- Product: REISEI
- Developer: ONRI Audio
- Version: 1.0.5
- Format: VST3, AU
- Requirements: macOS 14.0 or later, Apple Silicon (M1 and later)
Today I’m looking at something a bit mad. It’s from ONRI Audio, it’s called REISEI, and I genuinely don’t know how to pronounce it. On the surface it looks like it might be vibecoded — I don’t really know enough about the company to say for sure — but regardless, it’s interesting enough that I think it’s worth digging into. It’s an all-in-one mastering processor: EQ, compression, limiting, stereo manipulation, saturation, the whole shebang. On top of that, it’s a genuinely solid metering solution. So yeah, let’s have a look.
ONRI Audio REISEI: First Impressions
Never heard of ONRI Audio before this — I think I just saw it on social media and thought, I need to look at this. The site’s pitch is “mastering kept in one view”: spectrum, EQ, dynamics, stereo image, and limiting all on a single screen, so every decision gets made in context instead of buried in tabs.
Can’t help but notice the price, though. Brace yourself: at the time of testing, it’s $299, but that’s only until the end of the month — after that it jumps to $399. That’s an expensive plug-in. More than most DAWs cost. For them to charge that, they must really think they’ve got something special. And look, mastering compressors alone can run three to five grand, EQs two and a half to ten — I’ve spent that kind of money on hardware myself. So if one piece of software genuinely does all of that for $299 to $399, maybe, maybe that’s justified. Let’s dig a bit deeper.
The marketing copy is doing a lot of work, and I’m not sure I buy all of it. There’s a line about how building your own rack of individual plugins “feeds both the signal and your judgment with noise” — imperceptible waste that clouds a decision. I’m not convinced that’s actually true, of individual plugins or individual pieces of hardware. But the next bit — “mastering asks for less, a few clear moves that make the most of the sound that’s already there” — that one I do agree with.
What’s Actually In It
So what do you get: a full EQ section, two dynamics slots (one compressor, plus a second you can run as a de-esser), a section just called “Wide” that’s a stereo widener and mono-izer combined, saturation, and a master limiter — all on one screen. On that front, they’re not lying. It really is all there at once.
One detail worth calling out on the stereo side: mid/side isn’t a mode you switch into, it’s blended in. The master signal itself stays left/right from input to output the whole time, and a “weight” control folds mid or side elements into each move by degree — 30% toward mid, fully into the side, anywhere between. The stereo image stays anchored wherever you mixed it, rather than getting collapsed by flipping into an MS mode.
Under the hood there are eight compressor characters, fifteen saturation models, and thirteen EQ models, and you can switch between all of them click-free during playback. Not everyone’s going to need all of that, and the site is upfront that you can run the full chain as designed, or quiet the screen down and use a single processor in a session built around other tools — your call, not theirs. Personally I don’t think I’d be paying $300 to use just one module out of this, but it’s apparently “the plug-in of a lifetime,” according to a testimonial on the site. We’ll see.
One price gets you three machine licenses, which is a nice touch if you’re a mastering house running multiple studios and don’t want to buy per seat. No Windows version yet — it’s planned for a future release.
First Look at the Interface
It’s busy. Genuinely, wow-busy. It reminded me — probably unfairly — of something Alan Sugar wrote in his autobiography about his 80s stereo designs: covered in knobs and controls to look impressive, but mostly an empty box behind the front panel. I really hope this isn’t that.
Unity gain
Up top there’s a unity gain button (worth engaging before you start), a bypass switch, ABCD preset slots, and an image view you can swap between an FFT/EQ display and some genuinely interesting scope views. Everything’s resizable, draggable, zoomable — right-click and drag a box on the display and it zooms right into that region, which is a nice touch. You can tilt the display, look at dry only, wet only, hold the peak, look at everything at once. Big, clear input and output meters with their own reset buttons, switchable between several loudness scales — I left it on LUFS.
Compressor
The compressor section has a genuinely absurd number of character modes: neutral bus compressor, glue-style, opto, diode, pulse-width modulation, FET, VCA — it’s all there, and if they actually sound like what they claim, that’s impressive. You can set which part of the frequency range gets compressed independently from what triggers the sidechain, so if you don’t want to touch the low end, you just don’t. Threshold, ratio, range, character, mix, attack, release, RMS, and a “development” control I genuinely don’t know the function of yet — I’d need to spend more time with it.
Saturation
Saturation works similarly: tape, tube, triode, pentode, transformer, and combinations of those, plus stylistic presets like body, warmth, soft clip, hard clip, crisp, fold, enhance, air — each with its own little graphic showing what it’s doing. You can restrict it to a frequency band, and there’s a post-control section too: drive, softness, punch, dry/wet, emphasis, and something called “sag” that I’m guessing is meant to emulate voltage sag. Every module has its own solo switch that kicks in automatically when you touch a control — handy everywhere except the EQ, where obviously you want to hear it in context while you’re adjusting it.
EQ
The EQ itself offers a stack of response models — natural, analog, digital phase, soft analog, edge, linear, plus a few reconstruction modes (partial resynthesis, with harmonics, with dual-rate) that honestly sound like overkill in the best way. Click and drag, does what you’d expect from any EQ, with a high-quality toggle per band.
Dynamics
Separate from the main compressor there’s a second dynamics section I set up as a de-esser at 7kHz — it’s actually a genuinely decent de-esser, which surprised me a bit. Down at the bottom is the Wide section, where you pick a frequency band to start widening from (you probably don’t want to go too low) and choose from a set of stereo-widening algorithms — per-harmonic spread, tracked partials, pan-apart, best-resolution, various tracking speeds, dual-rate, fusion-plus-harmonic. There’s a mono fade control too, letting you decide which part of the spectrum stays mono, and you can choose to keep the transient stereo while folding just the sustain into mono — which is a genuinely clever bit of design. The correlation-based fold can run dynamically (only engaging when correlation drops) or stay static.
Limiter
Then the limiter: standard REISEI-character mode, plus options described as adding weight and glue, a firmer grip, or a smoother, softer hand — I started with the softest setting. There’s a clean mode, dithering, trim, ceiling, adjustable release, an “impact” control, and stereo link (which I turned off — I’m not a fan of linking my master limiter). A dedicated scope at the bottom shows exactly what the limiter’s doing to the LUFS level in real time.
Target-matching
There’s also a target-matching feature at the bottom: pick a target — no target, -9, -14, -6, -23, whichever streaming-platform standard you care about, if you put stock in those — and hit Apply Target. I set mine to -9 and it got there in one click.
Does It Sound Any Good?
So it promises a lot and it looks like a lot. Does it actually sound good, or is this style over substance?
I ran it against a couple of real tracks, starting bypassed and clicking it in. Honestly, even mid-testing, my first reaction was that it blows your mind a little bit — there’s a huge amount going on, and getting the best out of any one section would take real time, because each module is so deep on its own. That’s fairly unusual. Most of the time when people bundle a compressor, saturator, and EQ together, they simplify: fewer controls than you’d get from the standalone versions, to avoid overwhelming you. REISEI does the opposite — it gives you the full depth of each tool, all visible at once, nothing hidden under tabs.
It’s doing genuinely interesting things. I’m not sure I love that everything is visible all the time — there’s a strange, slight echo of working with hardware in that respect, because your eye darts around the whole surface rather than opening one window, closing it, opening the next. I hadn’t quite experienced a plugin that felt like that before.
On a second, completely different track, it held up just as well. That compressor alone is excellent. So is the saturator. I haven’t spent enough time in the EQ specifically to give a verdict there, but everything I’ve heard and seen so far looks and sounds genuinely strong. The second dynamics section handling de-essing duties is a nice touch, and the widening/mono-ing section is doing some things I haven’t come across before — there’s a bit of a family resemblance to a stereo tool Panorama Audio Labs put out a couple of weeks ago, but with its own spin on the idea.
Where I Land On It
I really like it. My issues with the plugin itself are minor — the scopes are excellent, every section is deep, there are more options than you could reasonably ask for. I’ve no idea what it’s actually modeled on under the hood, or how accurate any of it is to the hardware it’s presumably drawing from, but to my ears it sounds properly good.
My actual hesitation is more about fit than quality. I already own a lot of hardware and a lot of plugins — individual compressors, saturators, and EQs I know inside out from years of using them. Switching over to REISEI would mean starting from scratch with all of that knowledge, and turning off parts of it to only use a few modules feels like a waste of $299–399 given the whole point of the thing is using it as a complete chain.
That said, I can see exactly who this is for. If you’re running an independent film or production house without an existing mastering pipeline, or you’re just starting to think about doing your own mastering, one plugin that covers essentially everything is a genuinely appealing proposition — it’ll get you maybe 90% of the way there. It’s a bit of a surprising choice on ONRI’s part, honestly — they could easily have spread this out into a two-year pipeline of separate, excellent standalone products (a really good multi-mode compressor, a really good saturator, a really good widener, a really good EQ) instead of bundling it all into one release. Interesting call.
For me personally, it’s too much money — not because it isn’t good, but because I’ve already got tools that do each of these jobs individually. For someone building a mastering setup from zero, the math is different.
I’m giving it four stars. There’s nothing wrong with it operationally that I can point to, but the price keeps me from going higher, and it’s not going to appeal to everyone given that a lot of people already own tools that do these individual jobs. Still — clever, clever piece of software, sounds great, and I’m going to enjoy spending more time with it.