Spectral Gate/Expander with no artifacts

[pluginnow]

Hi!
This is a double post, there's another one on the "Sound Design", but had no replies.

To the topic:

I know it's possible to do it, because I have heard it. It gives a clean, smooth signature to the mix.

Have tryed over many years with every kind of noise gates, Melda Spectral Dynamics, inverted cockos Fir. etc. Can't do it.

Thanks in advance any idea!

[cron]

Spectral gating will, to my mind, always sound extremely harsh because the boundaries between muted and active regions of the spectrum are equivalent to filters/EQ with infinitely steep slope/roll-off, and those filters are constantly moving. This is basically the opposite of clean and smooth. If you bust out a (relatively) gentle 24db per octave filter or EQ cut and sweep it around, chances are you're going for an obviously filtered sound.

DSMv3 is the only plugin similar to MSpectralDynamics I'm aware of and IIRC it will do nice sounding spectral expansion and compression. I'm sure if you hit the learning curve hard it can be great on the master bus, but for me it and tools like it are more about solving problems than adding sheen.

[Neon Breath]

http://www.soundhack.com/spectral-shapers/

[pluginnow]

Yes, I have tried the Spectral-Shapers. They produce some artifacts explained by Cron, and they have limited FFT size on the Windows version.

But I heard some guys saying this expansion can be made in the analog world, on the amplifier (or pre-amplifier) stage of a Hi-Fi system... any clue?

Thank you!

[imrae]

Where is the line between "spectral" and "multi-band" being drawn? As I understand it DSM v3 uses a large number of filter bands, but nowhere near one band per FFT bin. Where do vocoders sit on this spectrum?

I think a lot of plugins use "spectral" to mean "directly processing FFT bins".

[SeeingInMidi]

You can try soothe2 on delta mode. Playing with the depth will essentially adjust the threshold.

[cron]

Where is the line between "spectral" and "multi-band" being drawn? As I understand it DSM v3 uses a large number of filter bands, but nowhere near one band per FFT bin. Where do vocoders sit on this spectrum?

I think a lot of plugins use "spectral" to mean "directly processing FFT bins".

You might be right here. I've had a look through the manual and, while it does use FFT for the analysis at the very least, it's a bit cagey about how the resultant processing is applied. 49 samples of latency at 44.1/48 kHz seems very low for an FFT based plugin too. I use Elevate as my primary limiter, and I think it offers more (time-domain) bands than you'd get bins from 49 samples.

[pluginnow]

How about this: https://patents.google.com/patent/US4700361

[Dasheesh]

https://dmgaudio.com/products_expurgate.php

[Dasheesh]

https://www.bozdigitallabs.com/product/ ... iful-door/

[pluginnow]

Dasheesh, that only have 3 bands...

[pluginnow]

Hello!

Four years later... any new idea about this?

Regards

[Tj Shredder]

Its in the nature of the beast. If you don‘t want artifacts, lower the amount of noise suppression until it sounds good…
If you want it analog, take a multiband filter and add a noise gate to each band. There you can play with attack and release times, which will add their own artifacts…

[Ah_Dziz]

Most fft based thresholding effects can be made to sound pretty clean by adjusting the maximum gain reduction and attack/ release along with window overlap and fft size. I'm assuming you mean fft based when you say "spectral" as these do their processing in the spectral domain rather than the time domain.
Without knowing what it is you want to do it's kind of hard to try and offer advice, but SH spectral shapers can do extremely subtle processing if you take the time to draw in the threshold and spend time dialing in the time constants. MSpectralDynamics can also accomplish pretty smooth processing.

[bobmic]

Give the Har-Bal gate a try sometime. It is quite good.