Like many, I eagerly anticipate each year the new release of iZotope RX to see what new goodies they have for us. But more than that, I want to see if there are real advances in the things I really need, like noise reduction and rescuing badly recorded audio. I’ve run a few audio shootouts over the last couple of years and it has been clear that iZotope have slipped behind compared to the likes of Waves Clarity Vx and Supertone Clear for noise reduction or Accentize dxRevive and Adobe’s Enhance Speech for audio restoration.

We’ve already covered what’s new in RX 11, like the new Streaming Preview or the Mid/Side mode. Here I’m mainly looking at the Dialogue Isolate module in RX, which now happily comes in RX Standard and now runs as a plug-in.

Pricing

In terms of pricing, Clear, dxRevive and the combo of both Clarity Vx plugins are all at the $100 mark. There are also the pro versions – $300 for dxRevive Pro and $400 for both pro Waves plugins. Adobe’s Enhance Speech continues to be free online or included in Premiere Pro.

iZotope RX 11 Standard is $400 (currently $300 on sale) and RX 11 Advanced is $1200 (currently $800). RX Standard has 33 modules in total and Advanced has 44, so you’re unlikely to buy it for noise reduction alone, but I have found as an editor I often reach for other modules like De-clip, Ambience Match or Spectral Repair.

Testing methodology

I’m testing RX 11’s Dialogue Isolate against the leading competitors as well as against RX10. If like me you are trying to decide whether to upgrade this year, I hope this will help. I’ve taken out RX Voice Denoise from my testing as it doesn’t really compete (but is still great for minor ambience reduction). I’ve also taken out Davinci Resolve’s Voice Isolation as it’s really something you’ll only use if you’re in Resolve & it’s not worth going there specifically for.

As usual I am pushing the noise reduction quite far to try to hear the differences.

For Adobe’s Enhance Speech I ran it in Premiere Pro as I think this is the most used workflow. An Adobe rep recently said that the model used online can afford to be bigger and so produces better results, so that’s an option for your trickiest audio.

With RX 10 I used both Dialogue DeReverb and Dialogue Isolate modules together (which are now combined in RX11) and I did the same with Waves Clarity Vx’s two plugins – too much reverb is just as much an issue as background noise after all. For dxRevive I tested with the newer 1.1 release which has given us a new improved model called “Studio 2” (plus an algorithm “Natural” featured only in the Pro version which is $300).

I’ll note that with RX 11 Advanced the Dialogue Isolate module includes multiband processing (similar to the Pro versions of Clarity Vx and dxRevive), but I haven’t used that here.

On with the testing – Test 1

For me, RX 11’s Dialogue Isolate does a wonderful job in this first test – it is my favourite of all the plug-ins tested in terms of keeping the original tone of the voice – and it does significantly better than RX 10. It’s a good example of why you don’t always want the enhancement of Enhance Speech or dxRevive. As you’ll see below, it wasn’t always as clear cut as this, but still I am pretty impressed.

Test 2

Here I am testing what is now a common occurrence – someone sending you some voice over recorded on their phone.

My winner is Adobe’s Enhance Speech – I feel it has taken out the noise and improved the EQ on the voice to produce the best sounding output. But after that, RX11 and Clear come in joint second and again RX11 is better than RX10 though it’s not as noticeable. Of course you would also want to EQ out some of the bass rumble.

Test 3

This is the hardest test I am throwing at the tools on display – with both heavy street traffic and lots of reverb present.

This time I only hear a very little improvement in RX 11 over RX 10 and both do a pretty good job. Supertone Clear struggled on this one, where Waves Clarity Vx was much stronger & the best of the non-enhancers for me. Enhance Speech and dxRevive were both were spoiled by artifacts. So I will give Waves the win here.

Test 4

In this fourth test there are annoying camera focus noises as well as some gentle ambience. This time I didn’t try to push the plug-ins so hard, but used lower settings on each tool to reduce the background noise slightly to try to not affect the voice at all. I noted that the camera noise was limited to a very small frequency range around 500Hz, so I also tested the Spectral Repair tool which is included in RX Standard.

As expected, going after the specific frequency brought the best results & was the only one that got rid of the camera noise completely and so iZotope RX takes the win here (whether version 10 or 11). After that, all of them did a pretty good job, except that I have to dock some points from Enhance Speech for turning the camera noise into Daft Punk style words at the end! (I did test this clip on the online version of Enhance Speech and it didn’t do this there).

Conclusion

I think it’s fair to say that in the game of noise reduction, iZotope have caught up with leading players like Supertone Clear and Waves Clarity Vx with the release of RX 11. I wouldn’t say they’ve surpassed them, but I think in my tests RX was perhaps a bit more reliable – achieving an overall lower level of artifacts.

It’s still the case that ideally you have multiple tools, because they each tend to do better in different circumstances. And the voice enhancement tools remain a bit hit and miss, but can be incredibly powerful when they work.

So do you buy? For an editor who just wants a good noise reduction plugin to use in their NLE, the much lower price will mean that Clear or Clarity Vx will be an easier choice. For audio post professionals who most likely already have RX Advanced, I think the upgrade this year is well worth it, alongside the other new or improved tools. For someone who is thinking of bringing RX into their workflow for the first time, using its multiple modules to clean up their audio – I think this is a pretty good year to do it.