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< All Waves Z-Noise reviews
Hatsubai Hatsubai

« Dynamic noise reduction »

Published on 08/04/11 at 20:21
Waves has different plugins out there for noise reduction, but I find this one to be the king of them all. It's crazy versatile with tons of features thrown in to reduce almost any noise that you may be experiencing. Dealing with noise can be a huge pain, and it can ruin what would otherwise be a 100% perfect mix. Waves really knocked it out of the ball park with this plugin. It has adjustments for threshold, reduction, NR, attack, release, transients, knee, a 5 band EQ with on/off per band, shape adjustments, gain, frequency adjustment, Q control, noise profile capturing, extract/adaptive settings, optimize buttons, and tons more features that would take quite awhile to list. To use this, simply enable it on whatever buss you want to reduce your noise from and start from there. There are quite a few features packed into this, and it may help to read the manual. I personally never read it, although I can't imagine it not being helpful for those of you who are beginners.

SUITABILITY/PERFORMANCE

Waves rules for audio plugins. For one, they're always rock solid and super stable. I've never had a single crash while using any Waves plugin, and the same goes for this. The plugin itself doesn't take up much RAM or processing power, which is a big plus for those who tend to have tons of plugins going on inside of their DAWs. The plugin is also cross platform compatible, so just about anybody can use this without any issues at all. There is one issue that I did experience, and that has to do with the actual coding of the plugin and today's recent OSes/DAWs. The plugin is a 32 bit plugin. However, my DAW and OS are 64 bit OSes. For Logic Pro, my go-to DAW, to utilize this, it needs to run a special bridge application. However, I'm not a huge fan of the way Logic implements that feature. I'm hoping that Waves updates these to 64 bit in the future. I've been using the Waves Mercury bundle for the past half a year or so, and it's been absolutely killer.

OVERALL OPINION

This is one of the best noise reduction plugins I've ever had the pleasure of using. It has removed lots of noise from different mixes I've had, and it helped revive some of my older mixes that I was just never pleased with. It's pretty much the flagship noise reduction plugin from Waves, and I can see why. I highly recommend everyone try this out as I'm sure nearly everybody will have some sort of use for this.