Waves WNS Noise Suppressor

Noise is something that's inevitable with recording, especially guitars. While you don't tend to experience it in a purely digital world with modelers and such (meaning they don't actively induce noise, although they can produce it), recording high gain guitars will pretty much always give you some sort of noise. To combat that, you can either use automation efficiently or just run a noise suppressor. I've done both methods with success. The Waves WMS noise suppressor is a very solid noise suppressor that gives you a lot of versatility. In fact, it's more versatile than most noise suppressors out there as it's more meant to clean up the sound than to actually be a normal noise suppressor, although you can use it for either application just fine. Listing the features of this would take awhile, but you mostly have different sliders that adjust frequencies of noise that you're looking to cancel out. To use it, just put it on whatever buss you want to reduce the noise from. I've never read the manual, but Waves tends to have great support, so I can't imagine you being left out in the dust if you're having issues.

SUITABILITY/PERFORMANCE

Waves plugins are some of the best out there, bar none. For one, they're cross platform. For a Mac user, that means the world. I'm always trying to support companies that support Mac, and Waves has been pretty good about that since the whole Intel switch. I've used these in Logic without any problems. Although they're 32 bit plugins, Logic will add a bridge to allow you to use them in a 64 bit environment as to not limit you to the amount of ram you can utilize. On top of that, these things are rock solid. I've never had a crash with Waves plugins at all.

OVERALL OPINION

This is a very solid plugin if you're looking to reduce noise from the overall track, and I find it works great for that. You can really sculpt where you want to reduce the noise and clean up the overall signal. It works awesome for some of those older analog recordings you may have laying around. You can use it as a normal gate, but I find that you're wasting a lot of features when you use it that way. A basic gate doesn't need to have as many features as this has. If you have some recordings you're looking to clean up, check this out, and I'm sure you'll be surprised.

The Waves Ltd. WNS Waves Noise Suppressor is a new plug-in from Waves designed to filter out extraneous noise for both mixing and audio restoration purposes. To date, this is probably the best piece of software to do this, at least that I have seen and used. It works in real time, so it makes it super easy to zoom right in on what you're trying to filter out. I wasn't involved with the installation process with this plug-in, as it was already installed at the studio that I used it at before I got there. The interface of the software is quite user friendly, while at the same time it is very in depth with what you can do with it. It makes it easy to zero in on exactly what you're trying to do. I don't believe that a manual is necessary, although I haven't seen it so I can't say too much about it.

SUITABILITY/PERFORMANCE

Although I've only used the Waves Ltd. WNS Waves Noise Suppressor one time, I didn't encounter any problems in terms of performance. I ran it on a Pro Tools HD System, but even if you were to run it on a LE system or something similar, I don't think that you'll have too hard of a time running it. Like most users will probably be doing with this plug-in, I only used a single instance of the plug-in, and for this type of use I don't forsee too many people having issues.

OVERALL OPINION

The Waves Ltd. WNS Waves Noise Suppressor does its job better than any other noise plug-in out there that I have used before. It is definitely the smoothest sounding, but beyond the sound it is very easy to use. I typically don't need to filter out much noise as I used this for mixing rather than audio restoration, this is a very powerful plug-in to have around as you never know when you might need to do some serious noise filtering. The only down side to the plug-in is that since it is new, it does cost a great deal of money. For now, I'd really only recommend this to those looking for a top tier noise filtering plug-in for audio restoration because of the price.