The Sound Board

If it’s as good as the demo here and as good as the Vx plugins, this will be an insta-buy.

The big minus - it’s trained to work on dialogue and vocals only. Forget about putting a trumpet recorded at Air through it.

The big plus - it claims to work on early reflections too (at least the Pro version). Short tails are by far still the biggest issue for de-reverbs, the shorter they are the harder it is. I’ll be testing it soon for sure.

Intro prices - $99.99 for Pro, $29.99 for regular.

(Aren’t we all glad that Waves caved to public pressure on the subs-only thing?)

EDIT - 11% off at AudioDeluxe currently with code MAY2023, though I see it is June tomorrow so hurry up. Also there’s a buy 2 get 2 free thing.

Oh.

Well, I'm glad I demoed it - it's absolutely terrible. Whereas with Clarity Vx the promotional stuff was a good representation of what you got, with my tests they are chalk and cheese - with the real version being chalk (that is worse than cheese, right?)

I was going to post examples, but they are so woeful I can't bring myself to do it. I tried a big long tail and various smaller spaces, and it make a complete Horlicks of the lot. Nothing usable, even while desperately trying to adjust every control in sight using Pro, and all three neural networks.

Which means in terms of plugins, RX dialogue de-reverb still reigns supreme (in fact only in RX advanced standalone). However I've heard demos of online AI products that are considerably better than RX. Which by my reckoning is further confirmation that we are moving towards a very odd place - one click web-based services are becoming superior to any commercially available plugin for noise reduction / restoration chores. By some margin.

For what it's worth, I was given a vocal awash in reverb for some remix work a couple of months ago, and I found that the original Clarity Vx did a great job of drying it out. Certainly, after adding my own reverb to the vocal, there was no hint of the old reverb to be heard.

It's possible that the quality may not be sufficient for dialog, but it was great for music.

Best,

Geoff

I was just thinking Vx would almost certainly do a better job at de-reverbing than de-reverb - there you go!

(Side issue - RX’s music rebalance does a good job at leaving vocal reverb IN, which is what you want in that case - you don’t want it anywhere else for sure).

Production Expert got much better results than me:



So I went back to do some more tests. And to be fair, all my initial experiments I threw it right in at the deep end, all very challenging material. When I presented it with more modest problems, it did infinitely better, and I got results comparable to those in the video here.

Like many such technologies, it does well to a certain point, and then it falls off a cliff. You can hear in their third example - the classic boxy room problem - it sounds on the edge. It cleans it up, but there's noticeable artefacts. In my experience, that's the tell-tale on the edge sound - if the source were just a little worse, it would fall apart completely.

I then did some A/Bs with RX's Dialogue De-Reverb. They're not a million miles apart, but Waves does edge it in some cases. So I was too hasty in my initial dismissal - while it's not a panacea or suggests a revolutionary workflow like Clarity Vx, it would definitely be useful in many scenarios.