VACUUM-TUBE DISTORTION · SOLVED, NOT SHAPED
THERMION
Tubes from hell. A Culture Vulture descendant that keeps going past where the original stops.
Eight structurally different valve circuits, four measured valves plus one that cannot exist, and a BIAS knob calibrated in real milliamps of plate current — because every published Culture Vulture setting is a meter reading, and a dial number isn't comparable to any of them. The valve is solved from Dempwolf & Zolzer's cathode-current law on a real load line, not shaped after the fact, so grid blocking, screen sag and supply sag fall out as consequences instead of being bolted on top. db-cell goes to two places at once — blended into the audio as texture, and into the valve's own cathode, so the operating point breathes the way a real supply does.
- Eight FUNCTION circuits — T, P1, P2, SQ, STARVED, PUSH-PULL, FOLLOWER, SCREEN SAG — and five TUBE options including one impossible valve
- BIAS reads in milliamps of plate current, matching Thermionic Culture's own published meter settings — 0.4 mA for tape, ~0.1 mA where doubling starts
- POWER SOAK: an output-stage load attenuator that drives the output valve harder while dropping load impedance, so the supply sags along with it
- db-cell wired directly to the valve's cathode as well as the audio path — one seed, one re-roll, one recipe for both destinations
- Every number in the model is labelled PUBLISHED, MEASURED, INFERRED or DERIVED, and the harness prints two known discrepancies against the real hardware on every run rather than hiding them
- EZ button for a new sound with a seed you can get back, plus a full selftest harness covering bias landmarks, harmonic profiles, aliasing, and CPU across five sample rates
VST3
STANDALONE
WIN / MAC
