Savant finally released their promised recreation of the Publison Infernal Machine 90. A quirky and temperamental hardware effects box from the 80's. The nutty creator sanded off all the chip ID markings on the circuit board in an attempt to prevent copying, and there's never been a service manual. There's one guy in France who still does all the servicing and there's a large backlog.

It did appear initially in interface mockups that Savant would only recreate the reverb through convolution. But reverb is not what this unit was known for or particularly sought after for. Back in the 80's it was the ability to store and trigger long high quality samples (not very useful today). Also the delay and especially the pitch shifting algorithm (grain-based), which was revolutionary then, and is still excellent even by today's standards were very well liked. Combining pitch shifting with delay yields some wild results. The pitch shifting also has a certain 'sound' to it when pushed to the extremes that itself becomes an effect.

Micro pitch shifting was a key ingredient to Prince's background vocals and he used a Publison. Pitch shifting vocals was also frequently used as a signature effect by Stock Aitken Waterman. Here's one of countless examples from them, where at 2:58 the phrase "Venus was his name" is an IM90 pitched down sample from the original phrase heard here.

Fortunately it seems from the promotional videos that Savant pushed beyond their original plans for reverb and also implemented delay and pitch shifting, and have done it faithfully.

https://savantaudiolabs.com/product/savant-im90

Intro price until mid-December - $79

This will definitely become my new favorite pitch shifting plugin.

 

Last edited: Nov 20, 2025

well that certainly didn't take long.

 

Will probably until after holidays as I am considering the new Antelope Audio Zenith 2 for my 2nd Workstation. Recently purchased a Volt 2 for the older Workstation.

Does seem promising though. May download demo. Hopefully none of the regular demo noise or dropouts.

Downloaded DEMO. Resource hog.

Short dropouts & sluggish initiation of preset loading. Graphics became sluggish at one point. About 5 minutes in to DEMO, DAW locked up. Had to use Task Manager to kill DAW Process.

 

Last edited: Nov 20, 2025

i had the joy of working in a studio that had two of these. Really an insane little box, especially for the time. I could spend hours tweaking it. Really miss that place. Unfortunately the owner went to prison and the gear was repo'd. Well, most of it was anyways...

 

Downloaded the demo for the PC, running under Cubase 15. I'm not seeing more than around 5% CPU increase (i9-13900K) for a single instance with a patch using reverb, delay and pitch shifting combined, so that seems acceptable.

Demo has occasional sound mutes, but nothing that gets in the way with exploring what it can do and assessing it. Been testing it for a few hours now and tried it on a few sessions. Saw no noticeable bugs or stability issues yet. Seems pretty solid and really delivers on what it promises. It's clear they put a significant amount of effort into it to get it sounding authentic and looks very much like a passion project from enthusiasts rather than a money grab.

Don't think I'd pay $179, but $79, yeah, I'd say they earned that.

 

Last edited: Nov 20, 2025

I bought it. No copy protection. As in zero.

There's literally nothing to crack as it's an installer. Not even a basic offline license key challenge. I don't think the binary is personalized either. Now that's a bold position, I hope others will still support them financially, because it's pretty niche. They've already mentioned possibly developing it further and adding sampling features that leverage the special capabilities of the Publison.

Anyway, that's enough fanboying. I've been unhappy with my risers and FX hits/transitions, so I'm going to put the IM90 to work as an excuse to play with it more.

 

I bought it.

 

does it sound like the original algorithms?
seem to me a quite complex machine to recreate them just by ear without original code

 

Its really fun to make riser type stuff with.

 

Yeah would be interesting to know, but I think it is quite obscure hardware might be difficult to find people who own it and also the plug-in and want to compare. Maybe there are comparison videos made by the developer?

 

Is there some reason to suspect they could not get access to one, or own one already? If not, it seems like it might be pretty easy to get in contact with the guy mentioned as still repairing them. Someone like that could get you into contact with someone who actually has one in working order.

Studio Piscine à Tokyo (the person who services the IM‑90):

• Address: Aubervilliers, France.
• https://www.piscineatokyo.fr
• Email: [email protected]
• Name: Jonathan Prager is the person behind Studio Piscine à Tokyo.
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/piscineatokyo

 

Not sure I'm understanding you correctly here, but if you're questioning whether Savant had a reference hardware unit to analyze, they did. There's A/B comparisons with the hardware unit in their promotional video.

On news of the announcement, Audiority said they also have a hardware unit and had been looking into emulating the Publison as well. They'd got as far as getting the pitch shifting working, but were hitting difficulties with the reverb. With Savant getting first mover advantage, I'd presume they won't prioritize finishing their own version.

 

I'm not questioning anything at all. I am going to listen to it on a few tracks of audio and delete it or buy it.

 

check out audient iD4.

 

its definitely very close. its a little different than i remember, but this was also something like 15 years ago or so that i had access.

 

Thanks! Thought about it a while back. An updated version could sway me though.

 

Last edited: Nov 21, 2025

Is that 5% in Task Manager or DAW DSP/CPU monitor? Both Pro Tools & Sequoia show high usage while Windows Task Manager shows around 5% when plugin is loaded. Seems GPU usage is also quite high compared to other plugins that are known to be resource hungry. Also noticed that it tends to hammer one CPU core/thread. Especially when plugin GUI is open.

I suspect that it requires AV2 at a minimum along with using GPU resources. Will give it a try on newer workstation to compare usage and, to see if my suspicions are correct.

 

I had one back in the day....
A fun gadget with the the little keyboard.
And dirt cheap I might add, lol
.
.
.
... Not!

 

But of course, it could sound quite good on its own. I’m questioning the authenticity of the algorithm they’re selling as a software remake rather than an approximation. There’s just too much going on inside for all the components to interact properly, as they do on the real box, as I understand it. It’s doubtful we could know that or verify that so few units exist and the comparison video with the Eastern European girl (?) looks rather silly

 

I was going by Task Manager. I just tried the 20s max duration reverb and got it to around 8% delta. Convolution has to multiply every input sample by every sample in the impulse response, so long impulses are much more computationally expensive vs algorithmic reverb. They're definitely using convolution (as expected). The pitch shifting and delay will be algorithmic. The mechanics of pitch shifting are known, they'd need to experiment to dial in the specific parameters (like crossfade points) to make it an authentic match.

Full Cubase mix with other plugins - with and without 24 instances of IM90 - 1 insert per channel. IM90 default patch (reverb).
Imgur link

I'd say that's pretty close to getting maxxed out. I also shifted any non-Cubase process using significant CPU to only the background cores, including the Task Manager process itself.

ASIO buffer 64 samples, RME Audio HDSPe AIO.