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Karl Foster, Personal Computer World, Wednesday 30 January 2008 at 00:00:00

RX promises to transform audio from wrecked to wonderful, with well-developed restoration tools

Noise destroys. No matter how carefully you prep a recording session, whether for music, video, podcasting or presentation, hum, hiss and buzz creep in. And with so many of us hauling our old LPs, tapes and analogue home movie soundtracks into the digital age, there's a clear demand for processing that can overcome the limitations of older sound-recording technologies. With this in mind, Boston-based developer Izotope has devised a suite of restoration tools that's not only dedicated to dealing with common audio horrors, but one that also includes highly sophisticated wave-massaging features. RX is a standalone application hosting five audio-restoration modules dedicated to removing distortion from overdriven analogue and digital recordings. These remove clicks and crackles from such physical media as vinyl and wax cylinder, eliminating the hiss common to recordings made with non-digital processors and tape, as well as cancelling hum from sources such as mains electricity. In all areas, RX performs admirably. With analogue audio digitised to disc, it's easy to batch-process a clean-up job on a bunch of vinyl album tracks, tame tape hiss and rescue signals afflicted with analogue or digital distortion. The Declipper, Declicker, Hum Removal and Denoiser modules are great, but RX's real bonus is its Spectral Repair. This allows you to precisely select any unwanted element, such as a cough, clunk or even a mobile's intrusive ringtone, and use the data surrounding the selection to cover the anomaly completely. Few restoration suites are as comprehensive, flexible and powerful as RX. At the price, it's a good choice for anyone seeking pristine audio from compromised recordings.

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