Thenatan have recently released TVHS, available at the intro price of $9.50, increasing to $49.00 after the promotion. The offer ends TODAY!!
A real VHS transport and a bleeding CRT television, not a tape plugin with a nostalgia filter. TVHS models wow, flutter, saturation, Hi-Fi compander mistracking, tape hiss, random dropouts, head-switching glitch and CRT flyback whine as 11 separate, individually-bypassable effects, plus 10 real tape-head impulse responses and NTSC/PAL switching. Wow and flutter never loop – they’re driven by filtered noise, not an LFO, so a pad never settles into a cycle.
Wow, flutter and scrape come from filtered noise, not looping LFOs – a pad never settles into a cycle, however long the note runs. Tape drive pushes a pre-emphasis stage into the curve and pulls it back after, leaving the harmonics behind. Breathe models the VHS Hi-Fi compander mistracking – the noise floor swells after a transient and sinks again. Dropouts fire on a true random process, so they clump and leave gaps instead of ticking on a grid.
A VHS drum carries two heads and swaps between them once per video field – here it’s a tick, a noise burst, and the two heads sounding slightly different from each other. Flyback bleeds in the line-transformer whine and mains hum that leaked from every CRT in every living room. Switch between NTSC and PAL and both the field rate and the hum frequency follow correctly.
Tone sweeps the entire audio path from the wide AFM hi-fi track to the narrow linear edge track, and four things move together the way they do on real hardware: bandwidth narrows, a head-bump resonance grows in the low mids, azimuth error dips the presence region, and a broad upper-mid shelf falls away. Turning it up adds the thick, boxy weight of a worn dub.
Ten convolution impulses pulled from actual tape and video hardware. Video Chrome, Magnetic Vision, Analog Scan, Signal Gold, Chroma Drive, Vision Grain, Tape Vision, Retro Signal, Broadcast Noir, Ghost Transfer. Pick one first and dial the knobs against it – the impulse changes the character more than almost any single control.
Every control on TVHS is fully automatable – wobble a pad up over eight bars, slam dropout in for one hit, automate the impulse switch mid-phrase. Mix blends the full chain against your dry signal. Twin circular meters read the output in real time, and every effect dims its own panel the instant it’s bypassed.
Every preset is a complete snapshot – all eleven effects, the impulse response, the video standard, the mix and the output trim. Run from Clean Transfer through Home Dub and Rental Copy, into Tracking Error and Degraded, out to the deliberately hostile Dead Channel.
Features include:
- REAL TRANSPORT MODELING – Filtered-noise wow & flutter. No looping LFOs, ever.
- TAPE SATURATION – Record-amp drive with matched pre/de-emphasis.
- HI-FI COMPANDER MISTRACKING – Breathe: the noise floor swells after every transient.
- TAPE HISS A/B – Two noise beds, gated by the programme.
- RANDOM DROPOUTS – True Poisson timing – never a grid, never repeats.
- BANDWIDTH + HEAD BUMP – Tone sweeps hi-fi track to worn linear track.
- HEAD-SWITCHING GLITCH – Field-rate seam between two mismatched heads.
- CRT FLYBACK + HUM – Line-transformer whine and mains hum, AM’d together.
- NTSC / PAL SWITCHING – Correct field rates and hum frequencies, both panels.
- STEREO WIDTH – Tape-track crosstalk. Fully mono at zero.
- 10 IMPULSE RESPONSES – Real tape and video convolution captures.
- 60 FACTORY PRESETS – Six categories, every control saved per preset.
- DRY/WET MIX – Blend the whole chain against your input.
- OUTPUT METERING – Twin circular meters, left and right.
- BYPASS + DIM – Every effect. The panel dims the instant it’s off.
- RESIZABLE UI – Scales to any screen. Ctrl-click to reset
Watch the intro video HERE.
TVHS is available to PC and Mac users (VST2, VST3 and AU).
For more information on TVHS, click here:
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