Forever89, a young plugin development studio founded by Rikard Jönsson and Svante Stadler who were previously involved with Ableton and Teenage Engineering, appeared seemingly from out of nowhere last year with the release of their spectral drum plugin Visco. But this particular review is all about Topos, a combined saturation/distortion/speaker emulation plugin which explores seamlessly between a range of models and does so with typical Swedish ballsy minimalist style.
Trash by Izotope, Decimort by D16, Saturn by Fabfilter, TAIP by Baby Audio, Satin by U-he, Speakers by Audiothing, Radiator by Soundtoys, a load of Ableton stock devices. You know, it’s not like I didn’t have enough saturation and distortion options, but my FOMO and GAS combined always have me sweating at the thought of any new plugin offering tone shaping capabilities for sound design. And Topos, with its promise of morphing seamlessly between speaker models, had me do a hard stop.
Amps and speakers together are morph fun
Topos is not just another saturator or gimmicky speaker emulator. It’s a spatial context machine that uses convolution in ways I haven’t heard from any other plugin. This VST3 plugin is built on a custom engine that blends nonlinear speaker modeling, impulse response-based spatial simulation, and adaptive saturation. It’s like someone took an impulse response loader, fed it weird old speakers, and then spread it out on a 2D field of distortion.
According to Forever89 it uses nonlinear impulse responses (nLIRs) captured from real-world loudspeakers, including broken home systems, bass bins, and even DIY rigs in untreated rooms. These aren’t static IRs. They react dynamically to input level and frequency, creating living, unstable textures.
To be honest, though, I have no idea of knowing how true to each source amp model or speaker Topos really is, but to me it often sounds awesome with my stuff, and that’s a good starting point.
The killer combo
During the course of this review I’ve tried Topos on breaks, modular sequences, bass, even foley textures – and each time, it’s done something that traditional distortion or reverb could not do without the help of the other – and with an ease that’s really one of the biggest selling points. Topos doesn’t add “space” like a hall or plate reverb. It adds environment. As in: this sound happened somewhere.
There are no audible artifacts, clicks or anything, when changing any parameter in Topos. At all, which is actually rather rare when thinking of traditional IR based plugins and patch changes with these. Plus the fact that you can place yourself anywhere on the topographical map between the emulated speakers and amps, is another great selling point compared to plugins allowing only to switch between static models. Once again Forever89 champion the concept of fluidity in sound design that quickly became their trademark in their drum plugin Visco.
Once again Forever89 champion the concept of fluidity in sound design that quickly became their trademark in their drum plugin Visco.
If you’re looking for something to “warm up” a synth, you’ll probably reach for a stock effect or one of the mentioned plugins or their nearest rivals. But if you want to re-contextualize a sound – make it feel like it’s being played through a specific speaker, in a specific room, under specific conditions – Topos does it faster and often better than anything else I’ve tried my hand with.
In a way, it’s more like a convolution reverb meets distortion plugin, but it avoids the static feeling of IR loaders which is where most previous plugins in the genre stop. Topos is a sound designer’s plugin more than a mix engineer’s one – and that’s why I like it more. I don’t care much whether it says SSL or XXL on my plugins, as long as it can be wielded for sound design.
Two Fingers
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I like Topos a lot, but I’d also just like to just mention a few things that has slowed me down a few times when working with it. The display window switches back to the wave/spectrum view if I don’t keep the mouse pointer active on a parameter/knob or keep it active in the main right window. I would have liked it to stick to showing what I’m doing with Filter, Amp, Speaker, Mix respectively, so I can see what’s going on, even when leaning back for a moment. Also, this hurts a workflow in Ableton where you maybe are using the bottom screen device sliders mapped to the plugin parameters. Moving, say, the filter on the device level here, or with a controller, does’nt activate the visuals in Topos like mouseover does, but just keeps showing the wave/spectrum window. A soft suggest would be to implement an option for these visuals to stay sticky or not.
The other thing I’m missing for the way I’d like to work ideally, in terms of automation, is for the ability to map the placement marker on the topographical speaker map (yeah map map!) to an automation parameter – an X Y axis movement. At least for now, I’m not able to make that work in Ableton Live. For sound design, to have this fluidity via the topographical map instantly has me wanting to throw in sweeps across the landscape, and maybe use that same sweep elsewhere. And instead of hard printing hand moves to audio, copying the automation would be so much easier. But hey, I think you can do it, guys!
Depthstortion is here
Gripes aside, Topos comes through as quite an innovative little plugin. It’s super lightweight, and can easily sit numerous times in a session without taxing the CPU. Its ability to blur the lines between what we tend to think of amps and speakers, and actually present a playground to seamlessly work within that constellation, is what sets it apart from anything out there right now, really. It will not write your songs, but maybe Topos will inspire you and take your sound design some place new.
Topos is priced at 99 USD/EUR
