Review: Kraftur from Soundtheory

Soundtheory has to be one of the most reputed plugin developers with only one plugin to their name – Gulfoss. But this one plugin does something nothing else out there does, and it is the true essence of a ‘just-make-things-sound-better’ box.

Gulfoss was sort of a dynamic EQ plugin that that balances your mix adaptively. While that does sound fairly easy to understand, they now have a plugin that operates in the dark arts realm of loudness extraction. Soundtheory Kraftur aims to be your one-stop shop for louder, better, punchier, fuller mixes.

Does it deliver or is it simply another saturation box that warms your mix a bit?

Kraftur has been carefully engineered to enrich your mix, allowing you to increase power while preserving the original integrity of its dynamics. Using new, proprietary DSP methods, Kraftur relies on innovative algorithms to avoid artifacts that come with more traditional approaches to soft clipping. Kraftur can also add clarity, punch or pleasant warmth to almost any audio material

Audiopunk 2077 

There is something very cyberpunk about the design of this plugin. It looks like the cockpit display on some futuristic spacefighter. However, I must say it seems a bit intimidating with all the histograms and flowing displays. At first glance, there is very little to tell you what this plugin does apart from the Drive slider which is self-explanatory. 

There are five major sections to this plugin. There is the huge triangular ‘Mix control’ that moves between the Dry signal, Single band processing and Multi-band processing. Below this, we have the Drive control slider and the Offset and Knee controls. These allow you to set the transfer curves for the processing. The last of this block of controls is the Low shift, Mid shift and High shift controls. These allow you to bias certain frequency ranges for more or less processing. 

The crossover points for the shift control are set by the controls above the histogram display in the middle. This graph is the most intimidating and interesting part of this plugin. 

Firstly, it moves quite a bit. It is constantly changing, morphing, and moving to the music that is going through it. So the bottom axis of the histogram shows you peak levels and they are colour-coded by the bands and the white is the combined value. The vertical axis represents the statistical density (how often a peak of that amplitude has been momentarily observed). The colour coding continues into the input and output meters as well. The last of the controls curiously hides one of the most valuable functions of this plugin – the clipper. There is a small button at the bottom right corner to engage it and a top-down slider to set the level at which you want clipping to happen. There is also a nice match button to help you judge better. 

The Dark Wizards of Distortion

Kraftur seems to use a mix of wave shaping, saturation, and possibly some EQ (?) to make your material much louder, fuller and punchier. It adds buckets of tasteful harmonics. The simplest way to describe this plugin is as an intelligent harmonics-adding machine with a clipper at the end.

Let’s get to how it works. You throw this on your mixbus and then add a bit of drive. The histogram starts lighting up like sporadic fireworks that increase in volume as you push the drive more and more. You can hear the ‘thickening’ of your mix. Once you’ve added some drive it’s time to play around with the triangle. Push it around between the three modes to get a healthy mix of single-band processing, multi-band processing and the dry signal. You can choose to either spare or further push your processing onto whichever bands you select via the shift controls.

The offset and knee controls allow you to adjust how the distortion spreads across the frequency range. It can be a gentle spread or you can choose to concentrate the saturation around certain areas by moving the curves. The visual feedback from the single and multi curves moving across the screen is also quite cool. Once you have gotten your drive dialled in to all the places in your mixes you want it to go to, you can pull the slider down on the clipper to just give your mix a gentle haircut and squeeze just a bit more loudness out of it.

Personal Thoughts

There is only one word to describe how this plugin works and what it does: witchcraft. I am pretty sure they got a bunch of people to trap a few spells within lines of code to achieve what this thing does. There is a real sense of wonder every time I use this plugin because the ease at which it achieves the amount of loudness whilst still retaining the transients and integrity of the mix is absolutely nuts! 

The ability to mix between single-band distortion and multi-band does remind me of one of the plugins from Acustica Audio – Ocean. But this one makes the experience much more fun and easy. They have gone all out with the UI to force you to use your ears as much as possible. With all the visual feedback this plugin gives, none of it is familiar so it forces you to calibrate to it rather than you calibrating the plugin to you. I did find myself to be resentful of this fact at the beginning of using this plugin as I do have a slight dislike of too many graphs. However, you slowly adapt and learn.

The match feature is really what is keeping people from completely destroying their mixes in the pursuit of loudness. On the flip side, it is almost always a surprise to see just how much perceived loudness you have gotten when you turn match off. The one personal thing I would have liked is the ability to see how much gain reduction the clipper is doing. I do understand why it isn’t there as well (USE YOUR EARS!) – but I think I need a little more time to come to terms with not knowing the numbers. 

Find out more about Kraftur from Soundtheory