Harsher Reality

// Damage that fights back

Most lo-fi plugins damage a sound and walk away. Harsher Reality is built on the other half of the story: the machines that fought for the signal. One dial, ACCEPT REALITY, takes your sound from clean and expensive to broken and hostile. Six media decide how it breaks. And the DENIAL recovery stage listens to what the destruction took away, the air, the body, the attack, and pushes it back through the wreckage. The sound stays broken, but it refuses to die.

// Hear it

Add the noise of six machines and keep your sound. Your guitar stays untouched; only each medium's own noise is layered on top, then DENIAL pulls it back.

// Six machines, not six presets

Every medium has its own baked-in voice, present even with all damage knobs at zero, and its own animated machine on the panel. Even DROP OUTS is media-aware: classic dropouts on tape, the station fading into static on radio, hard glitch cuts on digital.

Medium	Signature you'll hear
Tape	warm, gentle, low hiss
Cassette	bright tape hiss, flutter
Vinyl	crackle spikes, dark surface noise, true 33 rpm wow
VHS	slow wobble + mains hum
Radio	squeezed bandpass + static bed
Digital	dead-silent floor, pure crunch

// What's in the racks

• ACCEPT REALITY macro: clean to broken on one dial
• Wow/Flutter, Drop Outs, Wear, Scratches, Tracking, Jitter
• Noise voiced per medium: hiss tone, crackle, mains hum
• DENIAL recovery: the sound remembers what it was
• Drop a WAV on the panel, hear it destroyed, EXPORT a 24-bit render
• Factory presets + save your own
• Animated media: reel-to-reel, cassette, turntable, VHS, radios
• Safety limiter; automation-friendly smoothed knobs

// Pricing

Every install includes a 7-day full Pro trial, no card needed. After it ends the plugin falls back to Lite, never silence. Read the lab notes or the manual.