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No matter the medium, if it involves spoken word we all abide by one rule, dialogue is king. With people around the world still working remotely, often completing tasks such as podcasting, or ADR recording, the importance of an audible and consistent dialogue track seems to only be rising. Paired with a recent boom in AI development, so is the amount of commercially available audio restoration tools. Today on the 344 Audio blog, we’ll take an in-depth look at Accentize’ speech restoration plug-in, dxRevive Pro.
Company: Accentize
Product: dxRevive Pro
Price: £259
Our Rating: 4.9/5
Overview:
dxRevive is an AI powered restoration tool designed to restore and enhance dialogue that wasn’t captured in optimal conditions or environments. Accentize took a different approach to other commercial offerings with this plug-in. Highlighting its restorative abilities as opposed to its reductive abilities, it’s clear to users that the intended use of dxRevive isn’t just to remove unwanted noise, but to add a level of quality to your recordings.
In their own words:
”dxRevive is a versatile speech restoration plugin, dedicated to enriching the quality of various dialogue recordings. Unlike many other restoration plugins, dxRevive doesn’t merely filter the signal. It goes beyond, identifying and reintegrating missing frequency components, yielding studio-like recordings from diverse source materials.”
Key Features & Benefits
Accentize offers 2 versions of their product, dxRevive and dxRevive Pro. The former includes 4 presets, 100% local processing, and Multi-language/accent processing with their Studio algorithm (designed to enhance your audio quality to sound like it was recorded in an acoustically treated studio). Whilst Pro boasts the Studio algorithm, alongside their Retain Character algorithm (designed to retain the essence of your recordings while eliminating noise and giving it a boost in perceived quality), quick A-B comparison, Spectral Focus mode for fine tuning up to 4 frequency bands, plus 2 extra presets for ‘Restore Phone’ and ‘Restore Low-End’. Today we’ll be taking a look at dxRevive Pro.
Upon launch, you’re met with a very minimalistic layout consisting of 3 adjustable parameters (Mix, Gain In, Gain Out), A/B comparison, preset selector, algorithm selector, and a frequency spectrogram. A hint of blue compliments the black and greys that make up most of the U.I, resulting in a sleek and high end looking interface that doesn’t confuse or overwhelm users.
What It's Useful For
We used both algorithms on recordings of varying quality. Some captured in rooms with no acoustic treatment, some zoom audio, and some well captured with only minor noise or reverb issues. Below, we've included some before and after examples of dxRevive in action. The Studio algorithm yields most noticeable results overall, doing a great job suppressing reverb with little to no artefacts, or changes to noise floor level. And, easily dealing with basic issues like hisses, hums and background noise, which were cleared up using the default settings. Even on more troublesome recordings, we were pleasantly surprised at how effective this tool is with minimal parameter adjustments. The worst case we used it on was captured over zoom, with a hiss throughout, in an extremely reverberant room, and a reasonable amount of background noise (A children's sports day nearby in this scenario). We tried the ‘full revive’ preset which has Mix set to 100% by default, and the results were incredible. The studio algorithm managed to resolve most issues, whilst restoring low end and other missing frequencies to a very satisfactory level. On more subtle cases where zoom compression is the culprit of sub par audio quality, we found that starting with either Phone Restore or Default settings and making changes to taste garnered best results.
Being designed for use on recordings captured with better gear, in better environments, the Retain character algorithm offers more subtle results. Used on content like this, it’s great at removing unwanted noise from recordings and making subtle changes to reverb levels and perceived quality. To really see what it was capable of, we tried it on the worst zoom recording, plagued with issues that we tackled with the Studio algorithm, and the results were impressive. You’ll still be able to tell it’s a zoom recording. But aside from the lack of heavy handed frequency restoration in this algorithm and some extreme background noise seeping through, we were left with usable audio.
We would use this plug-in to enhance our Dialogue, or Podcast editing workflows.
The Bottom Line
There are more commercial offerings available today for audio restoration and noise reduction software than ever before. However, keep in mind that owning more than one plug-in designed for particular tasks is often good practice. Accentize’ choice to primarily focus on the audio restoration quality dxRevive offers, as opposed to noise reduction, sets it apart from other products aiming to enhance speech related workflows. An easy to use interface combined with the well designed and implemented algorithms make this a great tool to have in your arsenal.
Looking to the future, it would be great to see more presets or extra parameters giving users more control over specific use cases. I.e Reverb elimination, absent frequency restoration, elimination of Codec artefacts. Whilst the U.I could benefit from a minor change of colour to differentiate the Output Signal Line from other elements which all share the same colour within the bottom half of the window. dxRevive and dxRevive Pro are available as VST3, Audio Units or AAX plug-in on both PC and Mac.
For more from Accentize and the purchase information for dxRevive, follow these links:
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