DAC-CLIP

DAC-CLIP is the sound of running your audio out of an old sampler the conversion color of an MPC or SP-1200 and the way that hardware clipped when you pushed it past the rails. Slam a drum break into it and it crunches and dusts the way boom-bap always did: the kick squares off, the snare picks up that grimy bite, and the whole loop sits back in the era it came from. This is not a clean brickwall limiter and it is not trying to be. It is sampler-grade lo-fi and saturation a vintage clipper plugin built to make modern, too-clean audio sound like it came off a 12-bit machine.

Under the hood is the real converter chain, in the order the old boxes actually ran it. Quantize down to as few as four bits, fold in genuine mu-law companding for that quiet-detail, loud-crunch punch, then drop the sample rate with continuously variable aliasing, clean at one end, deliberately gritty and deconstructed at the other. Blend the reconstruction from chunky stair-step to smooth, pick from four level-matched drive characters (clean tube, SP-1200 crunch, MPC warmth, and a Neve-style transformer), carve it with a resonant filter, and keep your sub clean with a bass-safe band-split while everything above it gets wrecked. The output clipper models how those sampler output stages really behaved linear up to the rails, then a hard knee with asymmetry and slew limiting and a live scope shows the wave slamming into the ceiling as you ride it. Honest character, no measured-circuit marketing, 64-bit internal, audio stays local. VST3 and CLAP. Perpetual license, three machines. yerr