Is Gullfoss any good?

[Ah_Dziz]

Very handy at mild settings. I've been using it to kill the odd resonant frequency spike when mixing together stuff from various sources. It's also great at fixing up recordings made in "less than ideal" rooms. It can get rid of some of the "boxiness" that happens in small rooms.

[Ploki]

Absolutely true @plexxus. That’s where Melda falls short

[foosnark]

For my purposes, I found there were cases where I liked Gullfoss and TEOTE about the same, cases where I liked TEOTE a bit more, but surprisingly none where I preferred Gullfoss' results.

I also find TEOTE a little easier to tame. Gullfoss always seems to make to want things brighter than I like, and I felt like I was getting better results putting a high shelf EQ after it than trying to adjust its settings. TEOTE generally seems to be easy to keep in check with the Boost Threshold.

[NinjaToon]

Nobody can deny that gullfoss is good. You can get great results from it very quickly. They seem to have done really well with it sales wise and they update regularly so I was confident in picking it up a year or two ago. Happy with it.

It suffers from the same thing all expensive plugins suffer from; somebody bought something else and when they demoed X they they got better results from their copy of Y and now they can't wait to tell you about it.

Gullfoss does the thing it does well enough for me that I haven't even really bothered to check out it's competitors. Can't give it higher praise than that really.

[MogwaiBoy]

If I remember correctly Teote uses white noise as a reference,

The default target is -4.5dB/oct slope... so essentially in between pink (-3dB/oct) and brown (-6dB/oct) noise. This is the relative profile of "modern music", but I might be wrong. Pro-Q references this -4.5dB/oct too.

I don't know if Gulfoss follows suit.

[plexuss]

If you read the Sound Theory site (the last time I looked) there was elucidation towards the sound of the waterfall Gullfoss being used, at least, as the inspiration behind Gullfoss. Did they use an sample of the waterfall as the reference???

[sengoku]

If you read the Sound Theory site (the last time I looked) there was elucidation towards the sound of the waterfall Gullfoss being used, at least, as the inspiration behind Gullfoss. Did they use an sample of the waterfall as the reference???

according to https://www.soundtheory.com/about : "Why do waterfalls sound so pleasing? To answer, one could argue that a waterfall generates close to pink noise."

[plexuss]

If you read the Sound Theory site (the last time I looked) there was elucidation towards the sound of the waterfall Gullfoss being used, at least, as the inspiration behind Gullfoss. Did they use an sample of the waterfall as the reference???

according to https://www.soundtheory.com/about : "Why do waterfalls sound so pleasing? To answer, one could argue that a waterfall generates close to pink noise."

Well, I am just going to imagine they created a "virtual waterfall" emulation of Gullfoss for use in the DSP engine of the Gullfoss plugin, if only to satisfy my irrational need for romance.

[Synth Master Jedi]

I have Gullfoss and I like it, however at the end of the day, I think that the ears of the person using the plugin is important because it's easy to go overboard if one is not paying attention or listening critically to what they are doing.

I feel that if I have to use high settings in Gullfoss then something is fundamentally wrong with my source material to begin with. I'm mostly referring to applying Gullfoss to an entire mix, not individual tracks.

Sometimes I can use just a dash or sprinkling of Gullfoss on my mix and I find that sounds good to my ears at least and that also tells me that my mix was pretty well balanced and good to begin with.

[Fleer]

Gullfoss accompanies my go-to FabFilter EQ perfectly. Both are the only modern ones I need. Didn’t gel with Soothe at all.

[Ploki]

Gullfoss accompanies my go-to FabFilter EQ perfectly. Both are the only modern ones I need. Didn’t gel with Soothe at all.

Soothe is a problemsolver not a goto eq. You’re not supposed to use it on everything.

As i said, it’s “tame” on steroids with a lot more control.

Frankly i’d be wary of using any fft tool as a go to everywhere but that’s just me

[atell]

Gullfoss is a FFT based EQ, it's technically "a lot of bands" (probably 256-2048, more you get time-domain smearing) but not really because it's a different process than having split bands.
It's either linear phase, or the phase changes with the amount of processing, like with dynamic EQs.

That's not accurate. Gullfoss does not use FFTs for modifying the signal. It employs a proprietary serial filter bank that has unique properties when it comes to avoiding artefacts, preserving temporal coherence, allowing for ultra-fast reactions and highly accurate control over amplitude and phase. In fact, this part of Gullfoss is partially covered by a Soundtheory patent.

Your assertions about FFT processing introducing time-domain smearing also only apply to the most naïve use of spectral filtering, i.e. modifying the short-time Fourier spectrum and directly resynthesizing it with an inverse FFT and producing temporal aliasing this way. A properly implemented FFT based convolution algorithm produces the exact same result as a time-domain convolution, only faster.

TEOTE is a "fixed filter bank" - it's made of actual crossovers (3-64), not linear phase, so it has a bit of phase distortion - but its CONSTANT and its the same no matter the amount of processing. if you like how it sounds when it does NOTHING, it won't f**k phase when it does something.

That's not correct. Splitting a signal into parallel bands that are then individually amplified and summed together does not in general result in a static phase response, even if the filter bands do have a static response. Consider any frequency between two bands where both band responses contribute with roughly the same amplitude but different phases. The total response at this frequency is, therefore, the scaled sum of two complex numbers with different phases, as in a_low(t) * h_low(f) + a_high(t) * h_high(f) where a_low, a_high are the band amplifications at time t and h_low and h_high are the band responses at the frequency f. You'll notice that the argument of this sum arg(a_low(t) * h_low(f) + a_high(t) * h_high(f)) depends on a_low and a_high in general, and hence on the time t.

As a consequence, your parallel filter bank not only introduces phase error in between the bands upon reconstruction, it also has a time-varying phase response wherever the bands overlap and such a time dependence introduces uncontrolled and time-depending temporal signal dispersion at the cost of temporal coherence.

Gullfoss on the other hand will change phase response as its processing, wreaking havoc to phase and transients. Unless you use linear phase, which has pre-ringing.

It's correct that Gullfoss uses a non-constant phase response, but your conclusion is incorrect. Gullfoss' phase response is well controlled to the effect of improving temporal coherence on average. It also avoids pre- and post- ringing by understanding how exactly a signal can be modified while not changing the grouping of auditory elements, which means you don't get sounds that were not there before, preventing any ringing or other artefacts from being introduced.

If you had an issue with transients when using Gullfoss, it may be that you were observing a bug that got fixed a while ago that had some impact on signal integrity. We've also introduced Gullfoss Live, which does not process transients at all, if that is what you are looking for. But in general, if used correctly, Gullfoss does not damage signal transients.

Thanks,

Andreas

[atell]

Have the Gullfoss developers ever described somewhere how they generate their reference curve?
(...)
The description for Gullfoss is a bit unclear, as if this is a very special audio model (of course it could be just marketing and they use something rather simple internally).
However, Gullfoss requires little CPU compared to Teote at the maximum number of bands. That's why I wouldn't have expected that Gullfoss uses many more bands.

Gullfoss does not use a fixed target curve or anything like that. The processing decisions it makes are entirely context-dependent and are trying to maximise the audible information in the signal. That means that Gullfoss tries to prevent individual signal components from masking each other. The rebalancing effect emerges from this approach and it is not guided towards some kind of optimal global frequency distribution. That's why the Brighten control is very important. It gives Gullfoss a hint regarding the desired power distribution in the signal. Local avoidance of masking does not fully determine the signal distribution. If you have two separate tones, then there is a wide range of amplitudes for the two tones for which they are not masking each other. You can make the higher frequency tone louder than the lower frequency one, or the other way around, and still hear both. The Brighten parameter gives you control over precisely this degree of freedom without imposing a general slope for the frequency distribution. So the result depends on what is already present in the signal, as it should be. Gullfoss is not a dynamic matching EQ, unlike most of the competing plugins.

You can verify this by applying a gentle EQ curve to your signal before it hits Gullfoss. If your EQ modification does not affect the masking, Gullfoss won't try to compensate for it.

Thanks,

Andreas

[atell]

according to https://www.soundtheory.com/about : "Why do waterfalls sound so pleasing? To answer, one could argue that a waterfall generates close to pink noise."

This quote requires some context. It's true that the question why waterfalls sound so pleasing inspired the research that resulted in Gullfoss. But along the way, the understanding we gained went beyond the simple observation that pink noise sounds pleasant. We actually tried to understand why this is the case and arrived at more general principles. So Gullfoss does not have an internal pink noise reference.

Thanks,

Andreas

[atell]

For anyone interested in buying Gullfoss, we do have a very generous refund policy. If you still do not want to take any risks, the free trial is good for 14 days and can be extended upon request. If you have trouble using Gullfoss, we also offer personal guidance and help you with your specific program material to get the best result possible. Also, note that you do not have to own an iLok dongle. We fully support cloud-based and local software activations.

Thanks,

Andreas