Following on from our recent low cost noise reduction tools shootout, Paul Maunder takes four of the more premium solutions and pits them against each other in a comparison test - which do you think performs the best?

Their cost of course varies from region to region but from lowest to highest priced (when not on sale) they are:

Acon Digital Acoustica 7 Premium Edition (£169.90)

Sonnox Restore Bundle (£393.75)

Waves Clarity VX Pro ($799)

iZotope RX 9 Advanced ($1199)

In each case, five noisy pieces of audio were used, each with its different noise problem. You can listen to the unprocessed samples below:

Both iZotope RX Advanced and Acon Digital Acoustica Premium Edition are suites of tools consisting of several plug-ins which can be used within a DAW, plus a standalone application which also includes the option of spectral editing.

Waves Clarity VX Pro is a single plug-in which includes some more advanced controls than the standard edition, including 4 separate bands with process amount, an additional neural network algorithm, the option to extract the voice and leave the ambience, analysis and sensitivity controls, a reflections control to restore lost reverb and a voice sensitive ambience gate.

The Sonnox Restore bundle is the oldest software in this test and was last updated back in 2016. It consists of 3 plug-ins; DeNoiser, DeBuzzer and DeClicker. It hasn’t yet been updated for M1 Macs and also isn’t compatible with Mac OS Monterey either. Nevertheless, it’s still available for purchase and sits between Acon Digital Acoustica and Waves Clarity VX Pro in terms of price so I thought it would be interesting to see how it fares against the other software in this test.

You might have expected to see Cedar included in a comparison of premium noise reduction tools. We contacted Cedar to ask if they would provide licences for the test but they declined, informing us that they have a policy of not having their products included in shoot outs.

The processed examples below have been randomised from one example to the next and labelled A to D. For each one, I experimented with various tools in both iZotope RX and Acon Digital Acoustica and used the ones which gave the best results. Likewise with the Sonnox Restore bundle.

Waves Clarity VX Pro has fewer options but I auditioned the different algorithms and also made use of some of the advanced controls. Take a listen to each example and vote on which one you think is best. The results will be revealed soon along with details of which specific processors from the iZotope, Acon Digital and Sonnox plug-ins were used for each.

The crackle was the most challenging to effectively reduce. In the case of iZotope RX and Acon Digital Acoustica I used a combination of spectral editing and more than one processor to achieve the best results. 

Click here to see the results!