Signum Audio Interview: Art and Science Behind Their Plugins

We had the opportunity to speak with the team at Signum Audio, a brand renowned for its innovative and high-performance VST plugins. In this interview, we delve into the inspiration behind their journey, how they balance cutting-edge technology with accessibility, and their vision for the future.

Here’s what they had to say about their creative process, milestones, and what’s next for their brand!

1.  What was the inspiration behind starting your VST plugin brand?

We wanted to make our algorithms as accessible as possible, to professional engineers as well as audio enthusiasts. Releasing them in form of a plugin instead of as part of a software or even hardware product made therefore a lot of sense.

Besides the actual algorithms, we also felt that a lot of plugins just expose their algorithm parameters as their UI and there was a lot that could be done to improve interaction and visualization.

2.  How do you ensure your VST plugin maintains high performance without compromising sound quality?

We are in the fortunate position to have designed our algorithms specifically for plugins. Our algorithms are not designed to be implemented in circuitry and they don’t need to run on embedded systems. This means we can do a whole host of things that would be near impossible to do on actual hardware to improve the audio quality / sound of our algorithms.

3. How do you approach the balance between innovation and keeping plugins accessible to both beginners and professionals?  

We try hard to abstract the operation of the plugin from the operation of the algorithm. All information displayed and all parameters exposed should be clear meaningful to the user. Hopefully this should make our plugins intuitive to beginners and professionals alike.

4. What are some of the biggest successes or milestones your brand has achieved in the VST plugin market?  

Our biggest success was definitely Bute Limiter! It sets itself apart from other limiters by being very transparent, a powerful tool for dynamics control. It can handle situations where the human hearing is very sensitive to changes in dynamics, for example a piano piece, very well.

Another big success story was the building our studio. We’ve equipped it with quite a lot of rare vintage analog gear as we do love the traditional sound engineering approach. We also specifically don’t try to imitate analog hardware with our plugins, but to provide algorithms that go beyond what’s possible with analog hardware. So we have the best of both worlds in our studio.

5. How do you decide which plugins to develop next? What factors influence your decisions?  

Whenever we release a plugin it needs to bring something new and unique to the table. In terms of algorithms as well as UI – that being said, our focus is ultimately on the quality of the audio algorithms.

6. How do you manage the relationship between your brand and the music production community?

Before Corona hit we actually organised a sound centered festival in Edinburgh called TEFOS – the Edinburgh festival of sound. It was a mixture of showcasing (audio hardware and software), workshops, live music, and technical talks (North AudioTEK Conference). Unfortunately we didn’t get around organising it again ever since the pandemic is over.

Apart from that we have local bands recording in our studio every now and then, which is always good fun.

7. What’s next for your brand in terms of new products, innovations, or projects you’re excited about?  Any exciting plans to jump for some different tools than you already have?

We have a few very exciting ideas / prototypes for different tools. But product development is a slow process for a small company like us, so it might take quite a while before any new type of tool will see the light of day. Bear in mind we are still updating all our current offerings regularly as well.