The noise reduction thread

[Guy Rowland]

This keeps coming up. Every few months a new wonder-tool appears. Which is the best? What are the best techniques in how to use them?

Exhibit A is a new blind test shootout of 8 different plugins at Production Expert - https://www.production-expert.com/produ ... he-results . The results are exactly what I expected - no one plugin dominates.

It's never been more true than today that plugins that are miraculous on one thing are embarrassing on the next. I thought Hush Pro was the ultimate - on my very challenging test of dialogue against loud breaking waves on a pebble beach it was jaw-dropping. Literally - I watched highly experienced sound recordists jaws literally job. Some saw it as an existential threat in their daily fight for quality control.

It's Mac only, but I had to buy it for the macbook and just transfer stuff I really needed it to work its magic on. The first thing I tried was dialogue against cooking & frying in a live-sounding domestic kitchen. It couldn't even detect the dialogue let alone improve it. (the developer was incredibly helpful and responsive, and refunded my purchase - I'm always on the lookout for updates).

Waves Clarity VX scored very poorly in the tests, but I noted Production Expert said the results "surprised some team members, as several use Clarity Vx Pro successfully in our audio restoration work". As do I.

I don't fully understand how these things work, except that I know they train their audio on a ton of content. I suspect a lot of the variation comes from exactly what they have trained their models on, and it seems logical to me that this is highly variable.

As it is, if you need this kind of tool routinely, no one plugin is enough. It's all a lot of trial and a lot of error. But, as the article says, the days of iZotope and especially Cedar dominating are long gone.

I should add that all of these AI tools are broad brushes. Very often other tools work better - Spectral Repair in RX is still a workhorse, capturing specific noise profiles and even very simple photoshop-style copy and paste is often the right thing to do. Of course it's useful for more than mere noise reduction here, I've often copied, say, an "s" from one part of audio and put it somewhere else to rescue some poor diction. Then of course you have all the specific tools like de-click, de-hum etc. Sometimes the broad tools work better on stuff like hums than the specific though!

One more tip - I often have to vary the amount of reduction depending on the variability of the dialogue level. If I have to boost something quiet, I then need more noise reduction to stop a great whoosh of ambience blooming into the mix, a totally unnatural sound in nature. I sometimes render out noise and ambience separately and mix on the fly, other times I cut the clip at the quiet moment, then boost the overall gain and noise reduction by the same amount.

[Lawrence]

Clarity VX has been excellent for my uses-VOs in my untreated room, also acoustic gtr and vocals. Reduces various room tone and appliances very well.