Smash Happy Audio — User Manual
Mastering-grade space and depth — a source-matched, additive-only reverb that never touches your dry signal and folds away safely in mono.
Spacewaves adds a subtle, source-matched sense of space to a master without ever touching the dry signal — at Mix 0 it's a bit-exact passthrough, zero latency, no filtering. Everything you hear from Spacewaves is a purely additive wet layer sitting on top of your untouched mix.
The reverb tail's tone always tracks your program material's own spectral balance, so it reads as "more of the same room" rather than an added colour, and the low end is protected by design — the send is always high-passed, so the reverb can never smear or destabilise the bottom octave.
A starfield living background drifts continuously behind five sections: Mix, Size, Tone, Duck, and Output. Expanding rings ripple outward from the centre on transients while the tail is active — a visualisation of sound dispersing into the modelled space.
Mix (0% by default) is how much space is added — the dry signal is never touched regardless of setting, so 0% is always bit-exact off. Width, the slider underneath, controls where the reverb sits in the stereo field: low keeps it centred, high wraps it around the sides. At any setting the wet signal folds away cleanly in mono — it can never cause mono cancellation.
Size moves predelay and room size together, from tight and close to wide and distant. Decay (0.4–4.0 s) sets the tail length — mastering tails live short, and most useful work happens between 0.8 and 2 seconds.
The tail's tone always tracks your master's own measured spectral tilt automatically — Tone doesn't replace that matching, it offsets it: below centre darkens the tail further, above centre adds air on top of the natural match.
Transient-keyed ducking. The tail recedes under hits and blooms back into the gaps between them, so the added space never smears the front of a busy mix. This tracks level-independently, so the same setting behaves consistently whether your material sits at −20 or −6 dBFS.
A linear trim, −12 to +6 dB. At 0 dB the dry-path bit-exactness at Mix 0 holds end to end. There's no ceiling here by design; an overload LED latches if dry-plus-tail together clip.
Steps back your last change. Related edits in quick succession group into one undo step.
A/B compare: first press stores your current settings as the alternate; press again to flip and compare.
| Formats | Audio Unit, VST3 |
| Platform | macOS, Apple Silicon |
| Mix | 0–100%, default 0 — bit-exact passthrough at 0 |
| Decay | 0.4–4.0 s |
| Low-end protection | Send is always high-passed — the reverb never touches sub content |
| Latency | Zero — no lookahead, no oversampling |
| Mono safety | Wet signal folds away cleanly in mono at any Width setting |
| Channel configuration | Stereo in / stereo out |
Mix defaults to 0% — the plugin opens completely neutral by design. Bring Mix up from the first section.
Raise Duck so the tail recedes further under transients, or shorten Decay — mastering-appropriate tails are usually much shorter than a mix-bus reverb.
Tone defaults to centre, which just matches your program's own spectral balance — if it still feels coloured, check Tone hasn't been pushed toward one extreme.