From the H3000 to a New Jersey start-up.

Soundtoys’ story starts at Eventide, the New Jersey effects maker. In the mid-1980s, the company’s own history says, three new Eventide employees — Ken Bogdanowicz, Bob Belcher and Dave Derr — designed the H3000 Ultra-Harmonizer, the rack effects unit that became a studio fixture. SonicScoop, in a 2016 article on the men, called Bogdanowicz and Derr, with Belcher as software engineer, “the key players on the team” behind the H3000, and credited Bogdanowicz with diatonic pitch shifting; Soundtoys says he was the unit’s effects-algorithm and preset designer. The team went on to the DSP4000, which Soundtoys describes as the first modular effects processor.

While still at Eventide, in 1992, Bogdanowicz set up a side business, Crescent Engineering, with the blessing of Eventide’s Richard Factor, SonicScoop says. Its product, Mod Factory, was a chip upgrade for the H3000 — made “when the word ‘plug-in’ meant that you actually had to plug something in,” as the company’s 2003 history put it — and Eventide later licensed it for the H3500. Leaving Eventide took him two years, and Belcher came with him.

His next company was Wave Mechanics, founded in Montclair, New Jersey, in the mid-1990s. Its company history dates the founding to the years 1995 to 1997; a copy of its website archived in January 1997 carries a 1995 copyright; and Soundtoys, Derr’s Empirical Labs and Wave Distribution — set up by Eventide’s former sales manager Gil Griffith to sell Wave Mechanics products — marked their twentieth anniversaries together in 2016, with a joint party at United Recording in Hollywood on 1 October, SonicScoop reported.

From Ultra Tools to SoundToys.

Wave Mechanics was early to plug-ins. Its 1997 website described algorithms for hardware effects units and broadcast consoles and promised plug-ins “soon.” Its first, PurePitch, was the first formant-preserving pitch-shifting plug-in for Pro Tools, the company later said, and its pitch algorithms were licensed to Rocktron and TC Electronic. The Ultra Tools suite — Pure Pitch, Pitch Doctor, Sound Blender and Speed — followed. SonicScoop notes that the pitch-correction tools were “eventually eclipsed by AutoTune, which was released around the same time,” and quotes Bogdanowicz calling Sound Blender “the closest thing to the H3000 in the plug-in world at the time.” Some time between 1997 and 2002 the company moved to Burlington, Vermont.

In 2003 Wave Mechanics launched a new line of Pro Tools plug-ins called SoundToys, its history says. The name soon took over the company: after a few SoundToys releases, Bogdanowicz changed the company name “for the purposes of avoiding confusion with the Waves plug-in company,” SonicScoop reported. By 2004 the website’s title read “SoundToys is formerly Wave Mechanics,” though a footer still called SoundToys a division of Wave Mechanics, Inc.; the capital T has since gone, and the brand is now written Soundtoys.

The catalogue is built on old hardware. The company said in 2014 that its collection of “toys” ran from studio classics such as the 1176, LA-2 and Ampex ATR-102 to pedals and echo units, and that it wanted “to make digital feel and sound truly organic and warm.” EchoBoy offers 30 echo styles modelled on vintage units, among them the EchoPlex, Space Echo and Memory Man, the company says; Decapitator has five analogue saturation models and a “Punish” button; Radiator, launched in 2012, is based on the Altec 1567A tube mixer of the 1960s. The effects are sold singly, in the Soundtoys 5 bundle and within Effect Rack.

Plug-ins and their makers.

The modern studio runs on software: the digital audio workstation, or DAW, in which music is recorded and arranged, and the plug-ins that load inside it to equalise, compress, tune and colour sound. The seven companies in this guide make one or both.

Waves Audio was founded in Tel Aviv in 1992, and English Wikipedia credits its Q10 equaliser as the first commercially available audio plug-in; Waves received a Technical Grammy in 2011, and Celemony, the Munich maker of Melodyne, in 2012. FabFilter, founded in 2002, is based in Amsterdam. Ableton, maker of the Live DAW, was founded in 1999, is based in Berlin and says it is still run by its founders.

Soundtoys, which began in the mid-1990s as Wave Mechanics, a company started by former Eventide designers in New Jersey, gives its address as Burlington, Vermont. Slate Digital, which Audiotonix described as based in Los Angeles and Grenoble, was bought by that company in October 2022; Audiotonix is the British group that also owns Solid State Logic.

Ownership has moved fastest at iZotope, of Cambridge, Massachusetts. It joined Native Instruments in a group backed by Francisco Partners in 2021; after Native Instruments entered preliminary insolvency and was sold to inMusic in 2026, iZotope was acquired in July 2026 by the visual-effects software company Boris FX, MusicTech reported.

Because these products are code, “where it is made” means where the developers work: English Wikipedia lists Waves development centres in India and Ukraine, and Celemony says its staff work across Germany and beyond.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it, and what it says about where its products are made — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Still led by its founder.

Soundtoys is still in Burlington. Its jobs page says all positions are at its downtown headquarters, “a former art gallery and glass-blowing facility” within walking distance of Lake Champlain, and Bogdanowicz signed a November 2025 announcement as “CEO & Founder.” In the sources we checked we found no record of a sale or an outside owner. Belcher, the H3000 software engineer, was still described as a Soundtoys engineer in 2016, and in that year Bogdanowicz told SonicScoop that the company had inherited from Eventide “a legacy of creativity and playfulness.” Asked then whether Soundtoys might ever make hardware, he said a hybrid product would make most sense: “I wouldn’t rule it out.”

Development continues. Soundtoys added VST3 support across its range in 2022, released the SuperPlate plate reverb, with models of the EMT 140 and EMT 240, in 2023, the “experimental reverb” SpaceBlender in April 2025 and resizable interfaces for its plug-ins in July 2025. It has also tied products to charity: it says all Radiator purchases go to humanitarian and environmental organisations, that users raised $61,000 for Médecins Sans Frontières that way, and that it raised $176,000 for the disaster-relief group Team Rubicon in 2017.

For a design guide, Soundtoys shows how a playful name and vintage-gear references can carry a software brand for more than two decades. Compare Universal Audio, which also models classic studio hardware, and Arturia, which emulates vintage synthesizers. For this guide we use tube rust, cream and amber with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Soundtoys’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.