The bible.

The Premise

Orrery is a present-day audio-software house with an unusual charter: it does not design new instruments. It recovers old ones.

Over the last decade, Orrery has acquired the liquidated intellectual property, engineering archives, and surviving hardware of four defunct manufacturers — a Finnish telecom firm, an American instruments company, a Japanese consumer-electronics brand, and a British studio-rack maker. Each made something singular in its era. Each is gone. Orrery restores their gear to running condition as software plugins, modeled from specific surviving units, and issues them under one roof.

The four brands look nothing alike, because they were never meant to sit together — they were rivals' worlds, frozen in their decade. What unites them is not a house style. It is a house act: the patient work of bringing dead engineering back into motion.

And there is a quiet irony holding the whole catalogue together. Every one of these four companies was killed by the same thing — the shift of audio from hardware into software. Salo's dedicated codec chips were made obsolete by soft-codecs. Tekura's measurement instruments were replaced by analysis running on a PC. Yumeo's physical formats were erased overnight by the MP3. Halvyn's revered racks were undercut by plugins that did the same job for a fraction of the price. Software ended all four.

Orrery brings all four back as software. The medium that erased them is the medium that revives them. That is the whole idea.

The Manifesto

Measured, modeled, returned to service.

Somewhere in the last thirty years, audio left the world of objects and moved into software, and in the crossing, a generation of machines was lost. Not destroyed — worse than destroyed. Forgotten. The companies folded, the engineers scattered, the schematics went into skips, and the knowledge that made these instruments sing went quietly into the ground.

Four of those companies are ours to keep now. A Finnish firm that made the voice of the telephone. An American one that measured what no one could yet hear. A Japanese one that sold the future and was erased by it. A British one that built the best boxes in the room and was undone by the very thing you are reading this on.

Each of them was ended by software. We bring each of them back as software — not to erase the irony, but to honor it.

We restore. We do not improve. When a codec sounds half-swallowed, when a converter grinds, when a reverb rings a little metallic, we leave it exactly so, because that flaw is a fingerprint, and a fingerprint is the point. Every instrument we issue was modeled from a real, surviving unit, named by serial, so that you are never holding a guess. You are holding the thing itself, made to run again.

Recovered, not reinvented. From the archive.

The Four Houses

SALO OY — the voice of the network

Home: Salo, Finland · Founded: 1991 · Ended: c. 2004

Salo made the sound of the early mobile phone. Not the handsets — the voice inside them: the codec subsystems, the comfort-noise generators, the network-test units that carriers used to simulate a call falling apart. When a cellular network needed to know how a dropped call, a weak signal, or a busy cell would sound to a human ear, it tested against Salo hardware. For a few years in the mid-nineties, during the GSM boom, Salo gear sat in every Nordic carrier's test lab, and the company was quietly proud that it had made distance disappear for millions of people who never knew its name.

The end. The thing Salo was best at was the first thing to vanish. As voice moved to software codecs running on general-purpose silicon, the market for dedicated hardware codec and test units simply closed. Salo was folded into a larger telecom concern and wound down around 2004; the voice-DSP group was let go.

How Orrery holds it. Orrery acquired Salo's algorithm sources and a pallet of surviving test units from the concern that had absorbed it. The codecs are modeled bit-for-bit from those units — including the parts that sound broken, because to Salo, "broken" was the assignment.

Aesthetic. The monochrome grey-green LCD era: pixel type, ascending signal bars, a battery glyph, rubberized keys, hard dark plastic in graphite and translucent blue.

Voice. Warm, human, quietly proud — the counterpoint to Tekura's coldness. "Clear voice. Anywhere."

Naming convention. Handset-style four-digit model numbers; the real phone's reputation chooses which effect gets which number.

The catalogue:

• Salo 3310 — Full-Rate GSM Codec (the indestructible workhorse)
• Salo 8210 — TDMA Buzz (the "da-da-da-dun" speaker interference — the flagship)
• Salo 5110 — Frame Erasure / Dropped Call
• Salo 6150 — Adaptive Rate (the "signal bars" degrader)
• Salo 8110 — Comfort Noise (the eerie one)
• Salo 2110 — POTS Telephone (the legacy landline)
• Salo 3210 — Monophonic Ringer
• Salo 3510 — Polyphonic Ringtone
• Salo 5610 — Dial-Up Modem
• Salo 6210 — Vocoder
• Salo 6310 — Speakerphone
• Salo 2170 — Answering Machine

TEKURA — precision, in a beige box

Home: Oregon, USA · Founded: 1979 · Ended: c. 2001

Tekura was the oldest of the four and the least sentimental. It built precision instruments for measuring digital audio's flaws — signal analyzers, quantization and jitter meters, converter test sets. As the industry crossed from analog into digital in the eighties and nineties, everyone suddenly needed to see the new kinds of error: quantization staircases, jitter sidebands, aliasing, the noise floor after dither. Tekura's analyzers became the reference against which studios and broadcasters characterized their converters. If a Tekura scope showed it, it was true.

The end. Measurement went soft. PC-based analysis systems, and later plugins, did what a rack of Tekura instruments did, for a hundredth of the price and a thousandth of the bench space. The dedicated-hardware analyzer business contracted year over year; Tekura's parent sold off the audio-instruments division around 2001, and it ended without ceremony — appropriately, for a company that never had much use for ceremony.

How Orrery holds it. Orrery bought the audio division's remaining reference units and calibration archive at auction. Tekura's plugins are the strangest in the catalogue, because Tekura's instruments were never meant to make music — they were meant to reveal error. Used as effects, they are precision turned inside out.

Aesthetic. Warm putty-beige laboratory panel, a phosphor-green CRT with a graticule grid, chunky detented range switches, a red OVERLOAD lamp, and a "TYPE / SER. No." badge on every face. Every plugin ships with a working scope — it always did.

Voice. Clinical, deadpan, exact — funny precisely because it refuses to be. "Introduces controlled quantization error, for measurement and effect."

Naming convention. Model number plus the function spelled out, in full, without romance.

The catalogue:

• Tekura 4400 — Quantization Analyzer (the flagship; the staircase on the scope)
• Tekura 2200 — Signal Decimator
• Tekura 1601 — Jitter Reference
• Tekura 3100 — Perceptual Codec
• Tekura 1050 — Reconstruction Filter
• Tekura 5150 — DAT Reference
• Tekura 6100 — Spectrum Analyzer
• Tekura 6200 — Correlation Analyzer
• Tekura 4200 — Distortion Analyzer
• Tekura 1200 — Noise Reference
• Tekura 1100 — Response Analyzer

YUMEO — the sound of tomorrow

Home: Japan · Founded: 1985 · Ended: c. 2005

Yumeo sold the dream of digital — the name itself comes from yume, dream. It made the consumer digital gear a person saved up for: CD players, DAT decks, and above all the MiniDisc recorders of the ATRAC era. Not the top of the market and not the bottom — the aspirational middle, the brushed-chrome deck with the glowing cyan display that a student bought with a summer's wages and felt, for a moment, like they were holding the future. Yumeo's advertising promised perfection, endlessly, in exclamation points.

The end. The future arrived and deleted them. The MP3 and the hard-disk player made physical formats obsolete almost overnight; the format Yumeo had bet everything on became a curiosity in the space of two or three years. There was no slow decline — there was a cliff. The consumer division dissolved around 2005, still promising tomorrow right up to the last catalogue.

How Orrery holds it. Orrery acquired the format-processing IP and a shelf of pristine, barely-used decks — the poignant part being how many surviving Yumeo units are in mint condition, because they were obsolete before they were worn out. The plugins recover the specific character of each dead format: the transient-smearing of ATRAC, the swirl of low-bitrate coding, the digital-silence stutter of a skipping disc.

Aesthetic. Brushed silver and chrome with a glossy gradient, a bright cyan vacuum-fluorescent display, a MiniDisc slot, a jog/shuttle wheel, transport keys, and magenta-and-cyan "digital" accents.

Voice. Overpromising, optimistic, gloriously nineties ad-copy. "Pristine digital clarity — the sound of tomorrow."

Naming convention. Evocative consumer feature-names dressed in short model codes.

The catalogue:

• Yumeo MD-1 — MiniDisc / ATRAC (the flagship)
• Yumeo DAT-7 — DAT Deck
• Yumeo CD-9 — CD Skip / Error Concealment
• Yumeo MP-3 — Perceptual Coder
• Yumeo RV-1 — PureDigital Reverb
• Yumeo HF-1 — Sampler Filter
• Yumeo KM-1 — Karaoke Machine
• Yumeo GX-1 — PC Sound Card
• Yumeo GC-16 — Game Console
• Yumeo PT-1 — Home Computer (Tracker)

HALVYN — no compromise

Home: United Kingdom · Founded: 1983 · Ended: c. 2008

Halvyn built the expensive boxes — the studio rackmount processors that lived in world-class control rooms and cost as much as a car. Reverbs, delays, pitch and time. A Halvyn reverb was on records you know; engineers guarded their favorite programs like recipes. The company was British in the AMS/Neve/SSL lineage — obsessive, proud, convinced that its own DSP was simply better, and usually right. Its manuals read like engineering papers. Its faceplates glowed amber.

The end. Halvyn was killed by the thing it was too proud to become. When the great hardware reverbs reappeared as plugins for a couple hundred dollars, the boutique-rack business collapsed underneath the entire industry. Halvyn held on longer than most — partly on reputation, partly on stubbornness — but it wound down around 2008. Its engineers had spent twenty years perfecting instruments that software finally made unaffordable to keep making.

How Orrery holds it. This is where Orrery began. It was a failed Halvyn R-8000 that Iver Sandholm rebuilt in 2011, and it was Halvyn's disappearance that convinced him the whole generation was worth saving. Orrery holds Halvyn's design files and reference units, and there is an evident tenderness in how the house treats them. Halvyn died to the plugin; Orrery reissues Halvyn as a plugin. No one at Orrery pretends that isn't the whole poem.

Aesthetic. A charcoal 2U rack with rack ears and mounting screws, an amber LED alphanumeric display showing the program name, a large DATA wheel, and rows of soft-touch buttons.

Voice. Terse, spec-sheet, quietly reverent about its own engineering. "16-bit processing. 44.1 kHz. True stereo. No compromise."

Naming convention. Class-letter plus model number.

The catalogue:

• Halvyn R-8000 — Digital Reverb (where the archive began; catalogued OR-0001)
• Halvyn D-4000 — Digital Delay
• Halvyn P-3000 — Pitch Shifter
• Halvyn T-2000 — Time Compressor
• Halvyn A-1200 — Auto Retune
• Halvyn G-6000 — Gate Reverb
• Halvyn R-9000 — Digital Reverb (the top-of-range flagship)
• Halvyn C-5000 — Chorus / Ensemble
• Halvyn E-7000 — Digital EQ
• Halvyn X-2500 — Exciter
• Halvyn H-3200 — Harmonizer

Continuity Notes

1. Orrery only restores. Any new plugin requires an original unit to exist in the fiction first — with a maker, a model number, a year of manufacture, and a serial. Invent the machine, then restore it. The archive may expand; it may not fabricate.
2. One catalogue, chronological. Orrery catalogue numbers (OR-####) are assigned in order of restoration; because the archives were worked through one house at a time, they fall into contiguous blocks by house, in acquisition order. They never reset per brand. OR-0001 is fixed: the Halvyn R-8000.
3. Every product names its source. No release ships without a provenance line and a serial. The serial is the promise that a real unit was measured.
4. Keep the voices separate. Orrery = present-tense conservator, dry and exact. The four houses = their own period voices (Salo warm, Tekura clinical, Yumeo overpromising, Halvyn terse). Orrery frames; the houses speak. Never let Orrery's calm bleed into a brand, or a brand's era bleed into Orrery.
5. Never improve the flaw. The artifacts — the codec warble, the quantization grit, the format swirl, the metallic tail — are the product. Restoration preserves them; it does not sand them down.
6. The four are rivals, not a family. They should not visually harmonize. Their only common ground is that Orrery keeps them all and that software both killed and revived them.
7. The dates hold. Tekura 1979–2001 · Halvyn 1983–2008 · Yumeo 1985–2005 · Salo 1991–2004 · Orrery founded 2020, Copenhagen. Keep new lore inside these bounds.