Audio Ease has announced Speakerphone, a speaker simulator plug-in, powered by Altiverb, with a host of environments to put them in.

A bad GSM connection on a busy sidewalk, a bullhorn with feedback and a helicopter overhead, or a 1952 rockabilly guitar amp in a recording studio live room: Speakerphone gives you authentic speakers of any size together with their natural environments. All the walkie-talkies, distant transistor radios, upstairs TV sets, bullhorns and cell phones you'll ever need. Speakerphone will add dial tones, operators and static, and you can select from a wealth of ambiences on either the caller or receiver's end.

Operation is extremely quick: you just call up one of the hundreds of carefully crafted and archived presets. If you're a tweaker just click 'show controls' and the whole dashboard slides out, at your disposal, with the most minute detail.

Speakerphone combines a wealth of effects including a convolution engine that uses actual samples of hundreds of original speakers, a radio receiver tuning dial, record player scratch and static generator, GSM cell phone data compression, distortion, tremolo, delay, a variety of EQ and dynamics, bit crushing, sample rate reduction, a full blown convolution reverb, and a library of samples to combine into entire environments.

You want to have the artist rap through a cell phone? Rather than pull up an eq and distortion, why not make him rap through one of Speakerphone's actual GSM connections? Perhaps surrounded by the acoustics and sounds of an idling car at a gas station? And then there's the host of classic guitar amps, complete with tailor made distortion, spring reverbs, and everything else to build guitar tone like you've never heard from a plug-in.

Speakerphone will initially be available for Mac OS X in VST, AU, RTAS, MAS and AudioSuite formats, with a Windows VST/RTAS version likely to follow very soon afterwards (if not at the same time). Pricing and release date have not yet been announced.