TVHS: VHS and CRT Tape Emulation Plugin by Thenatan Audio

The developer says the tape effects are modeled from how the hardware behaves rather than from a fixed vintage curve. Wobble generates wow, flutter and scrape from filtered noise, so a sustained pad does not settle into a repeating pattern. Dropouts follow a random process, so dips can cluster or leave gaps instead of landing on a grid.

The Tone control moves the whole path from a wide hi-fi track toward a narrow linear track. Bandwidth narrows, a low-mid head-bump resonance grows, azimuth error dips the presence region and the upper mids fall away together. Turning Tone up adds a thick, boxy weight alongside the loss of treble.

Saturate applies tape record-amp drive with matched pre-emphasis and de-emphasis. Breathe models the VHS Hi-Fi compander mistracking, so the noise floor swells after transients and then drops again.

The Headswitch effect reproduces the field-rate glitch of a VHS drum switching between its two heads, and the two heads are modeled to sound slightly different. Flyback adds CRT line-transformer whine and mains hum, amplitude-modulated together. Both effects follow the NTSC or PAL standard for field rate, scan-line frequency and hum frequency.

The plugin includes 60 factory presets in six categories, from Clean Transfer to Dead Channel. Each preset stores all eleven effects, the impulse response, the video standard, the mix and the output trim, along with each effect's bypass state. Every control is automatable, and hovering a control shows an on-screen description. The interface is resizable.

Use the Mix control to blend the processed chain against the dry signal, and Width to reduce tape-track crosstalk, from a fully mono image at zero to the full image.