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Signal flow

Audio passes through these stages in order:

  1. Input. Mono or stereo in. A mono input is copied to both channels. The output is always stereo.
  2. Input gate. Not on the panel. It is off by default, and two factory presets switch it on. See Parameters.
  3. DRIVE with the OD or FUZZ voice. See DRIVE, OD and FUZZ.
  4. Dry tap. The dry signal for MIX is taken here, after the gate and DRIVE.
  5. Mode. TREM, REPEAT or LOOPS processes the signal. Switching mode crossfades over about 30 ms. REPEAT and LOOPS keep recording the input while another mode is active.
  6. WEAR. Tape motion, saturation, head EQ, crush, then noise and dropouts. WEAR only touches the processed signal. See WEAR.
  7. LEVEL scales the processed signal by -12 to +12 dB.
  8. MIX blends the dry tap with the processed signal. The blend is linear, not equal power: out = (1 - MIX) × dry + MIX × processed.

Consequences worth knowing:

  • DRIVE is heard at any MIX setting. MIX fully down gives you the gated, driven input and nothing else. It is not a host bypass.
  • LEVEL only changes the processed side. It does not change the dry level.
  • CHAOS does not appear in the chain as a stage. It reaches into TREM, REPEAT and LOOPS and changes how each behaves. WEAR does not respond to the CHAOS knob.

Latency, tail and channels

  • Bent Spool reports 0 latency to the host. DRIVE does add 14 samples of internal delay while it is above 0, which Bent Spool does not report.
  • The tail is infinite. The host keeps processing after the input stops, so frozen LOOPS audio and generated noise are never cut off.
  • Channel layouts are mono in to stereo out, and stereo in to stereo out. There is no MIDI input or output.