Voiceover Studio Tools: Do You Hear That? – VO Tech Tip

It’s possible that I spend way too much time thinking about noise. It comes into our recordings from odd vectors, surprising us time and again with the many places it can hide.

Over the years, the types of noises we encounter have changed dramatically. We used to worry about the hiss from multiple takes captured on actual tape recorders. Older equipment generally provided noise from the circuitry. Those steady state sounds were actually fairly simple to address because they didn’t change too much.

As we began recording in less than perfect environments in our homes, we encountered sounds of a more cyclical nature, rising and falling in terms of loudness (amplitude). A computer fan is a good example of this, or the thrumming of an HVAC unit. In less controlled environments, there are noises where the pitch changes as well. Have you ever noticed that as a vehicle approaches and then passes you, the sound goes from a higher to a lower pitch? That delivery truck zooming down the street is not playing a fixed note. Those variables compound exponentially. Echoes come back to your microphone out of phase with the original sound, resulting in a complex series of wave interactions which can bury your voice in reverberant acoustic soup.

A simple denoise tool – the kind often used just a few years ago – worked by “sampling” the noise in your recording. Those tools essentially tried to zero out the “bad” sound in the selection you provided. When the problem was simply a static sound like electrical hum or component hiss, it may have actually done a decent job of reducing it. But as I mentioned above, that’s seldom the case in the real world.

I’ve always appreciated the denoise tools in Izotope’s RX Standard set. Both Voice and Spectral DeNoise effects have been a go-to for many years. A challenger appeared when Waves Clarity Vx came out last year. It was an impressively effective approach to controlling even more complex noises and environmental sounds. Having a few tools is a good plan. Each denoising tool has its strengths, and having a variety of them can provide effective results.

Recently, even more effective denoise tools have been appearing in quick succession. They now use much more sophisticated neural networks, modeling, and AI. This has caused me to reassess what is possible. The results have been staggeringly impressive. I shared my positive impressions of Acon Digital’s Extract Dialog a while back. Extract Dialog is exceptionally good at suppressing all kinds of background sounds while focusing on cleaning up voice tracks.

Accentize DX Revive came out last month with the ability to replace missing frequencies and reduce room reflections (and that’s really just scratching the surface). There were discussions about whether tools of this quality would make studios unnecessary. After all, if you can remove echoes and noises, and actually replace frequencies that were not even captured, why bother worrying about where you record?

That’s a fair question. Except I feel it’s still important to consider all of these amazing tools in context. While they are incredibly powerful and effective, they still need someone to apply them appropriately. As I encourage recording students and clients, it’s often simpler to get back behind the microphone and do it better. We can spend way too much time trying to heal bad audio rather than just capturing things effectively at the source. 

If we are handling both the performance and production of our deliverables (as we are increasingly asked to do), spending more time fixing stuff can be a serious sinkhole. Investing in the quality of your recording space means that you may need to barely touch the audio you deliver, freeing up time and focus for more critical tasks.

Additionally, when connecting with an outside studio through Source-Connect, providing clean, raw audio down the line makes clients much happier as well. Any professional studio probably has these tools (or even more sophisticated ones), but given the opportunity, they would much rather leave them on the rack.

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