Reverb Removal - are we there yet?

[MeldaProduction]

Well, so I checked both, and "Reverb Remover" seems like a simple gate with highpass in side-chain, no wonder their audio demoes are all on drums. Not useful really, you can do that manually, so that you could tweak it to your material.

Unveil is a different story, that thing really does something, that could be useful. Unfortunately it exhibits about the same problems as denoisers - the more you remove the reverb, the more you destroy the recording. I could see it used quite well on some vocals to remove the native ambience, but I'd be careful.


The thing is, an ideal reverb converges to white noise, so a reverb remover actually is kind of a denoiser. And I believe it's proven you cannot remove a noise without artifacts, this is even worse as the reverb is much louder.
So , yes, it is a myth, but we Unveil seems like a first drop in the rain of approximations that is probably to come .

[Aloysius]

Unveil seems like a first drop in the rain of approximations that is probably to come .

Oh yes Vojtěch, I like the sound of that!!!

[Spitfire31]

My first real life experience of Zynaptiq Unveil was on a jazz quintet concert recording that I made in a less than ideal hall.

By judiciously using Unveil on the final mix, I not only managed to get most of the hollow sounding reverb tamed to the point where I could almost make the recording sound like it had been made in a studio. I also lost quite a bit of muddiness in the bass and low mid range, caused by the layout of the hall.

Almost magic!

The keyword, in my case, is 'judiciously'. You've got to use your ears so as not to kill the sound, as Vojtech remarked above. With that caveat, Unveil can indeed work magic.

/Joachim

[Tricky-Loops]

Well, so I checked both, and "Reverb Remover" seems like a simple gate with highpass in side-chain, no wonder their audio demoes are all on drums. Not useful really, you can do that manually, so that you could tweak it to your material.

But if this were true, why do they write that it isn't a gate:

"DyVision Reverb Remover is NOT a gate or a transient shaper, but employs an entirely new approach to separate and remove reverb and leave you with a cleaner, 'dryer' signal."

[skitchy]

Well, so I checked both, and "Reverb Remover" seems like a simple gate with highpass in side-chain

@Melda - could you not post pure derogatory speculation about other peoples products please. Reverb Remover isn't a gate, and anybody with any degree of experience with audio could tell you that just by listening.
BTW the demos use drums because I found they show the most dramatic difference between 'wet' and 'dry'.
Its not a gate, or a transient shaper.

[bailees7irish]

http://www.kvraudio.com/product/dyvisio ... views/3855

[MeldaProduction]

Well, so I checked both, and "Reverb Remover" seems like a simple gate with highpass in side-chain

@Melda - could you not post pure derogatory speculation about other peoples products please. Reverb Remover isn't a gate, and anybody with any degree of experience with audio could tell you that just by listening.
BTW the demos use drums because I found they show the most dramatic difference between 'wet' and 'dry'.
Its not a gate, or a transient shaper.

Sorry about that, but I just cannot agree even to the name of it. It's your product, correct? I'm not saying I could just take a gate with side-chain and do the same thing (but I also cannot claim that I couldn't do better with a gain).

This is what I did - I used a few different loops and applied a mild short static reverb (no modulations, so the best scenario for a reverb remover). With minimum settings the Reverb remover did nothing noticeable. So I played with the knobs and at a point, where it started to do something, it was actually removing portions of the signal, and it sounded exactly like a gate to me.

To me it just removes the tail of each sound, hopefully the reverb tail, but it could only work for percussive sounds, which is why I think your demoes are on drums. Unfortunately even from drums it removes separate notes. It works in time domain, right? It doesn't really matter if it is just a gate or a more advanced one, the thing is, I don't see a chance I could use it on some HQ material, not even the drums probably, I'd rather take a gate or expander, where I could adjust it a little more, sorry. But my opinion is not that important, it will find some customers for sure.

On the other I also tested Unveil and I cannot say it was a big success. After all I could compare it with the original, without reverb. Whereas Reverb remover was destroying notes, Zynaptiq was creating alien sounds, typical for spectrum domain.

Well, the theory says reverb removal is impossible, so we can just try to do our best .

[MeldaProduction]

To the Reverb Remover - you got me curious, so I did a few more tests, and sorry, you won't like it. I used organ track, acoustic guitar track and slap-bass track. Again I added some nonmodulated reverb. In all of these tracks there was no reasonable improvement audible until the "Remove" knob was very high and at the moment it started clicking and poping, like a gate with low threshold. I also checked on an analyzer and looks like an exponencial expander (though I did spend with it like 2 minutes, so it was just a guess).

And one more thing - on the organ track (maybe others too) I found that with Remove knob at minimum, where it should do nothing, it does a big gain, you should check it out.

[skitchy]

EDIT - actually, you know what, I'm not going to bite. I recommend you all try Reverb Remover on your own material, and you'll see that it works. The demo is uncrippled apart from inserted noise every minute or so, and the full version has no copy protection because I don't believe in it.
Most of my sales are to non-music people (like green-screen film companies, voice over houses, that sort of thing) and I have NEVER had a SINGLE complaint - not one.

[Dzole]

Is it still a myth? Does a fully functional reverb removal VST exist? \

Waves: Z noise, X noise, X Click, X Crackle, X Hum!

[kvaca]

Is it still a myth? Does a fully functional reverb removal VST exist? \

Waves: Z noise, X noise, X Click, X Crackle, X Hum!

these are useful for removing artifacts like noise,hum,click...but it has nothing common with removing reverb, at lest when used correctly /and when abused-you still create more artifacts than reverb removal/

the truth is that reverb CANNOT be removed from steady tone without ugly artifacts...

[bmanic]

EDIT - actually, you know what, I'm not going to bite. I recommend you all try Reverb Remover on your own material, and you'll see that it works. The demo is uncrippled apart from inserted noise every minute or so, and the full version has no copy protection because I don't believe in it.
Most of my sales are to non-music people (like green-screen film companies, voice over houses, that sort of thing) and I have NEVER had a SINGLE complaint - not one.

Well, I'm actually working with both musical and non-musical material and I did try your reverb remover plugin about a month ago. To be absolutely frank, I was not impressed.

It was really difficult to get it setup so that it didn't chop and stutter the signal in a very un-natural way. When it did work it wasn't any better than my custom gating + transient designer stuff, in some cases it was worse (like multiple voices in a nasty sounding hallway).

Unveil fared much better but it has other problems, similar to denoiser algorithms (like Voytech said) and it too can struggle to really "remove" a reverb (early reflections aren't going anywhere so you still end up basically with a sound in a room/hall with it's tail removed).

So, on the basis of the demo, you say you never had any complaints.. well, don't get your hopes up just yet. Perhaps other people like me tried the demo and didn't really bother to give feedback as it just didn't work that well? This may sound harsh but looking at your responses here it seems like you haven't really gotten any real world feedback. I'd love to hear from one of your clients and see how they use the thing because believe me, I'd pay a pretty hefty price for a true reverb remover type process, even if it was an offline one that took an hour to render!

Cheers!
bManic

[strayboom]

i tried to remove reverb with audition.
- load a waveform
- capture noise print, well, capture a small amount of reverb at the end of the wave
- use this reverb noise print with noise reduction

this gives a good result overall, but can't do miracle.

[Spitfire31]

As a (so far) well satisfied user of Unveil, I'd like to toss in a caveat that IMV applies to reverb 'removal' even more than noise 'removal': treat it as a reducer, not as a 'remover'.

That's how I approached Unveil on a mixed jazz concert recording made in a somewhat cavern-like venue. By judiciously tweaking Unveil, I managed not only to tame the room 'over-spaciousness' but also reduce the low mid muddiness that the room induced. The idea wasn't to turn a live recording into a studio session but to subtly 'move the listener a closer' to the band.

I think that, at least with current technology, we can't expect complex algorithms to work completely transparently when applied in heavy doses. I think that we need to use our ears and tweak until we arrive at an audible improvement which, depending on the source material, will probably be a bit short of an imagined ideal result.

I recently restored an old noisy cassette interview made in a rather big room (a copy of a reel-to-reel recording at that). What I noticed first of all when applying Izotope RX twice to remove tape hiss, was that at a certain point, the recording sounded worse.

On investigating, I discovered that the cause wasn't NR artefacts but that a bit of residual noise hid small dropouts and other problems in the recording. So, in this case, a bit of residual noise was an advantage!

Finally I ran the de-noised result through Unveil at very conservative settings and removed just a touch of the room sound. Final result: not perfect but much improved and the client was happy.

Often, a little goes a long way.

/Joachim

[Liero]

Wise words. I'm very happy with unveil, although the pricing is a bit on the steep side.