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152 Chapter 11 Special
Denoiser
The Denoiser eliminates or reduces almost any kind of noise floor.
Denoiser Parameters
Threshold
The value of this parameter determines how high you think the noise floor of the
material is.
Tip: Find a passage where only noise can be heard in isolation, and set the Threshold
value so that only signals of this volume will be filtered out.
Reduce
Reduce determines the level that the noise floor should be reduced to. A CD
theoretically has a maximum signal to noise ratio of 96 dB. Each 6 dB reduction is
equivalent to halving the volume level (a 6 dB increase equals a doubling of the
volume level).
If the noise floor of your recording is very high (on recordings from cassette—more
than −68 dB), you should be content with reductions of 83 to 78 dB, provided that
there aren’t any plainly audible side effects. After all, you have reduced the noise by
more than 10 dB, which is less than half of the original volume.
Noise Type
This value effectively states what type of noise you think the material contains:
• A value of 0 means white noise (equal frequency distribution);
• Positive values change the noise type to pink noise (harmonic noise; greater bass
response),
• Negative values change the noise type to blue noise (Hiss—tape noise).
Smoothing
The Denoiser uses FFT (Fast Fourier Transform) analysis to recognize frequency bands of
a lower volume and less complex harmonic structure, and then reduces them to the
desired dB value. In principle, this method is never exact, as neighboring frequencies
will also be affected.