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 at 4:18 AM

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 at 7:46 AM

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 at 9:11 AM