Acon Digital Acoustica provides a great value suite of editing tools, plug-ins and processing tools for post-production, podcast creation, mastering and audio restoration. I recently highlighted a few of my favourite tools from this suite. In particular, I covered DePlosive: Dialogue, Equalise 2 and Dynamics. These are just a handful of the superb plug-ins available from Acon Digital. In this article, I’ll highlight a few more of my favourites.

DeBuzz: Dialogue

Buzz and hum noises such as neon light buzz, AC power hum and RF transmission interference seem to crop up more often than they should in dialogue recordings. Sometimes these issues are unavoidable, other times they might be the result of dubious recording practices. Whatever the cause, buzz in a dialogue recording needs to be dealt with.

DeBuzz: Dialogue provides a straightforward means of dealing with this type of noise. Available as both a plug-in for your DAW, or within Acoustica itself, it does an effective job at reducing buzz while leaving the dialogue itself intact. The controls are simple, with the main ones being the sensitivity slider and the maximum attenuation dial. As you would expect, the sensitivity slider adjusts the relative sensitivity of the noise detection. A good way to use this is to click the ‘Solo noise’ button at the bottom right hand side of the plug-in and then adjust the sensitivity as you listen to just the noise that’s being removed. When soloing the noise, the goal is to hear as much noise as possible without the dialogue also being removed. The maximum attenuation dial affects the amount of noise reduction, in decibels. It goes down to -60dB, but to avoid artefacts, it’s best to set it to just as much as you need rather than pushing it to full attenuation.

Also included is a sensitivity curve, which allows you to control the noise sensitivity in adjustable bands. High and low shelf controls are provided, along with a peak/dip curve. All of these have adjustable Q. The sensitivity curve is useful for optimising noise reduction where the buzz is more prominent while leaving other frequencies relatively untouched.

Limit

Acon Digital’s Limiter has a very useful function. It incorporates a compressor before the limiter itself. Referred to as a pre-compressor, it’s ideal for reining in the number of peaks prior to the limiter. This helps to prevent audible distortion, and provides an overall more controlled sound than a limiter alone might. It’s a nice feature when working on dialogue.

Unlike most dynamics processors, Limit doesn’t have a threshold control. Instead, to increase the perceived loudness, you need to increase the input level of the audio. The internal threshold limit is fixed at 0dB. Once the input exceeds this, gain reduction is applied. I like to use Limit in conjunction with Acoustica’s built-in loudness meter, especially when working on broadcast content.

Another feature of note in the Limit plug-in is the Auto Release button. When enabled, the release time you set will not be absolute, but will instead act as a maximum, with the actual release time changing depending on the transient nature of the content.

Limit provides an adjustable Look Ahead time which can be set from 0ms to 15ms. The higher the value, the greater the transparency of the processing, albeit at the cost of greater latency.

It’s nice to see that Limit incorporates oversampling, with options being Off, 2x or 4x. Oversampling is a means by which the sample rate of the audio is increased prior to processing, before before converted by back down again afterwards. Processing the audio at a higher rate allows for less steep anti-aliasing filters and can be useful for reducing the audible effects of aliasing.

DeVerberate 3

This plug-in is a highly effective reverb reduction tool. It isn’t included with Acoustica Standard or Premium Edition, but is available to purchase separately. Acon Digital Deverberate 3 uses deep learning for easy reduction of reverb from recorded dialogue. Using a neural network trained on thousands of hours of high-quality voice recordings and a wide variety of acoustical surroundings, the artificial intelligence can automatically separate dialogue from reverb.

Having tried, tested and used quite a number of different reverb reduction tools, DeVerberate 3 has proven itself to be one of the most effective. For the reduction of reverb in dialogue recordings in particular, it’s great tool, and one which I keep in my plug-ins favourites list.

To see and hear DeBuzz: Dialogue, Limit and DeVerberate 3 in action, take a look at the video below.