$99 ($69 introductory price until 1st September), soundtheory.com

Soundtheory’s Gullfoss plugin was released in 2018 and has become a staple in many studios, thanks to how it dynamically balances and unmasks audio with ease. Although we’ve seen similar plugins from other developers (most notably Soothe), it was extremely innovative at the time of release.

• READ MORE: Review: Oeksound Soothe2

Six years later, Soundtheory is finally releasing its second plugin. Kraftur is a multiband saturator and clipper, but is it as groundbreaking as Gullfoss?

What does Kraftur do?

Kraftur makes your audio sound fuller and louder, letting you tame transient peaks while retaining dynamic punch. Its natural home is across the mix bus to subtly boost and enhance your masters, but it can also be used when mixing individual instruments to add presence or thickness.

Kraftur works through a combination of single- and multi-band saturation, which you can seamlessly blend with the dry signal via a unique wet/dry triangle on the user interface. There’s also a separate soft clipper to further shape wayward peaks.

Kraftur’s user interface is immediately striking. Its pleasing balance of muted greys and colourful visual feedback is complemented by orange, cyan, and yellow elements for its three bands. A high dynamic range (HDR) can be enabled to make the graphics pop, and a motion blur on the triangular blend control gives us some 80s VHS nostalgia. It’s just a shame that the plugin window is a little large and currently isn’t resizable.

How do you use Kraftur?

Think of Kraftur as two parallel saturation modules (single- and multi-band) followed by a clipper.

The saturation modules share a main Drive control that pushes into both processors, plus Knee and Offset controls to adjust the transfer curve and target just the peaks, or the quieter parts and the whole body of the sound. The multi-band saturator then adds further controls to adjust crossover frequencies, solo each of the three bands, and also independently change the thresholds (labelled as Low, Mid and High Shift).

Single-band saturation might be useful when you want to add a touch of aggression, where low-end peaks lead to harmonic distortion across the whole spectrum. This helps glue a track together as it feels like the whole mix is responding as one.

However, if you want to reduce the intermodulation distortion effect, then you can get cleaner results by using multi-band and having the low-end just distort itself. The Shift sliders can help further, set to drive the low-end less than the mids and tops, if that’s what you’re going for. Or you can use the triangular blend control to mix both styles alongside the dry signal for the best of both worlds.

A tasty-sounding clipper sits at the end of the chain. And we mean the end. The dry signal component from the triangle blend will be clipped, and even the final Gain control is placed pre-clipper. Although this affords an extra control to drive the clipper harder, it would have been more useful to have a final output knob or slider to be used for global volume matching. Thankfully, a Match button is effective for re-balancing the output in real time as you change other parameters. This make it easier to gauge just how much you’re crushing your audio.

How to read Kraftur’s visual feedback

Kraftur’s visual feedback is especially helpful when tweaking settings.

There are input and output meters for the single-band and three multi-band signals, plus a visually brighter section for when you drive the signal harder. These are combined with the large main window that features a transfer curve and input and output histograms.

It’s an unusual way of presenting the information, but once you wrap your head around it, you can quickly refine the threshold and knee settings to hit just the peaks of the signal. Unfortunately though, the lack of gain reduction metering for the clipper makes it tricky to judge how hard you’re chopping into the peaks.

How does Kraftur perform?

We put Kraftur to the test on a range of audio, including full mixes and individual instrument parts.

Coming up with compelling-sounding results is a breeze, and can easily be blended to taste. Drum transients are tamed, the body of sounds is thickened, and you can do some serious peak reduction without drastically changing the audio.

We test it alongside a few similar tools, and find the distortion has a slightly more ‘grabby’, faintly gated sound that wraps around hits to bolster the transients but without over-thickening the tails. This all results in a subtly tighter sound than the competitors.

The clipper is clean up to a point, but then it saturates slightly sooner with bass-heavy material, albeit with a pleasing, analogue-like behaviour. Even when set to full, there’s still a touch of softness to the knee curve, so the option for a completely hard knee might have been useful, alongside separate knee settings for each band.

Oversampling is on by default with no option to switch it off, yet somehow the plugin runs with zero latency, which is seriously impressive.

Kraftur uses mixed-phase filters that exhibit a mostly linear phase response, but it means you can’t use Kraftur for parallel processing on a bus without getting a phasey sound. CPU usage is moderate, so (depending on your system) you wouldn’t want to use lots of instances, but you could get away with a few.

Do you really need another clipper?

On the surface, Kraftur looks fairly versatile, with its two saturators and clipper in a single plugin. However, when you compare it with FabFilter’s Saturn 2 (also a multi-band saturator, but with 28 distortion styles), or Kazrog’s KClip3, then you realise that Kraftur is a little more limited in terms of harmonic variation.

Thankfully, at $99 it’s priced competitively for a mastering-grade plugin (especially if you make use of the $69 introductory price), and it performs well at transparent volume thickening.

Early users have noted Soundtheory’s relatively unusual licence and transfer policies, where the licence is valid only for 25 years, rather than perpetual ownership. Countering this, the brand says its policies aid in ensuring longevity of its plugins, without asking users to pay for updates. As an example, says a representative on Gearspace, Gullfoss is currently at version 1.11.5, despite the brand releasing updates that “could have easily rebadged as Gullfoss 2”. For most users, the licensing and transfer arrangements won’t be an issue.

Do you need Kratfur? Well, there are plenty of decent clippers and saturators already out there, so you may already have one or two that you’re happy with. However, if you’re mixing or mastering genres that benefit from being pushed a little louder, then it’s always useful to have multiple options, as certain tools will work better with particular flavours of music than others.

When it suits the source material, Kraftur is an excellent plugin that helps you to get cleaner and louder tracks, so we’d happily add it as an option in our tool kit.

Key features

• 3-band multi-band saturator and clipper plugin
• VST, VST3, AU, AAX Native (requires iLok account)
• Add clarity, punch or warmth to any material
• Blend between single-band, multi-band and dry signals
• Separate threshold controls for each band
• Reduced aliasing and intermodulation distortion due to unique oversampling method
• Flexible control of the distortion curve
• Match mode for auto volume compensation
• VisionTone colour rendering pipeline based on human perception

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