Loading…
A free, component-level-modeled tube preamp for VST3/Standalone (Windows) — cascaded gain stages, dynamic bias-shift, and transformer saturation in a precise, modern control surface.
Download the manual (PDF, 1.2MB)Bias‑X’s hero display reads the actual DSP state live — four waveform lanes from input through output, a transfer-curve plot pulled from the same math the audio thread runs, and a heat-ramp meter that glows hotter as the tube is driven harder.
Drive · Stage 2 · Bias · Sag
Two cascaded gain stages, a real grid-bias point, and supply sag under drive — the core of the tube’s response.
Grit · Input Iron · Output Iron
Asymmetric pentode clipping plus independent input/output transformer saturation.
Age · Capacitance
Capacitor-aging coloration across three capacitance sizes, from tight and modern to loose and worn.
Output
Final output trim.
Env Depth · LFO Rate · LFO Depth · LFO Shape
An envelope follower and a free-running LFO — four shapes — for movement over time.
Grit no longer turns the volume down as you turn it up. It used to lose 4.4 dB across the knob at mixing level and 13.3 dB on hot material, so turning it up sounded like turning the plugin down. It is now within 0.3 dB across its whole range, and it is roughly three times stronger at the same knob position — 0.10–0.30 is a normal working range now. Output is no longer a hidden drive control. And every factory preset is far gentler on delicate material: vocal presets measure 0.37–1.08 % distortion at mixing level where they used to be 2.40–2.97 %.
All of that shipped in 1.0.0. It is repeated here because 1.0.0's notes opened with a paragraph about test tooling and buried it three paragraphs down — and the first paragraph is the part most people read. The 1.0.0 notes are left as they were published rather than quietly rewritten.
> 1.0.1 changes no audio. Same DSP, same presets, same behaviour — the plugin binaries > are functionally identical to 1.0.0. If you are already on 1.0.0 there is nothing here for > you but a better manual. This is a documentation release.