In the Goodhertz audio lab in California, Goodhertz founder Devin Kerr does the majority of his critical listening at the mixing desk.

In August of 2012, after months of working on CanOpener Studio, and a lifetime of listening to music mostly on headphones, I got my first opportunity to visit the lab and hear music the way Devin does, at that desk, on a pair of professional-grade speakers — a highly controlled acoustical environment, tuned for his professional tasks (mixing, mastering, algorithm-designing).

One of the most difficult parts of building a Goodhertz plugin is meeting our standard for smooth automatability:

Any control or parameter in a Goodhertz plugin, even on/off switches, can be freely automated without clicks, pops, or other gnarly artifacts.

Rob and I started started referring to this as the “Goodhertz promise,” and, as of now, we’re the only plugin company that delivers on such a promise.

Here at Goodhertz, we love sounds and we love stories, so we thought: we should make a podcast. And what better story to pilot the podcast than the story of how Vulf Compressor — our quixotic dynamics plugin — came to be.

So we called up Jack Stratton (of Vulf & Vulfpeck), and asked him to tell the story of how he — with the help of Goodhertz’ Devin Kerr — turned his search for a sound into a powerful, one-of-a-kind plugin; how Goodhertz turned Jack’s notion into a now-on-sale.

If only we knew who programmed the DSP on the Roland SP-303. One day we’ll find out. One day we’ll meet them, shake their hands, and conduct a brief interview. Some questions we have in mind:

We built Lossy to solve a specific problem: make it easy to recreate the sound of a bad MP3 in realtime, without having to bounce a track to and from an MP3. But imbuing sound with an MP3’s imperfections — the fizzle and sizzle of 64 kbps — was only the beginning.