TECHNOLOGY REVIEW
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iZotope RX3 Advanced AUDIO RESTORATION SUITE RX3 may offer a lot of tools but what about the all-important noise reduction? Jerry Ibbotsen puts it to the test.
IN A PERFECT world everything I recorded would be at the right level and devoid of any flaws or imperfections. There would be no unwanted background noise and I would only work in perfect acoustic spaces. But in a perfect world I’d be writing this from my yacht in the south of France while being served cocktails by an army of flunkies. Instead I’m on a battered office chair with a split down one side and I’ve just had to put on the central heating. RX3 from iZotope helps fix the imperfect. It’s a Swiss Army Knife of audio correction and manipulation tools drawn together in one neat package. It runs as either a standalone program or as a VST plug-in and promises a lot: declip, denoise, and remove noise form the tip of a very large iceberg. There’s also a tool to de-reverb audio, a channel mixer, a pitch shifter, and a thing to remove stones from horses hooves. Actually I lied about the last bit. The full arsenal of
weaponry is too extensive to list but let’s just say it’s impressive. I’ve used some iZotope tools in the past and they’ve always worked well so I was pretty keen to see what RX3 could do. My previous benchmark for noise reduction was actually Audition, a much under-rated DAW and one with stunning clean-up capabilities. For RX3 to match that would be some feat. I installed it on my
Windows 8 laptop running a Focusrite Scarlett 8i6 USB audio device and with Audition CS6 as host DAW. Initially I tried RX3 in standalone mode and to be honest, if you wanted to fix audio files as a single job you could do a lot worse than running RX3 like this. The interface is simple and clear and actually rather Adobe-like.
44 November 2013
I’m not just speaking as a long time Audition user but as someone with a decent knowledge of Photoshop and Premiere. I’m usually nervous when
running new software for the first time and go running to the Help menu at the first sign of trouble. With RX3 this is brilliantly executed with clear explanations of everything in plain English. Even without the Help it’s a doddle to get your head around and the many icons do exactly what you’d expect. The tools are called Modules and grouped into two categories: Repair and Utility. The former is where the noise reduction and correction side of things is done. The latter includes Gain, Equalizer, Channel Operations, plus a Time and Pitch module. This is worth a mention for anyone who was gutted at the loss of the Pitch Bender in Audition a few years ago (although it has reappeared). Under Time and Pitch you’ll find something called Pitch Contour. It lets you… er… bend pitch. There’s also a Spectral
Analyser, giving you a visual representation of the frequencies within a sound file. You can even blend Spectral and Waveform views together. I’m stalling. The elephant in
the room is how good the noise reduction is. With so many reminders of my fave DAW in RX3 it’s time to see if the tools on offer are as good as those from Adobe.
IN USE My first test was based around some audio I’d recorded for a lecture on sound at a local film school. I wanted to alert students to the perils of filming near electrical machinery so I recorded myself talking next to a particularly noisy fridge. I
loaded the clip into RX3 and opened the Denoise Module. The first step is for it to ‘Learn’ the noise and I did this by highlighting a section of what just contained fridge sound and hitting the Learn button. With the whole file then selected I hit ‘Apply’. With no tweaking of the many parameters that were open to me, the results were… stunning. The layers of fridge hum, buzz, and whine had been drastically reduced. I’d done this in Waveform mode, working across all frequencies. There was some low-end noise left so I switched into Spectral mode and sampled some of the remaining bassy fridge rumble. With this second processing complete the audio was virtually 100 percent clean. In standalone mode you can make multiple range selections to create a complex noise profile. This is great for when you only have clear noise in short bursts. Noise Reduction also runs in Adaptive Mode where it can remove noise that varies over time.
I wish I had the time and space to run through every single element of RX3 but I don’t. I must mention de- reverb though, if only because it left me slack-jawed. I tried it
out on a raw recording of clashing swords made a few years ago. The weapons were recorded at a museum and the only room available was big and reverberant. The resulting audio has a lot of reverb in it which has always frustrated me.
I loaded it into RX3 and
went to De-Reverb. The process is simple: click Learn and play as much of the file as you can in order for the software to study the audio. There are variables to play with including the level of reduction and whether to boost the dry signal, but I just hit Apply and sat back. The reverb was gone.
Vanished. Dead. It now sounded like I’d recorded the clashing swords in a studio. The sounds were so much
INFORMATION Feature set
• Works as either a standalone application or as a plug-in within a DAW or NLE
• Remove or reduce reverb from vocals, instruments, and more using the De-reverb module
• Clean up dialogue with the Dialogue Denoiser • Pinpoint problems with the Spectrogram and Spectrum Analyzer (UK) Time+Space +44 (0)1837 55200
www.izotope.com
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THE REVIEWER JERRY IBBOTSON has worked in pro audio for more than 20 years, first as a BBC radio journalist and then as a sound designer in the games industry. He’s now a freelance audio producer and writer.
more in-focus and up-close. The revamped sample went into my fx library. I’ve used RX3 as a standalone and as a VST plug-in and in both formats it left me speechless. In my book the mark of a good piece of software is more than just its power, it has to be simple to use and RX3 ticks both boxes. It’s an all-round audio toolkit that has been well planned and brilliantly executed. It’s easy to use and can achieve amazing results. I cannot recommend it highly enough.
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