TVHS

Run your mix through a VHS deck that's dying and a CRT television that's bleeding — without owning either.

TVHS is a real tape-transport and video-hardware emulator for Mac & Windows, built from the physics of the machines instead of a "vintage" preset curve. Wow and flutter come from filtered noise, not a looping LFO, so a pad never settles into a cycle no matter how long the note runs. Dropouts fire on a genuine random process, so they clump and leave gaps instead of ticking on a grid. The compander mistracking, the head-switching seam, the CRT flyback whine — all eleven effects are modeled from how the actual hardware misbehaves, then backed by 10 real tape-head impulse responses for the character no model alone gets right.

Every VHS plugin before this one gave you a tape emulation. TVHS gives you the deck AND the television it was plugged into.

Features

The Transport — Modeled, Not Sampled:

• Wobble: wow, flutter and scrape driven by filtered noise, never a looping LFO — no two passes ever sound the same
• Saturate: tape record-amp drive with matched pre-emphasis and de-emphasis, so the harmonics stay behind after the tone is pulled back
• Breathe: the VHS Hi-Fi compander mistracking — the noise floor swells after every transient and sinks again, exactly like a consumer deck that never quite tracks itself
• Noise: tape hiss gated by the programme, so it swells with the music and decays behind it instead of hissing flat over silence
• Two selectable noise beds (A/B) for a different hiss character
• Dropout: random level dips on a true Poisson process — events clump and leave gaps, and no two dips share a depth or a length

Bandwidth & Tone:

• One Tone knob sweeps the entire path from the wide AFM hi-fi track to the narrow linear edge track
• Four things move together, because they do on real hardware: bandwidth narrows, a head-bump resonance grows in the low mids, azimuth error dips the presence region, and a broad upper-mid shelf falls away
• Turning it up doesn't just remove treble — it adds the thick, boxy weight of a worn dub

The Television Half:

• Headswitch: the field-rate glitch from a VHS drum swapping between its two heads once per video field — and the two heads genuinely sound slightly different from each other
• Flyback: CRT line-transformer whine plus mains hum, amplitude-modulated together the way a real unshielded supply behaves
• NTSC / PAL switching on both effects — field rate, scan-line frequency and hum frequency all follow the correct standard, because a real deck was always one or the other, never a mix
• This is the half of VHS that no pure tape plugin can give you

10 Real Impulse Responses:

• Video Chrome, Magnetic Vision, Analog Scan, Signal Gold, Chroma Drive
• Vision Grain, Tape Vision, Retro Signal, Broadcast Noir, Ghost Transfer
• Convolution captures pulled from real tape and video hardware, not modeled from a spec sheet
• The impulse changes the character more than almost any single knob — pick one first, then dial the rest against it

Stereo Width, Mix & Metering:

• Width models tape-track crosstalk — turn it down and the image collapses the way adjacent tracks bleed into each other, fully mono at zero
• Mix blends the entire processed chain against your dry signal, so the character can stay extreme while you decide how much reaches the track
• Output trims the master level, with twin circular meters reading left and right in real time

Bypass Everything:

• Every effect carries its own bypass, independently
• A bypassed panel dims immediately, so the state of the whole plugin is readable at a glance
• Bypass states are stored with every preset — which effects are engaged is part of the sound, not an afterthought

60 Factory Presets:

• Six categories running from barely-there to broken: Clean Transfer, Home Dub, Rental Copy, Tracking Error, Degraded, Dead Channel
• Every preset is a full snapshot — all eleven effects, the impulse response, the video standard, the mix and the output trim
• Every impulse response appears exactly once in every category, so working through one category is also a tour of all ten impulses
• One click reconfigures the entire deck

Built To Be Used:

• Every control is fully automatable, including the bypass state of each effect
• The interface itself explains itself — hover any control and the on-screen caption line describes what it does
• Resizable interface, drag to scale, Ctrl-click to reset to 100%
• Modeled effects use lightweight noise-driven math rather than brute-force processing, so the CPU load stays low even with everything engaged
• Serial number activation instead of a dongle