Disclosure

Affiliate links

Some links on this site earn us a commission if you buy through them. They are marked, and they carry rel="sponsored" so search engines know what they are.

The commission is the same whichever way a review lands, and nobody here sees a per-product rate before writing. A link is only ever added to a review after the verdict is written.

If you would rather not use them, every product is named plainly enough to find without us.

Free and loaned products

Every review states how we got the product, near the verdict rather than buried at the bottom. If a developer gave us a licence, that sentence says so.

This is not decoration. The rule we follow is the one the FTC states: a disclosure has to be “very close to, or — even better — part of, the endorsement”, and a disclosure only on a page like this one is not enough. So this page is the backstop, not the disclosure.

A free licence buys a review. It does not buy a good one, and it does not buy sight of the review before it is published.

Sponsored content

We do not sell sponsored reviews, and we will not. A review that somebody paid for is an advertisement, and an advertisement that looks like a review poisons every other page on the site.

What can be bought is bench time: a maker can pay us to run a product through the same measurements everyone else gets. The results are published unedited and without approval, including when they are bad. Anything produced that way is labelled at the top.

Our own conflicts

This site is run by Voximus Audio, which sells audio plugins under the name Vox Samples. We compete commercially with most of the products reviewed here. That is not a footnote; it is the single most important thing to know about this site, and it is why the rules below are absolute rather than aspirational.

Four rules follow, and they are absolute:

1. We never review or score our own products. A Vox Samples plugin is named where naming it is useful to you — in a roundup it genuinely belongs in, or a comparison you would otherwise have to make yourself — and every mention says we make it, in the sentence that mentions it, not in a footer. It never gets a rating, a rank, a verdict box or a place in a scored table.

2. We do not review a product we have made a direct reimplementation of. Some of our plugins are deliberate recreations of specific units. Where the product under consideration is the unit one of ours recreates, we do not review it, because we cannot be a fair judge of a thing we copied.

   This rule is deliberately narrow, and it is worth being precise about what it does and does not cover, because the wide version would swallow the site. It is not “anything we compete with” — we sell plugins across most of this category, so that would leave nothing reviewable and would be a way of avoiding scrutiny rather than accepting it. Where a product merely does a similar job to something we sell, we review it normally and say in its provenance block that we sell something comparable.

3. If a product competes with something we make, or is licensed to us, the review says so in the same block that says how we got it — not here, and not at the bottom.

4. Nothing on this site is derived from taking someone’s software apart. No measurement, no claim, no listing. Everything measured here was measured by playing audio through the product like any other user.

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