Noise enhancement
Noise enhancement
We all have the ability to block out constant background noises and often using a gate to eliminate background noises altogether defeats this mechanism. This tends to draw our attention to the noise when the gate opens. Typically, adjusting the gate range down to 10dB or 15dB produces results that sound much more natural.
Ducking
Ducking is used to automatically reduce the signal levels when the level of a source signal (from the external sidechain) goes over threshold. This is typically used in situations requiring a voice-over. For example, when an announcer or DJ wants to speak, the background music is automatically made to duck (is attenuated) so that their voice can be heard clearly and at a normal level.
De-essing
Compressors have traditionally been used for de-essing, but the degree of de-essing achieved is very level dependent, that is, the loud passages will have sibilance ("s" sounds) attenuated more than the quiet ones.
De-essing using the duck mode of the DN530 is an alternative way of removing sibilance, rather than using compression. Use the solo to tune the sidechain filter into the sibilance (around 10kHz). Set the attack relatively fast (1ms), and similarly with the release (30ms), plus a little hold and then trim the threshold so that the gate meter respond to all the sibilant sounds but not to normal speech. Attenuation ranges that are between 6dB to 10dB will produce the best results, consistently reducing sibilance to the same degree.
