Two vintage-synth plugins, two ways to sell the past: Audio Blast's V10F and Ebbandflow's deCADE

October has brought two more small plugins built on old synths. Audio Blast announced V10F on 8 October, a monosynth that takes its cue from the Kawai 100F. Less than two weeks later, Ebbandflow released deCADE, a sample-based instrument made from recordings of a dozen 1980s synths. Neither is a big launch on its own. Taken together, they show two different ways of selling the same nostalgia, and those differences matter more to the person paying than the marketing lets on.

What is V10F, and is the Vince Clarke link real?

The Kawai 100F came out under the Teisco name in 1977, after Kawai bought Teisco. It was a single-oscillator monosynth. Audio Blast's launch post leans on its history, and the Depeche Mode connection holds up. We read the May 1982 Electronics & Music Maker interview Audio Blast cites. In it, producer Daniel Miller lists the band's first synths: Martin Gore's Yamaha CS5, Andy Fletcher's Moog Prodigy, and a Kawai 100F belonging to Vince Clarke. Clarke told Sound On Sound in 2020 that he owned one, calling it an early monophonic synth. Neither source says which records it was used on, so "part of Clarke's early setup" is as far as the evidence goes.

The plugin itself is described as "inspired by" the 100F, and its FAQ says the original supplied the synthesis approach and control layout. It is not a circuit model. You get a sawtooth or square oscillator plus noise, a sub-oscillator that can sit before or after the filter, and a filter with 24 dB and 12 dB low-pass, band-pass and high-pass modes plus a separate high-pass. There are two envelopes, three LFO shapes, distortion and three effect slots. A host-synced arpeggiator/sequencer runs up to 64 steps with eight patterns per preset. Synth News points out that these additions deliberately take it away from the original.

What does V10F cost?

The product page shows €77, down from €129. The launch post gives €129 alone, and Synth News says Audio Blast has set no end date for the lower price. It runs as VST2, VST3 and AAX on Windows 8 or later, and adds Audio Unit on macOS 10.15 or later. Synth News notes that CLAP and Linux are not listed. A free demo includes 32 of the 512 factory presets, and its audio cuts out after 51 minutes of use. Audio Blast is aiming it at jungle, UK garage and dubstep producers.

What is deCADE?

Ebbandflow calls deCADE "the sequel no one asked for" on its own page. It contains 127 individually captured sounds from a dozen '80s synths, recorded through what the company describes as an (almost) purely analogue signal path. These are arranged as 100 sources, and each source pairs two different synths. Ebbandflow describes the instrument as sample-based at heart. On top of the samples sit a unison control that stacks up to five voices per note, low- and high-pass filters, a drift control called Variance, two chorus modes, a tape-style delay, reverb, and an option to mimic the voice limits of the original synths. It needs 14 GB of disk space.

The store shows a sale price of £39 against a regular £59. Audio Plugin Guy and The Beat Community report $49 introductory and $69 regular. Owners of deFORM, Ebbandflow's earlier instrument, are offered a loyalty discount. Bedroom Producers Blog covered deFORM in May as a free cinematic synth that needed an email address to download.

Ebbandflow does not name the 12 synths anywhere on the product page. Its pitch is that you get the one you always wanted without the upkeep or the auction scramble.

Why do these keep selling?

The pitch rests on an obvious price gap, and the clearest example came earlier in October. MusicRadar reported in October that Cherry Audio's Pentaphonic plugin recreates a 1981 synth estimated at fewer than 70 units, which can cost up to $5,000 second-hand. The plugin costs $59. Hardware makers sell the same nostalgia from the other end, as with Roland's JUPITER-08 Boutique this week. The economics are simple. The original is scarce, fragile or expensive. The plugin is cheap and always works, and it fits the in-the-box workflow most producers already use.

What we think

V10F and deCADE sell opposite things, and buyers should know which one they want. V10F's marketing is about provenance: a documented link to early Depeche Mode, Teisco history and a reading list. Yet it is the least faithful of the two. Audio Blast says plainly that it is "inspired by" the 100F and has added a multimode filter, sub-oscillator and effects. deCADE is the reverse. It is built from recordings of real hardware but won't tell you what that hardware is. With V10F you are buying a story attached to a modern synth. With deCADE you are buying a sound, and you have to judge it by ear. We think both are honest about this if you read closely. Our point is that you should judge the instrument, not the name on it. If V10F's sequencer and filter suit your bass lines, the Clarke connection is a bonus. If they don't, it shouldn't sell you the plugin.

Launch prices with no end date are a pressure tactic, and you can usually wait. V10F's €77 has no stated deadline, and deCADE's intro price comes with a loyalty offer to people who took its predecessor for free. In our reading, deFORM was the email list and deCADE is the first thing sold to it. That is a fair model for a small developer. It is also a reminder that "introductory" pricing in plugins is often a funnel. Try the V10F demo, listen to deCADE's audio demos, and buy only if the instrument earns a place in a track.

Read the licence on sample-based instruments. deCADE's FAQ allows commercial use inside a finished musical arrangement, stems included. It forbids exporting the content in isolation in a way that amounts to resampling or redistribution. Terms like these are common for sample libraries, but it matters if you make sample packs or sell loops: you can't render deCADE's sounds into a pack. A synthesis plugin like V10F generates its sound rather than playing back someone else's recordings, so the question doesn't arise in the same way.

Who wins and who doesn't. Producers get sounds that once cost thousands for the price of a dinner, and small studios like Audio Blast and Ebbandflow can, we think, make a living from niches the bigger emulation houses skip. The 1970s and '80s designers whose work is being mined get a name-check at best. With deCADE they don't even get that. Our reading is that this economy will keep growing as long as the hardware stays scarce. The developers who last will be the ones who are clearest about what they modelled, what they changed, and what you are allowed to do with the result.