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.
// 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
Lite
- Tape, Cassette, Vinyl
- Accept Reality + core damage set
- Hiss, Dust, Saturate, Mix
- Free factory presets + save your own
Pro
- All six media (+ VHS, Radio, Digital)
- Scratches, Tracking, Jitter, Drive
- DENIAL recovery stage
- Drop-a-WAV audition + 24-bit Export
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.