Kazrog has released Vac Rac TSL, the official plugin emulation of the Inward Connections Vac Rac tube optical compressor/limiter. The plugin was developed in collaboration with Vac Rac designer Steve Firlotte of Inward Connections, who worked directly with the Kazrog team on the emulation.
The Vac Rac series are modern boutique tube limiters hand-built by Firlotte. Rather than replicate a single vintage design, the Vac Rac draws on the lineage of classic tube optical limiters, combining optical gain reduction with a tube signal path. Vac Rac TSL models four hardware units: the TSL-5 and TSL-4 from Devin Powers‘ collection, the TSL-3 from Grammy winner Ross Hogarth‘s personal unit, and the transformerless signal path of Grammy winner JJ Blair‘s original Vac Rac TLM-1.
Features include:
- Three tube voicings (TSL-5, TSL-4 and TSL-3), plus a blend control for the transformerless TLM-1 path.
- Ratio (2:1 to 12:1) and up to 40dB of gain reduction per channel.
- THD control for adjustable tube saturation, from subtle warmth to heavy distortion.
- Two-channel layout with independent Detector HPF, Ratio, Reduction and Makeup Gain on each channel.
- Dual mono, stereo-linked and mid/side operation.
- Sidechain high-pass (10Hz to 250Hz) and low-pass filters.
- Wet/dry mix control for parallel compression.
- Analog Entropy — Kazrog’s component tolerance variation modeling for realistic channel-to-channel differences.
- Switchable VU meters showing gain reduction or output level on each channel.
- Oversampling up to 64x realtime and 256x offline, with user-selectable filter taps.
- Black and brown UI themes based on alternate faceplates from the original hardware.
Pricing & Availability
Vac Rac TSL is available for an introductory price of $49.99 USD (regular $79.99), in VST2, VST3, AAX, Audio Units and LV2 formats for macOS, Windows and Linux. It does not require authorization — the demo and full versions are separate downloads. The demo is time-unlimited.
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