Big Man Labs has released Bigulator, a circuit-level model of an obscure analog mastering clipper taken off the schematic and fitted to measurements of the unit.
The original is a VCA driven at audio rate by a peak-skimming rectifier. There is no detector, so the shape of the waveform is doing all the work. Big Man Labs says it clips like nothing else, loud and dense, and it stays natural doing it.
The plugin adds what the hardware couldn’t do: one to three bands with minimum or linear phase crossovers, Ratio and Asym per band with thresholds that link or run independently, a digital sum clipper with four voicings, and oversampling to 16x. ASYM puts the unit’s channel imbalance on a knob and takes it further than the original could go.
Bigulator is available now at $42 with a 14-day trial for Windows, macOS (Intel and Apple Silicon) and Linux, in AAX, VST3, AU and CLAP formats.
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