Wave Arts Tube Saturator Vintage

Tube Saturator Vintage

Authentic tube emulation for free

Tube Saturator Vintage is a free reissue of the original Tube Saturator. It uses circuit simulation technology to faithfully reproduce the sound of a dual triode preamp. While it sounds great, the circuit simulation technology is very CPU intensive, that’s why we developed its successor, Tube Saturator 2. Tube Saturator 2 is vastly more efficient, nearly identical in simulation accuracy, and adds other features. However, some users prefer the sound of the original and request it, hence we have released it as a free plug.

While free, Tube Saturator Vintage still requires registration. When the plug first pops up a “needs registration” window, click the Register button. enter your name and email address and click “Get Serial”. This will email a serial to you. Copy the serial into the field and click OK. Alternatively you can get a serial by creating a Wave Arts account. After logging in, you’ll find an option to get a serial on your account page.

Here’s the original Tube Saturator description:

Tube Saturator is the world’s most accurate real time tube amp plug-in. Unlike other tube simulators, which use radically simplified models, Tube Saturator uses state of the art circuit simulation technology to capture every nuance of an analog circuit. With circuit simulation, the analog schematic (consisting of the individual resistors, capacitors, tubes, and so on) completely defines the signal processing. The schematic is converted into a system of non-linear differential equations which is solved at each sampling period, in realtime. That’s mathematical talk for “it sounds exactly like the analog circuit”.

Tube Saturator is in fact a basic circuit consisting of a Baxandall type three-band EQ feeding two 12AX7 triode preamp stages, similar to preamp stages you’d find in a guitar or high fidelity amp, and hence you can get the same distortion and tonal characteristics that you’d get from saturating a real tube preamp. The circuit simulation technology is very CPU intensive and a fast computer is recommended to run the plug-in.

Increasing the Drive control increases the (digital) input gain while decreasing the (digital) output gain, so you can easily adjust distortion levels. The FAT switch changes the bias circuit of the first preamp stage to increase gain and saturation.

Use Tube Saturator to add a bit of analog warmth to recordings, or increase the drive for some distortion. You can use it as a saturating peak limiter too.