Outboard noise cancellation

Dick Rees

Dick Rees

Curmudgeonly Scandihoovian
Jan 11, 2011
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St Paul, MN
There was an old post on the PSW regarding a piece of outboard which would substantially reduce background noise. I believe it may have been a broadcast type piece of gear and also may have come into a thread on Dugan gear. The only thing I can remember is that when I checked it out, it was about $1800.00 for a rack-mount unit. Price may have been per channel.

Anybody? Anybody? Buehler???
 
Re: Outboard noise cancellation

Thanks, but it wasn't from any "name" manufacturer of consumer sound gear. It was a new product and has been out only a couple of years.
 
Re: Outboard noise cancellation

David Sturzenbecher said:
Could it be the "Rupert Neve Designs Portico 5045 Primary Source Enhancer"?
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DING DING DING... I think we have a winner!

Good work, David. Now that you brought it up, I recall the thread that Rees is thinking of. Lots of discussion about lectern mics, too.

Thanks for the excellent memory jog, I just burned 1200 calories!
 
Re: Outboard noise cancellation

This unit originally hit the press in an article on enhancing the Super Bowl referee's microphones. I do not have first hand use with this unit, but one of my coworkers installed one at a Division 1 football stadium with a Shure Axient System to great sucess.
 
Re: Outboard noise cancellation

The 5045 is a pretty nice unit, though it's very much a one-trick pony. It's basically an expander of sorts, maximum of 20dB of gain reduction. Very nice on lectern mics and ref mics (we do regular Big Ten games with one), reduces a lot of the pre-feedback ringing and echoes.
 
Re: Outboard noise cancellation

Tim McCulloch said:
DING DING DING... I think we have a winner!

Good work, David. Now that you brought it up, I recall the thread that Rees is thinking of. Lots of discussion about lectern mics, too.

Thanks for the excellent memory jog, I just burned 1200 calories!
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Yup. That's the one. Eat a couple of donuts to make up for the lost calories.
 
Re: Outboard noise cancellation

Mike Brown said:
I saw one engineer drag out a bunch of Dolby CAT43 cards/remote to one gig.

I have been doing a bunch of dialog cleanup/restoration in the studio lately and this plugin has been blowing my mind: Zynaptiq UNVEIL De-Reverberation and Signal Focusing: Applications For Post-Production - YouTube

Would be cool to have it for live as well.
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I'm doing that kind of stuff as well or better running the sound through a StudioLive, a GraphiQ and a TCE IIIC.
 
Re: Outboard noise cancellation

Mike Brown said:
I saw one engineer drag out a bunch of Dolby CAT43 cards/remote to one gig.

I have been doing a bunch of dialog cleanup/restoration in the studio lately and this plugin has been blowing my mind: Zynaptiq UNVEIL De-Reverberation and Signal Focusing: Applications For Post-Production - YouTube

Would be cool to have it for live as well.
Click to expand...

At the day job we are looking seriously at picking up the Cedar Audio DNS One plugin for this type of work... we do a lot of restoration of archived spoken word recordings. Anyone here have any real-world experience with this or the other Cedar hardware products? I haven't had the opportunity to try any of them yet and see for myself, but I've heard great things. It would be great to hear any real opinions that are out there.

Sorry for the topic swerve.
 
Re: Outboard noise cancellation

Dick Rees said:
I'm doing that kind of stuff as well or better running the sound through a StudioLive, a GraphiQ and a TCE IIIC.
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Have you tried it? I think if you tryUnveil you will find its doing something distinctly different than any of those.... but I'll take your word for it. :)~:)~:smile: Maybe I'll send you a small piece of dialog and we can compare notes?

Steve Milner said:
At the day job we are looking seriously at picking up the Cedar Audio DNS One plugin for this type of work... we do a lot of restoration of archived spoken word recordings. Anyone here have any real-world experience with this or the other Cedar hardware products? I haven't had the opportunity to try any of them yet and see for myself, but I've heard great things. It would be great to hear any real opinions that are out there.

Sorry for the topic swerve.
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Hey Steve,

I don't own any of the CEDAR stuff currently, but I have used the hardware fairly extensively in the past. All of the CEDAR stuff was astounding and worth the investment if you are doing enough work to warrant the price.

My current restoration kit of:

Izotope RX Advanced (great value for the price, cant recommend enough)
Unveil (really fantastic for matching scene to scene and cleaning up things with lots of early reflections, cant recommend enough)
Waves WNS (I feel like the CEDAR stuff I have used is better than this, but it fills some holes where Izotope drops the ball)
EQuality
various comps/de-essers etc

has not let me down, though.
 
Re: Outboard noise cancellation

Mike Brown said:
Have you tried it? I think if you tryUnveil you will find its doing something distinctly different than any of those.... but I'll take your word for it. :)~:)~:smile: Maybe I'll send you a small piece of dialog and we can compare notes?
Click to expand...

I'm just going by listening to the linked example. You can work at this kind of stuff until you start to compromise the quality of what's left (or being brought out), then you have to decide on exactly how far to go.....or if you've gone too far. The nice thing about doing it with one piece of gear or program is that it takes much less time to reach the decision point.

If I did it a lot, I'd see the advantage of spending the money to save the time. Right now my focus is in minimizing the amount of ambient distraction up front so I don't have to go back and do a bunch of noise removal at home.

I'm looking at downloading some free/trial software to audition.
 
Re: Outboard noise cancellation

gordon mcgregor said:
I've used the CEDAR stuff, but it's well expensive but absolutely amazing what it can do with some skilled use and decision making. G
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Thanks for the insight... the expense is understood and justified by the work-load, otherwise we wouldn't be considering it. It's being considered for the Merging Tech. PyraMix workstation/system we are using, which sure ain't cheap either, but totally worth it for our needs. Hopefully we'll be able to arrange some hand/ears-on demo time before pulling the trigger on the purchase. So far, it looks like their reputation is well deserved, so I doubt we'd be disappointed.

I'll be sure to update with a detailed review, as soon as I get my hands on it.
 
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