by Steve Cunningham
While summer is nearly done, the very hot season is in full swing here on the southern part of the Left Coast. This is the time when your humble scribe likes to survey the landscape in search of new goodies to give a little boost to the weekly production process. In other words, it’s time to take advantage of what little extra cash came as a result of spending the warm weeks working in a dark studio on side jobs, instead of hitting the beach, mountains, or just out of doors like normal people do. I don’t know about you, but that’s when these projects seem to appear for me -- when everyone else is having a vacation, whatever that is.
This month we’ll take a look at the Waves’ series of One Knob plug-ins, most of which have been around for a year or so. The exception is their newest entry, one dedicated to removing noise. This would be the NS-1 Noise Suppessor, which we’ll examine in some detail. Plug-ins don’t get much simpler than the NS-1. Its interface consists of a single meter, calibrated in decibels, and a single fader with a scale that goes from 0 to 100. Is it as good as iZotope’s RX noise reduction plug? We’ll have a look as well as a brief run through the other One Knob processors.
MAKING WAVES
As you may recall, I’m a long-time fan of this company, which has always been on the cutting edge of DSP with their broad range of plug-ins. I’ve also been mad enough to try to replace their products, which historically have also been among the most expensive available. At one time their annual update program, which gave the user access to upgrades for a year, carried a price remarkably close to the original purchase price of the plug-ins. In other words, every now and then you had to buy the plug-ins all over for the privilege of using them. All that changed a few years ago, when they capped the annual program price at a maximum of $200 per year, an entirely acceptable amount if one owned several of the plugs (or a collection, as I do).
The current version of Waves products is now at version 9; I had just barely installed version 7 when I bought the new NS-1, which has been released in version 9 format only. I’ll update my other Waves plugs to version 9 Real Soon Now, although versions 7 and 8 can peacefully co-exist with 9. The primary benefit of this latest version is that Waves’ plugs now support full 64-bit operation, along with faster performance overall or so the company says. I cannot attest to the latter claim, although the NS-1 may not have presented a comprehensive enough test sample.
More recently, Waves has introduced several single-purpose plug-ins including a new one dedicated to removing noise. This would be the NS-1 Noise Suppessor. Plug-ins don’t get much simpler. The NS-1’s interface consists of a single meter, calibrated in decibels, and a single fader with a scale that goes from 0 to 100. That’s it. There’s no buttons for sampling room tone, no frequency knobs, no “window size” controls for the DSP. Just one fader, and a meter to tell you how much the overall level is being reduced as a result of the noise reduction.
There’s no explanation of what is going on here in the manual, which is a terse twelve pages of PDF and that mostly covers the plug-in’s header section, which is common to all Waves plugs, and how to store and recall presets (there aren’t any save a Full Reset). But the manual opines that the NS-1 is an “intelligent” process that somehow differentiates between dialog and not-dialog. Here’s what I believe is going on.
The NS-1 apparently contains a noise gate, which at low settings, from roughly 10 to 30, is quite gentle at attenuating room noise, reverb correlated with the dialog, and other stuff, and the decay time of the gate is such that it’s not audible. The gate begins to show itself at settings above 60, and while you can hear it, it is not too objectionable. At settings above 80, the gate is working pretty hard and the overall signal becomes choppy as a result.
There is also some high-pass filtering going on, which is not evident until the fader exceeds 50 but occurs nevertheless at lower levels to eliminate hum (which it does rather well -- perhaps it’s tuned to 60 Hz and the harmonics?). Above the 50 setting the high-pass filter becomes audible as the low end starts to disappear on a male vocal, probably around 120 to 150Hz. As the fader advances above 70, the filtering becomes obvious, and the low end drops precipitously at around 200 to 250Hz. At the same time, the high end starts to disappear, although it seems to be adaptive since sibilance is not reduced as much as other high frequency sounds.
All of the above is clearly level and spectrum dependent, and the NS-1 does its best to leave the dialog alone while reducing other non-dialog sounds. It’s quite effective at low settings, where it does minimal damage while reducing noise. Since the gate and filtering are audible at higher settings, it would probably serve to print multiple passes of the processor rather than try to remove all the noise in one pass. The NS-1 is a real-time processor, at least in the Audio Unit and VST versions I worked with, and it’s likely it won’t work offline in Pro Tools either, so one must print the cleaned track to a new track in order to process it more than once.
The NS-1 does a good job even with really noisy tracks, although the gating and filtering artifacts will be audible in the final product. But if the source is nearly unusable, then it may be impossible to avoid artifacts no matter what plug is used. How does the NS-1 stack up with iZotope’s RX? Since the NS-1 does not allow for getting a recording of the noise and filtering from that, the RX will do a better job with constant sounds like hum or AC noise, with fewer audible artifacts. Having said that, the NS-1 still does a very credible job even with those, and frankly did a better job with variable noises like room reverb and tones. Considering the fact that the NS-1 is dead-simple to use, and far less complicated than RX, I suspect it will get more use in my toolbox for recordings that have small amounts of annoying noise. On those occasions where there’s a significant noise problem, I likely will pull out RX, but that doesn’t often occur these days. Besides, the NS-1 is cheaper, and particularly at the time-limited offer price of $99. For me it’s a no-brainer.
WHAT ABOUT THE REST?
Looking at the rest of the One Knob series, here’s how they stack up, from good to not-so-good.
Brighter is quite obviously a treble booster, one which tends to change its response as the knob is advanced. At low settings, the boost starts around 3 kHz, but as the dial goes up its focus moves higher up in frequency. This is one of the better processors from a practical standpoint, inasmuch as it does not continue to boost the sometimes painful high-midrange, but starts to boost the presence and sparkly stuff as it’s turned up.
The Pressure compressor offers a second control, a Pad that adjusts the input signal to hit the compressor harder or softer, while the big knob appears to adjust threshold, ratio and wet/dry mix all at once. The compression itself seems to model a “classic” hardware unit, especially when the knob is cranked full. At that point it squashes the life out of the input signal, but without imparting any audible “character” to the compressed signal. I like this one for hammering either male or female voice tracks when that “used-car-advert” is what’s required. But at moderate settings it’s also capable of simply bringing the VO track closer to your grill, which is often what you want. A nice-sounding compressor overall.
Phatter seems to be little more than a low‑frequency EQ boost, and doesn’t add any missing low end the way that Waves’ Maxx Bass and other low‑frequency enhancers do. It will give you more of the low end you already have, so don’t expect it to provide Big Bottom if there’s none of that to begin with.
Wetter is a reverb whose response as you turn the dial up is to change the wet/dry balance along with the reverb sound itself. Basically it goes from short and bright to long and dark, which makes it more versatile than its one big knob implies. It’s a good algorithmic reverb sound, along the lines of a TC Electronics hardware unit. It’s not a Lexicon by any stretch, but fine for many situations.
The Filter actually removes more high frequencies as you advance the knob. A secondary control switches between several preset resonance settings. It’s a pleasant‑sounding, smooth filter, although the resonance settings live in the “well-behaved” neighborhood, never venturing forth to the “out of control” part of town. Meh.
The plug known as Driver is unfortunately aimed at guitar tones, as it simultaneously applies a nice warm‑sounding overdrive along with some mid-range boost that can be downright unpleasant for some sound sources. Bass and treble are reduced as well, so unless you want a VO track that sounds like it’s recorded through a Marshall stack you may want to pass on this one.
The One Knob plug-ins are $80 USD each, except for the NS-1 which retails $200 USD, although a limited-time offer has it available for $99 USD. The complete set of One Knob plugs retails for $400 USD, and includes all seven plugs making them about $57 each. Not a bad deal for a Waves plug-in, although the NS-1 is clearly the standout out of the series -- pity it’s not included in the bundle at a discount. Both online and brick-and-mortar retailers will provide some discounts, so it pays to shop around. But if you need a noise-reduction plug-in, the Waves NS-1 provides a simple solution that will give good results at a reasonable price.
Waves License Center
This evaluation gave me the opportunity to test drive the results of a migration away from Waves’ traditional reliance on iLok USB dongles. Version 9 debuts the company’s new Waves License Center, which can be found in a new Applications folder inside the traditional Waves folder. Clicking on the “wlc” application brings up the main window which is divided into three panes. On the left are all the available devices on which licenses can be stored -- in this case my laptop plus one USB memory stick -- while the two panels on the right allow licenses to be moved from one device to the other, or to be backed up to Waves’ cloud storage.
When I downloaded the NS-1 plug and its associated files directly to my laptop, Waves deposited my license for that plug directly on my “cloud” account, where it is essentially a deactivated asset. Moving a license from the cloud to a storage device is quick and simple; choose the source (in my case it was the cloud), and the destination, and click the Send Licenses button. My license showed up on the Fat-32 formatted USB memory stick in less than 15 seconds. Further, it showed up as a very small file, which tells me that I’ll be able to store pretty much every Waves’ authorization I have on that small 2 GB stick.
There’s a couple of other benefits of this scheme. First, one can easily transfer licenses from one computer to another, or from a stick back to a computer. The particular memory still illustrated here is old and I don’t trust it entirely, so I’ll replace it with a new one before something untoward happens, and I’ll be able to do it in minutes. Further, I won’t have to spend another forty dollars for a newer iLok, and can spend ten dollars on a shiny new USB stick. Moreover, if that memory stick disappears, there’s a License Recovery screen that offers a simple way to recover Waves licenses from lost, stolen, or damaged USB flash drives or computers. Note that each license can be recovered only once per year. If the storage device for which a license has been recovered should reappear, logging into the License Center with the device connected will reset the license recovery period automatically. So at least as far as Waves is concerned, the iLok is dead; long live the iLok!
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