We’ve seen some notable developments over the last couple of years in the area of dialogue noise reduction. With A.I and machine learning bringing about considerable advancements in the effectiveness of what can be achieved, now seems like a great time to conduct a shootout of some of the current dialogue noise reduction tools. This is not intended to be an exhaustive test of every single dialogue noise reduction tool on the market but rather a comparison of a select few that we’ve featured in some way on the blog over the last few months.

This shootout will be split into two parts. In this first round, we focus on noise reduction. This will be followed up soon with a second part focused on the reduction of reverb. In this shootout we pit plugins from six brands against each other in a comparison test. 

The Contenders…

The contenders in part one are:

Hush Pro

Hush Pro is an AAX Audiosuite plug-in for Pro Tools which we recently put to the test. It provides faders for voice, reverb and noise and works on Apple Silicon Macs to isolate speech from room reflections, ambient noise and transient sounds.

Waves Clarity Vx Pro

Waves Clarity Vx Pro is designed primarily for the cleaning of dialogue and vocals. It provides controls which allow the frequency range to be split into separate bands so you can tailor the amount of processing required. 

Acon Digital Extract: Dialogue

Extract: Dialogue from Acon Digital is designed to separate dialogue from common types of background noise such as wind, rustle, traffic, hum, clicks and pops. The algorithm is based on deep learning and has been trained on thousands of voice recordings.

Accentize dxRevive Pro

Accentize dxRevive Pro is a speech restoration plug-in which is capable of not only removing noise and reverb but also reintegrating missing frequency components, eliminating codec artifacts, recovering clipped audio and restoring band-limited audio like phone calls. We put it through its paces on various dialogue recordings recently.

iZotope RX Dialogue Isolate

Rather than including iZotope RX as a whole, we’ve focused on a single module for this test: Dialogue Isolate. Found in RX Advanced, it is designed to separate spoken dialogue from non-stationary background noise such as crowds, traffic, footsteps, weather, or other noise with highly variable characteristics.

Supertone CLEAR

This plug-in started life as GOYO Voice Separator with a beta release back in April 2023. In the final release version, now called Supertone CLEAR Voice Separator, it supports all the usual plug-in formats, including AAX. Supertone CLEAR is a de-noise and de-reverb voice separator audio plugin which provides controls for ambience, voice and noise, allowing the relative levels of each to be adjusted.

The Test

Four different recordings were used for this test. These have been chosen to include some of the common noise problems found in location recordings. For fun, and to push the noise reduction to the limit, one of the examples has traffic noise and car horns which should serve as a good challenge for the plug-ins on test.

The original, unprocessed recording is followed by the processed versions from each of the plug-ins. The examples have been randomised from one example to the next and labelled A to F. Take a listen to each example and vote on which one you think is best. The results will be revealed soon!

Cicadas

Broadband Noise

Hum

Roadside Traffic

Why Didn’t We Include X Plug-In In This Test?

Whenever we conduct a shootout such as this, somebody always comments that their favourite plug-in hasn’t been included. We did consider other noise reduction tools for this test, including Absentia DX and CEDAR VoiceEx. CEDAR prefer not to have their products included in shootouts so that’s why VoiceEx is not included here. Todd AO were kind enough to send us a licence for Absentia DX but we feel that it’s a slightly different tool to the others in the test in that it offers a feature set which goes beyond just the simple reduction of noise. Absentia DX provides tools for dialogue cleaning, cutting, transcription and assembly, along with batch processing of files while retaining the inherent metadata. For these reasons, along with the fact that, unlike the plug-ins in the test, Absentia DX allows for selective removal of different noise types rather than just noise as a whole, we felt that it should be categorised differently to the other tools here, hence its omission from this test. Absentia DX will be covered in a separate article very soon.

The other reason for limiting the number of plug-ins in the test is manageability. Too many plug-ins and audio examples gets confusing for voters and actually means that fewer people engage with the voting as a result. We feel that we’ve included a good selection of tools in this test. Also, we chose brands which can be included in the forthcoming second part.

Stay Tuned For Part 2!

In the forthcoming part 2 we’ll be testing reverb reduction tools. The contenders will be:

• Hush Pro

• Waves Clarity Vx Pro DeReverb

• Acon Digital Deverberate 3

• Accentize dxRevive Pro

• iZotope DeReverb

• Supertone CLEAR

Keep an eye out for the results of this first test, along with the reverb reduction shootout soon!

UPDATE: The results are in - click here to view them