HAZE Review

Unfiltered Audio released Haze, a time smearing engine with tape, grain, and spectral modes. Haze seems to bring together some of the best features of many of my personal favorite UA plugins into a single utility. There’s a touch of Lo-Fi-Af, a touch of Silo, and a touch of SpecOps. Haze does not replace any of these plugins, but curates some of their best features into a powerful time stretching utility.

At the heart of Haze is the speed control, allowing you to slow down or accelerate the audio buffer. Each mode treats this differently, with tape mode repitching the audio like actual tape, and grain/spectral modes keeping the pitch consistent while time is stretched. The buffer size lets you set how often the buffer is rest, which can be crucial for keeping things on beat.

Tape mode is pretty simple, it emulates old recordings with age, wow, noise, bias and dropout controls. Pretty standard stuff that we see in many tape effects, I’d love to give these all a side by side comparison one day, each developer has a different flavor of “analog tape wear”.

Things get a lot more fun with the granular mode. All the controls are in %, so I can’t specify actual grain settings in comparison to other granular plugins. But this is on the simpler side anyway. Great for grain clouds with a fast rate and medium grain size. I really enjoyed the scatter control. Also erode was a fun control, dropping grains for a more sparse sound. I love simple grain effects like this, they aren’t quite as comprehensive as a full blown grain engine, but this one definitely gets the job done and provides enough variety to keep things interesting.

The real fun is with the spectral mode, I can’t help but speculate the idea of SpecOps 2 when I see the variety of spectral effects available here. Each control is like a full effect. It’s fun to mix and match them, but they do make me wish I had some modulation to play with. Smear blends neighboring bins creating a noisy approximation of the sound. Blur slowly fades bins creating a spectral reverb. Whspr applies noise to each bin making the signal breathy and organic. And MP3 applies that classic Mp3 style lossy data compression for watery digitization.

I enjoy the simplicity of Haze, it’s a fun effect for just smearing audio and stretching things out into new ambient soundscapes. The three modes definitely cover a wide range of uses, sometimes you want gritty vintage tape, other times you want a soft fluttering grain cloud, and sometimes you want a more experimental spectral mess. It reminds me a lot of the various time stretching modes available in DAWs, which often have repitch, grain, and spectral stretching modes. In that sense, I think of Haze like a time stretch algorithm in effect form.

you can pick up HAZE from Unfiltered Audio’s website here: https://www.unfilteredaudio.com/products/haze