Recording - August 2012 - 50

PLUG-IN OUTLET
With Eos, UNVEIL was able to bring the djembe track up out of the wash of reverb to some extent. But even with quite conservative settings, the Plate One algorithm in Eos was simply too much for UNVEIL to handle, and the resulting audio still had a lot of tonal alteration and remnant reverb in it. This didn’t surprise me too much, as Eos is a “character” reverb designed for extremely rich tonal alteration and long reverb times. (That’s why I love it!) I switched over to Breeze and set up the “Give It Some Space” small-room preset with a slightly tweaked reverb time (about 2 seconds). This was an obvious ambience that was very much a part of the track, yet UNVEIL still did a startlingly good job of lessening it and bringing the djembe track way out front again. See Figure 1 for a before-and-after look at the audio loop with reverb (green) and after UNVEILing (purple). The other instructive example was an early version of a stereo mix of a song by a friend, where the engineer had accidentally

Final thoughts And so we’re back where we started: We used to say that practical de-reverberation was impossible, and now we have UNVEIL. It’s not perfect but it is fascinating to play with and has lots of potential. I can see it finding a home not only in conventional audio production but also in surround upmixing (as described above), news/location recording and perhaps in forensic audio as well (it’s brilliant at pulling voices up out of background noise), and even in sound design (you can isolate and change the balance of different elements in a sound in ways no other plug-in can). This is pretty heady stuff! Does all this impossible-made-possible come with any caveats? A few. First of all, UNVEIL is not for Macs that are light on processing power. Zynaptiq recommends at least a dual-processor Mac with 2.4 GHz clock speed or greater, and my attempts to break those recommendations came at a stiff price. I could run UNVEIL on my 2.0 GHz Core 2 Duo MacBook, but a single instantiation of the plug-in in Ableton Live Intro 8.2.8 with nothing else going on boosted my CPU load to 45%, and actually running audio through it kicked it up well over 50%. If you don’t have a multicore machine (like my 8-core Mac Pro, which liked UNVEIL just fine), this is going to be a “listen, process, and render” plug-in.

Fig 1

Fig 2

UNVEIL processing audio on a simple djembe loop (Fig. 1, left) and a complex stereo mix (Fig. 2, right). The waveform scrolls in real time—you’re seeing each audio transient as a spike with its reverb as a tail to the right of it. Where the green (input) and purple (output) displays match, UNVEIL isn’t doing anything.
put too much reverb on the lead vocal. I ran it through UNVEIL with relatively conservative settings, and could hear how the plug-in brought the lead vocal forward in the mix and got the heavy reverb under control for a better-sounding result. Figure 2 shows what UNVEIL looked like when working on this relatively complex 2-mix. Are these letter-perfect removals of all reverb from these tracks? No, of course not. But they’re noticeable, often dramatically so, and perhaps more importantly, they’re not unmusical or inherently bad-sounding. Yes, the tonality of the recorded tracks has changed significantly, and Scott Dorsey’s caution from his 2009 editorial remains true—the best way to not have too much reverb in your mixes is to not record it in the first place. But there’s something significant going on in UNVEIL, and even if it’s not perfect now, it points the way toward some pretty startling possibilities in the future. You can go to our website at www.recordingmag.com/ resources/resourceDetail/386.html and listen to the audio examples of the tests I’ve described here. If that’s not enough (and I doubt it will be!), you can go to the Zynaptiq website and check out the product video of UNVEIL in action, which has some pretty dramatic examples of work with recorded music, location audio, and sound design elements. And while you’re there, you can download and try out the demo version of UNVEIL for yourself.
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The next caveat is pretty much ignorable if you’re comfortable with your DAW but still worth mentioning: there is no built-in preset load/save capability in UNVEIL. It does ship with about 15 presets and you can save your own using your DAW’s plug-in handling feature set, but you can’t do it within UNVEIL. That’s particularly important in the standalone version, which can’t save settings at all. This isn’t a huge loss, as the plug-in really requires careful tweaking for every new audio source you feed it, but if you have a set of generalized starting parameters that work well for a particular kind of audio that you process frequently, you’ll need to rely on your DAW to move them around. Last but not least, UNVEIL isn’t cheap. There’s a lot of power and a lot of possibilities in here, and you’ll have to pay to get your hands on them. But if you do any sort of audio processing work that benefits from being able to increase intelligibility and clarity of sound sources, or if you’re in the business of rescuing tracks that have been mismanaged without access to the original source material, or (perhaps especially!) if you have a fascination for the new, the different, and the frankly amazing... you’re going to want to give UNVEIL a listen for yourself. This is the first step into a new world, and while it’s not capable of working miracles of perfect reverb removal, what it can do is still pretty darned impressive.

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Recording - August 2012

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