Sound Devices has announce NoiseAssist, a new noise suppression plugin for the company’s 8-Series mixer-recorders that uses an advanced signal processing algorithm designed to reduce background noise such as traffic, generators, HVAC noise, and more.
NoiseAssist offers a straightforward user interface with one adjustment — the amount of background noise to suppress. The mew plugin is available now at store.sounddevices.com for an introductory price of $600.
NoiseAssist has been designed to automatically and continuously monitor background noise independently from the desired speech in the signal. More specifically, it is intended to discriminate between the desired speech signal and background noise through proprietary advanced multi-band frequency, level, and statistical calculations. The background noise and reverberation can then be suppressed by a user-selectable dB level without affecting the desired speech signal. This is all done in real time with stated latency of 1 millisecond of latency.
Up to two instances of NoiseAssist can run on any combination of isolated channels (excluding 17-32 on Scorpio), bus L, or bus R. NoiseAssist maintains the two independent audio channels frequency bandwidth, while suppressing the background noise and reverberation.
The algorithm is the result of two years of in-house research and development by staff engineer Steve Popovich and CEO/president Matt Anderson. The two collectively hold more than 20 patents and have several decades of experience designing audio algorithms and systems.
The optional NoiseAssist plugin is compatible with all 8-Series mixer-recorders running firmware version 5.00 or higher, which may be downloaded from sounddevices.com/download. Firmware version 5.00 also includes support for the Sonosax SX-LC8+ Control Surface.
