugin adds. It looks the same in every STORYBORED plugin.

Common questions

SPU-94 keeps the console's own behaviour, and some of it can be unexpected. Here's what's happening and what to do.

Why is there a gap before the reverb?: Each mode has 10–55 ms of pre-delay built into the console's original preset. It's part of the sound, not latency, and it isn't adjustable.
Why is the reverb dark above 11 kHz?: The reverb runs at the console's 22.05 kHz clock, so the tail rolls off around 11 kHz. High frequencies come through in your dry signal.
Why does HALL barely respond to DECAY?: HALL's length comes from its delay network rather than the feedback gain that DECAY controls. Choose HALL for its size; for a tail you can stretch, try SMALL STUDIO or LARGE STUDIO.
Why does SMALL STUDIO turn into a wash at high DECAY?: SMALL STUDIO has the widest decay range in the plugin, about thirty-fold. Its name describes the space at 100 %; above that it grows into something much bigger.
Why is ER TILT so subtle?: On HALL it changes about 1.5 dB across its whole range, and less on ROOM. It's energy-normalised, so it shifts the balance between the early taps and the tail without changing the level. The centre is its home position.
Why does MOTION make the sound darker?: MOTION runs through the console's own interpolator, which gently filters the highs. The added warmth is part of the effect.
Does MOTION at 0 do anything?: No. At 0 it's fully bypassed. The same is true for ER TILT and ER TIME at 100. These are our additions to the console, so they're fully out of the path at their defaults to keep the original sound intact.
Why does the tail stop when I change modes?: The console clears its reverb memory when the mode changes. SPU-94 fades over 12 ms so there's no click, and the new mode starts fresh.
Why does loud input distort in the tail?: Like the original, the reverb saturates at its 16-bit limits inside the tank. MIX and OUTPUT come after that stage, so to clean it up, lower the input level.
Why do wet peaks go above 0 dBFS?: On very loud, dense material the wet signal can peak up to about 5.6 dB over 0 dBFS from the reconstruction filter. It's bounded and stays inside the plugin's headroom. Use OUTPUT to set the final level.
Why is MIX set to 70 % by default?: So the reverb is clearly audible the moment you insert it. 50 % is equal gain, not the default.
Why is the polarity different from an emulator?: The original console inverts its output. SPU-94 flips it back, so blending it won't thin your low end.

BUY NOW — $19.99

SPU-94

TAIL

REFLECTIONS

OUTPUT