Waves X-Hum

Hum can be a real pain to battle, especially with some of this older outboard gear. While ground loops can be found with proper ground lifts and whatnot, DC hum and such can be a huge pain as it usually means you'll have to rewire your entire house or potentially even move completely. X-Hum helps people that are battling hum in their recordings and just can't seem to get rid of it. It's a simple to use plugin that has some nice features packed into it. There are adjustments for the high pass filter, filter type, frequency, notch filters, q control, link controls, gain, output gain, different monitoring modes and more. To use this, simply enable it on your master buss and start tweaking. It's really that simple. I've never read the manual, but it's not really needed for a plugin as basic as this.

SUITABILITY/PERFORMANCE

Waves is the king when it comes to things like stability and performance. They're almost unbeatable in this category. I've never experienced a single crash or hiccup while using this plugin inside of my favorite DAW -- Logic Pro. The plugin is cross compatible, and that means that almost every user out there should be able to utilize this plugin on their favorite machine. It also doesn't take up too much RAM or processing power, which is a huge plus. There is one issue I have experienced, however. The plugin itself is a 32 bit plugin. I run a 64 bit DAW, and it can be a real pain because Logic Pro has to run a special bridge application to utilize this inside the 64 bit workspace. I'm hoping they'll update this plugin later down the road to work in 64 bit environments natively. I've been using the Mercury bundle for about half a year now, and I'm loving every minute of it.

OVERALL OPINION

I've had some outboard gear in the past that would hum quite a bit, even after I fixed the ground loop that was occurring. However, due to some wiring issues in the house (or the power transformer outside), I kept getting some hum that was a huge pain to deal with. Thankfully, this plugin took care of most of that hum and helped keep the wave forms I was dealing with fairly clean. It wasn't 100% perfect, but it saved one of my mixes that would have otherwise been totally trash.

Waves Ltd's X-Hum is an audio restoration plug-in that aims to remove hum gotten from not being properly grounded and otherwise. It works in a way where there are 8 harmonically linked notch filters that work simultaneously to remove the full hum. Ever wonder why it's hard to fully remove noise with a single band of EQ without losing something? I installed this plug-in along with the full Waves Complete bundle, so doing so wasn't any different than installing any of the other Waves plug-ins, as it shouldn't be anyway. The interface of the plug-in gives you control over the primarily frequency and Q width, as well as eight gain knobs for each of the filters. Everything is plotted on a graph for easy visualization. Other parameters include a high pass filter and overall output levelers. I haven't had a look at the manual for this plug-in as one wasn't really necessary for me.

SUITABILITY/PERFORMANCE

The system that I'm running the Waves Ltd. X-Hum plug-in on at home is Pro Tools LE based. I'm running version number 8 of the industry standard DAW with a Digi 002R audio interface. The computer I'm running everything on is a Mac Book Pro lap top that consists of a 2.2 Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, and 4 GB of RAM. This has been more than adequate for running this plug-in, as I've never needed to run more than one or two instances at a time.

OVERALL OPINION

The Waves Ltd. X-Hum is only found in the Waves Audio Restoration bundle and other plug-in bundles as it isn't available as an individual plug-in. If you're looking into this plug-in, chances are that you're going to want the complete Audio Restoration bundle anyway. This is by far the way to remove hum and other noise that I've found out there. It's incredibly precise, and if you know what you're doing a little bit, more times than not it will do an awesome job. If you're looking for some tools to remove all types of unwanted noise, there's nothing better than this bundle and X-Hum!