Disclosure
Affiliate links
Some links here earn us a commission if you buy through them. They’re marked,
and they carry rel="sponsored" so search engines know what they are.
The commission doesn’t change with the verdict, nobody here sees a per-product rate before writing, and a link only gets added to a review after the verdict is written. If you’d rather not use them, every product is named plainly enough to find on your own.
Free and loaned products
Every review says how we got the product, next to the verdict rather than at the bottom of the page. If a developer gave us a licence, that sentence says so.
We do it there because of where the FTC says it has to be: “very close to, or — even better — part of, the endorsement”. A disclosure that only lives on a page like this one isn’t enough. So this page is the backstop, not the disclosure.
A free licence buys a review. It doesn’t buy a good one, and it doesn’t buy sight of the review before it goes up.
Sponsored content
We don’t sell reviews and we won’t. A review somebody paid for is an advertisement, and an advertisement dressed as a review costs you your reason to trust any other page on the site.
Bench time can be bought: a maker can pay us to run a product through the same measurements everything else gets. The results publish unedited, without approval, including when they’re bad. Anything produced that way is labelled at the top.
Our own conflicts
This site is run by Voximus Audio, which sells plugins as Vox Samples. We compete commercially with most of the products reviewed here. That isn’t a footnote. It’s the most important thing to know about this site, and it’s why the four rules below are absolute rather than aspirational.
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We never review or score our own products. A Vox Samples plugin gets named where naming it actually helps you — a roundup it genuinely belongs in, or a comparison you’d otherwise have to make yourself — and the sentence that names it says we make it. Not a footer. It never gets a rating, a rank, a verdict box, or a row in a scored table.
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We don’t review a product we’ve made a direct reimplementation of. Some of our plugins are deliberate recreations of specific units. Where the product in question is the unit one of ours recreates, we don’t review it, because we can’t be a fair judge of something we copied.
The rule is narrow on purpose, and it’s worth being precise about what it doesn’t cover, because the wide version would swallow the site. It is not “anything we compete with”. We sell across most of this category, so that version would leave nothing reviewable — which would be a way of dodging scrutiny rather than accepting it. Where a product merely does a similar job to something of ours, we review it normally and say so in the same block that says how we got it.
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If a product competes with something we make, or is licensed to us, the review says so where it says how we got it — not here, and not at the bottom.
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Nothing here comes from taking someone’s software apart. No measurement, no claim, no table row. Everything we publish was measured by playing audio through the product, the same way you would.
Analytics
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