Following on from various team members sharing their list of must-have plugins, in this article, Mike Thornton shares his top 7 plugins from his lifetime of working in broadcast audio and post-production.

Although I have to keep pruning the number of plugins in my plugins folder to reduce the amount of scrolling I have to do to get to go-to plugins, the reality is that the list of plugins I use and the number of instances of plugins are both pretty small.

If you look at any of my sessions, you will find that I use very few plugins. For example, a radio documentary, the content recorded on location, will tend to have an EQ plugin on it set to a high-pass filter just to improve the intelligibility, and that’s it. My mastering track, through which I route the main mix before recording to another track, usually has three plugins on it: a sonic maximiser, a limiter, and a loudness meter, all of which are covered below.

Radio documentaries often have links, usually recorded in a studio, designed to link all the interviews and other actuality into a coherent narrative. As they were recorded in a studio, they rarely need any noise reduction or EQ. Depending on the voice, I will use a compressor to help the voiceover to sound more solid and authoritative.

Let’s start with the plugins in that ‘mastering’ chain…

Avid Pro Limiter

Especially in the early days of AAX and the lack of DSP plug-ins, the Avid Pro Series were a lifesaver. As a result, the Pro Limiter became my preferred limiter, and it continues to be on so many of the projects I mix and master.

Back in 2013, Russ looked at the Avid Pro Limiter and found a couple of hidden surprises. I followed up on that review, concentrating on the loudness metering features.

I like the GUI, and it just works. With these kinds of programs, I am not pushing hard into the limiter. I aim for normal speech to be just hitting it, so 1 or 2dB of gain reduction. But it means that if a contributor raises their voice or laughs, I don't need to worry too much; I just let the Avid Pro Limiter handle it. However, if an ‘event’ pushes the limiter into more than around 8dB of gain reduction, I will pull it back in the mix so that I don't overdrive the limiter too much.

I have included two screenshots showing the settings I use for BBC Radio as well as the settings I use for podcasting. For podcasting, because it will be converted into an mp3 or m4a, I prefer to set the ceiling at -3dBFS so that I don't risk overloading the codecs. For podcasts, I am working to a loudness delivery spec, and I use -16LUFS.

I must also give a very honourable mention to ISL from Nugen Audio. I tend to use ISL when transparency is top of the list. For example, I tend to use it on documentaries for BBC Radio 3 (the classical music channel). These documentaries often involve a lot of sound design. I have also deliberately tried pushing it very hard, and it just works even with way more gain reduction than I would typically ever consider using, and it's completely transparent.

Nugen Audio VisLM

Being able to accurately measure loudness is a critical part of the post-production mixing process, whether you’re working on something for TV, radio, streaming platforms or even a podcast.

Nugen Audio VisLM includes presets for a wide variety of international loudness standards, including EBU R128, ATSC A/85, OP59, and Netflix. In addition, VisLM can be fully configured and tailored to suit any custom specs.

With up to 24 hours of loudness history linked to the timecode in your DAW and comprehensive True Peak metering, VisLM is well suited to complex post-production mixes where compliance with a defined loudness requirement is critical.

The Rewritable Memory Edit Mode is absolutely amazing. It enables users to make small corrections to a mix without having to re-analyze the whole programme. I also love how I can resize the window and all the additional options they have added to the plug-in.

In this 5-minute free video tutorial, Paul Maunder gives an overview of Nugen’s VisLM loudness meter plugin. This tutorial is aimed at new users or anyone considering transitioning from another loudness meter to VisLM.

If you have ever used VisLM's feature to ‘overdub’ a section of a mix then you will know how much time it saves not having to reanalyse the full mix because VisLM can recalculate the integrated Loudness and LRA on the fly to reflect the changes you are making to the mix when dropping in and fixing some patches.

But for this feature to work, you effectively have to play the whole mix into the real-time VisLM plug-in so that it captures the data on the mix and is ready to update it when you undertake the changes.

What if you haven’t done that? Maybe the mix came from another facility that doesn’t use VisLM. There is now the ability to harness the offline, non-real-time features of the AudioSuite plug-in to complete this analysis in double quick time.

You can analyse the full mix file using the AudioSuite version of VisLM. Then a yellow button lights up, telling you that the plugin has data ready to export. When you click on that button in the AudioSuite plug-in, a corresponding Import button appears in the real-time plugin. When you click on the Import button, the real-time plugin asks you to play the audio from the timeline to identify where the clip is on the timeline, and once the blue progress bar has filled up, you can stop playing the audio. The real-time plugin will load the loudness analytics from the AudioSuite plugin, and you are ready to go.

Click out this video to see this feature in action along with a couple more features added to v2.8.3…

BBE Sonic Maximiser

Until a client brought over a hardware unit from the US for a multi-site recording project back in the 1990s, when I had my own mobile recording unit in a truck called the Omnibuss Mobile, I was sceptical about this technology. However, once I heard this unit, I was hooked.

I have been using BBE hardware for live and recording work.  It is excellent at brightening the sound without pushing the EQ, so in a live sound setting it means I can improve the intelligibility of the rig without pushing the EQ and risking feedback. I use it for broadcasting and post-production to help the intelligibility of my mixes, especially when they are being listened to in noisy environments. In Pro Tools I use the Nomad Factory plug-in which lives in my templates rather than the hardware, .

Other than a limiter and a loudness meter, this is often the only other plug-in I use in my ‘mastering’ channel strip for basic speech programming content like documentaries and dramas for broadcast on BBC Radio or for podcasts.

iZotope RX 10

As ‘Mr RX It,’ I have worked with iZotope RX for over a decade, going back all the way to RX2, when I produced a series of video tutorials in which I fixed a number of common audio problems in real-time.

Over the years, RX has been an integral part of my workflow. I have been able to use iZotope RX to save the lives of countless clients. Here are two examples…

• The first one was where a studio-based panel recording was severely distorted, and they were looking at a complete reshoot very close to transmission with all the challenges of rebooking guests, studio, etc. They sent me the files and I was able to fix it. It wasn't a simple fix, but with two different settings, one solution would fix a lot of the distortion, and a different configuration fixed the problems the first one didn't fix but didn't fix the problems the first one fixed, so a couple hours of my time saved them from having to completely reshoot the show.

• The second example was for a radio documentary that was in the form of an audio diary. However, the audio was captured by two different producers on different days with different equipment in different locations. To tell the story, they wanted to be able to cross-cut between the different recordings, but they didn't match, so I used a combination of EQ Match and Ambience Match to make seamless edits between sessions, enabling the producers to tell the story without external narration.

Working mainly in audio post-production, for me, De-rustle, De-wind and Dialogue Isolate added in iZotope RX 6 at the time were an incredible jump forward in what we were able to do with audio restoration. For example, I needed to clean up the soundtrack for a video of a baptism on a beach that was originally recorded on a VHS camcorder and then transferred onto DVD with the low frequencies filtered off but there was still some higher frequency wind noise left. I thought that the De-wind module wouldn’t be able to fix it, but it did! The dialogue was also embedded in a lot of background noise and instead of de-noising it, I just ran it through Dialogue Isolate, job done!

iZotope RX 7 brought Music Rebalance, which over the years has been another lifesaver, enabling me to rebalance mixes where the music had been mixed too loud, destroying the dialog intelligibility.

Over the years, especially as iZotope added machine learning powered tools, the return on investment of this package has been incredible, not just in financial terms for me but in terms of client appreciation and repeat business and the money it has saved my clients too.

With RX 7, iZotope also released Dialogue De-reverb. I remember when I demoed RX4 in front of around 1,000 folks at a Super Meet event in Amsterdam, the demo of the then-new De-reverb module had 1,000 jaws on the floor. Back to RX 7, and with the help of more machine learning algorithms, iZotope has produced a dedicated dialogue version of their de-reverb module, and straight from my first test, my jaw was back on the floor. I especially like that it has the same ambience preservation control that we have seen on modules like De-rustle.

Although iZotope RX 8 was largely a music-focused release, the Guitar De-noise module was able to a much better job of cleaning up an electric guitar part than even the improved De-hum module. Spectral Recovery, was a tool I had waiting for every since ISDN lines came on the scene, as it became possible to recreate the top end that gets chopped off when using the G722 codec. However, the Spectral Recovery module was also a timely inclusion in RX 8 Advanced, with more and more content being recorded at home, thanks to COVID, often using smartphones that also tend to have a high frequency cut off.

In iZotope RX 9, the dynamic mode in the De-hum module was a stand-out addition, which I found wasn’t just excellent at dealing with hums and buzzes but also great for dealing with PA feedback. For me, iZotope RX10 brought welcome improvements to Spectral Recovery, Dynamic De-hum and Dialog Isolate modules.

These days, iZotope is no longer the only player in town. With new kids like Accentize, Todd-AO, Acon Digital, Supertone, Hush Audio and the Waves Clarity range, iZotope has some serious competition, especially as, in my opinion, RX 9 and RX 10 have not been ‘full point’ upgrades.

Avid Pro Compressor

This is my go-to compressor in all my audio post work. Whether it's to add a little weight to a presenter's links on a documentary or helping to manage speech dynamics on discussions, it’s the Avid Pro Compressor I turn to.

If you are not sure about how much compression you are using, then the Avid Pro Compressor has this Attenuation Listen mode that helps you ‘see’, or should that be ‘hear’, what is going on. It nulls the compressor’s output against the dry signal and allows you to hear just the parts of the signal which are being attenuated. This is invaluable for getting to know the effect all the parameters have on the results but particularly the attack and release.

Avid EQ III

In post-production, EQ is often used as a corrective tool rather than a creative tool and even though I have many EQ plug-ins I find myself reaching for Avid’s EQ III over and over again. Given that it gives you a 5-band parametric EQ, with shelf filters on the HF and LF, plus high and low pass/notch filters, on paper, it's already comparatively very powerful and versatile. It does what I need EQ to do for me and it’s AAX DSP. Whether it's rolling off the bottom end of interview content or adding a little HF boost to improve intelligibility, these are just some of the tasks I turn to EQ III to help me achieve what I need.

Julian couldn’t have said it better in his article Awesome Audio Plugins I Use On Every Mix…

“Habit keeps me using EQIII. It’s always available on every system. That is the ‘killer feature’ of a stock plugin. There are EQs I’d like to use more but old habits die hard. My head says FabFilter, my heart says Sonnox but my hands usually fire up EQ III.”

Waves MaxxBass

There are times when I need to do something to enhance the bass. Waves MaxxBass and Renaissance Bass are similar and different at the same time. What these plug-ins share is that they enhance the bass without using EQ. Instead, they use the creation of harmonics based on the signal to create the effect.

The human ear is smart. It can reconstruct missing fundamentals in sound from just hearing harmonic content. If we use RBass to bring out the harmonics our hearing picks up on the harmonic relationship and magically fills in the missing fundamental, which helps us perceive low sound even though it’s not coming out of the speakers. This is what I like about these plugins: they improve the listening experience for those listening on poor-quality equipment.

MaxxBass provides similar results to RBass offering extended controls and a more visual user interface. The blue section refers to the original bass audio, with the yellow referring to the upper harmonics created from the original bass. A combination of frequency, ratio and MaxxBass level enables you to get the desired amount of perceived low end.

In this free video tutorial from the archive, I share how to get the best out of the Waves MaxxBass plugin in audio post-production.

In this video, again from the archive, I share how to get the best out of the Waves Renaissance Bass plug-in.

In Conclusion

There you have it. Seven really useful plugins that I use all the time. Are they the only seven plugins I use? Of course not, there is a larger handful of plugins that I use regularly and then a raft of plugins that I use occasionally. All of which are kept under constant review.