With so many tools promising equalisation with spectral awareness of their own, can any of them offer broad options and simplicity in one? We look at one solution that thinks it can.
Rise Of The Clever EQ
In recent years intelligent EQ tools have started to gain a foothold in the wider audio engineering toolbox. Certainly what used to be a small selection of niche tools used by early adopters has grown into an audio plugin subcategory of its own. Those that claim to offer musical sentience inevitably must ditch some of the more conventional EQ controls and instead carve out new terminology for their own take on ‘smart’ EQ. This can go some way towards demystifying what each respective product is trying to achieve, as this can be less obvious to those unfamiliar with it.
Intelligence Versus User Input
Whether an intelligent EQ is trying to tame harshness or resonances, or accentuate a signal’s ability to please the listener, their controls can be cryptic to say the least. Some employ a reduced control set in an attempt to make themselves more accessible, complemented with an ‘expert’ mode lurking in a hidden panel. Others remove anything that might scare off the casual user or musician at whom the EQ is aimed, instead opting for subjectively labelled controls or musical pitches in place of frequencies.
Soundtheory Gullfoss
A third approach is that of Soundtheory’s Gullfoss, the enigmatically named audio plugin that promises to deliver the closest thing yet to a simple ‘betterizer’ EQ. This EQ sets out to do two things; that is to sound good and to be easy to use. This EQ uses neither AI or machine learning, instead opting to use Soundtheory’s own auditory perception model. This steers the EQ towards making changes that a human listener would gravitate towards. Soundtheory elaborate:
Gullfoss is an easy-to-use tool for everyone from the amateur musician to the professional mastering engineer. Its clean user interface offers a set of basic parameters that can be adjusted to improve the clarity, detail, spatiality, and balance of a mix or recording in a matter of seconds.
Gullfoss is an intelligent equalizer that listens to a signal and decides how to prepare the audio so that your brain can get the most information out of it.
The equalizer is capable of changing its frequency response more than 300 times per second and without introducing audible artefacts or degrading signal quality [using] the highly advanced computational auditory perception model that has been developed by Soundtheory
Released in 2018, its most recent update sees a surprise development with the introduction of two new flavours of the plugin, meaning users of Gullfoss get a suite of three tools in all. In addition to the original Gullfoss EQ the two new additions are as follows:
Gullfoss Live
This new take on the original Gullfoss EQ is optimised for tracking and mixing, including live mixes. With exactly the same features and sidechain functionality as its forbearer, its headline feature is its low latency operation, with a target latency of 2ms.
Gullfoss Live does not fully process the transient portion of the signal, resulting in a slightly different sound to the Standard and Master editions of the plugin. This can be thought of as a reasonable tradeoff for its low latency performance that can be up to ten times faster than that of Gullfoss Standard or Master. This is the main difference with Live compared to the other two plugins- essential for live mixing or studio tracking applications.
Gullfoss Master
Sporting the same control set as Gullfoss Standard and Live editions, the headline feature of the Master version is its increased precision and lower noise floor. As a result it shares a value of around 20ms of latency with the Standard edition; users are rewarded with the best possible audio quality, with the five parameters across the top of the GUI adjusted in smaller increments for finer etching of the signal.
In keeping with mastering-orientated workflows, Soundtheory recommend that Gullfoss Master is inserted upstream of any heavy dynamics processing. High internal precision does introduce a higher CPU load, although for the intended (single instance) use this shouldn’t be a problem on a current system.
Simple And Versatile?
In the video we compare the new editions of Gullfoss, demonstrating some of the similarities in use as well as their performance under load.
When using the three editions of Gulfoss, one thing becomes clear: This EQ really does sound good. Getting results is easy despite considerable complexity under the hood, thanks to a remarkably small set of controls with immediately obvious effects. The visual feedback is great as well. By providing Gullfoss’ new expanded capabilities across three sister audio plugins, Soundtheory makes it easy to choose your weapon and mix without having to optimise Gullfoss in a menu. For me, that makes it versatile and simple.