Product Reviews by KVR Members

Plugin of the week is Kraftur by Soundtheoryltd (Makers of Gullfoss).
Kraftur is offering soft clip saturation over 3 bands, it uses new algorithms under the hood enabling efficient oversampling as well as precise automatic gain matching while staying latency free!
Also comes with a clever interface for representing peak decibel values using input & output loudness histograms!
Afaik this is new to the plugin world.
Same counts for the red triangle in the top left allowing for a mix between the dry signal, the signal processed by the multiband audio path and the signal processed by another single band soft clipping curve.
There are 2 controls to shape the curve, offset & knee, which you can use after adjusting the drive level for each one to shape the exact onset where the saturation hits the individual frequency bands.
The amount of saturation and peak control next to the unique histograms is represented by visually saturated colors in the bottom horizontal input meter.
No numbers yet, which is a feature request of mine and other users so far.
Same goes for optional linear phase crossovers for the bands, not available yet.
The developer for now refers to a non standard filter design for the crossovers.
But loaded into Plugin Doctor, I see the usual IIR type of full phase rotation on the crossover points.
Personally I would love to see the option for FIR filtering, making Kraftur usable on sources where shifting phase positions would be unaccetable.
Which seems to be another topic of conflict next to oversampling police where imho the "conflict" results in ignoring the context and nature of the processed signal.
Yes FIR filtering would introduce pre ringing, but in psytrance you dont randomly shift the phase of your snare for example which is precisely married to the kick, or vice versa.
On this I really dont know if I am the ignorant, questioning the developers decision there - or the developer is the ignorant, ignoring the existance of music where you really really cant just introduce random crossovers ruining all the presicely crafted waveforms and their interaction.
Lets see what the future of Kraftur will be <3
Also feel free to disuss and correct me.

Plugin of the week is the Clariphonic EQ from Kush Audio.
Kush Audio is kind of unique in the plugin world since there are hardware versions as well as modelled software versions of each unit available from the same developer.
Clariphonic is a parallel EQ, it applies 2 interacting curves, "Clarity" is a high shelf reaching up to 38k. You may have heard of the air band from Maag, similiar approach.
It comes down very soft into the audible range, and clarity really is the word here.
Focus is a wide bell that sits underneath the Clarity high shelf, you get a few different shapes here to choose from but its all tailored for this specific job of clearing a mix up, lifting the curtain, choose analogy XY.
Sorry to sound cheesy or salesmanish here with Clariphonic, but I made comparison tests, did some analysis in plugin doctor and ended up that I cant tell cant find out why this EQ sounds like it does. Sorry but its magical. Or maybe, magical until the technical explanation is found here. I couldnt find any to why it is like it is.
This EQ can brighten up material, make it more clear without ever becoming harsh or producing useless numbers and artifacts.
Adjust the same high shelf shape with any digital EQ like this, it wont sound the same and I cant tell you why :D I dont know what the dimension is inwith the difference lies here. Only technical difference I know is that this is a parallel EQ, as it says on the front as well.
I mean, you can dial the gain on the max here and it sill sounds good and usable.
Like if it would do some intelligent thing here, but the process is absolute static and not program dependant.
Maybe someone can bring more light in the situation with more knowledge!
But for now this just lives in my mastering chain forever.
Currently I am on his subscription checking out all the other Kush stuff if I find something more that I like, since theese plugins are just a bit different and have very interesting details.
Also check out the Kush Audio Youtube channel, helpful and motivating videos! The guy is just awesome.

New FFT goodnes from Izotope with Plasma !
Imagine Gullfoss and Spectre had a baby.
It would be similiar to this.
What we have here is dynamic tube saturation added via FFT processing and different profiles.
A combination that is new afaik.
[ Sideinfo: the FFT code seems to work with 16 bins. Which is a lot less resolution than for example Soothe2. But it seems to be the right spot for this one, the shown graph smoothed out just could be a bit missleading and suggesting more individual FFT bins ]
Normally I am not a fan of Izotope's frequency response profiles. They just didnt worked me so far. For EQ jobs for example I prefer the work from Sonible.
But this one is a different animal.
Theese profiles worked very well for me!
In the picture you can see Plasma filling the danger area from 200 to 500 Hz with tube saturation type harmonics very well.
This is the frequency area where you can try a lot of things and loose a lot of hair in the attempt to get it sounding full but not scooped.
Plasma's time parameters also seem to work really nicely transparent keeping it stable but dynamic as well.
This is a job I could do with Spectre in mastering as well - but it would be technically different process and not dynamically moving of course.
The effect can be very subtle and the added harmonics really dont go in too extreme, I really really like the smootheness of this one.
Just a tiny bit more body and fullness in this case, super nice.
And you can split it into mid side or even transient / sustain giving you two individual instances to control differently with differnt profiles even.
This one came out so simple and elegant yet so very effective.
Nice job Izotope. This one is really a make everything sound better plugin so far.

Best in the game right now!
Currently going Gold Clip into Master Plan, its just the best option I can find right now for my material.
Its just next level.