Nils Schiffhauer – DK8OK

If you still desparately looking for a software to restore your recorded DX audio clips, iZotope’s RX6 offers an alomost perfect solution. While the de-crackling tool automatically removes all of these annoying statics, the near-unbelievable tool “Spectral de-noise” is doing wonders in extracting e.g. formants of speech out of noise, thus greatly enhancing intelligibility.

I did a convincing test with a clip of CKZN, New Foundland’s shortwave station still transmitting on 6.170 kHz with 1 kW; received June 1st, 2017 at around 02:00 UTC. The original recording is heard like this:

It looks like this, when opened in RX6, with spectrogram in the background:

First step was to automatically get rid of most of the static by “de-crackling”. RX6 offers you the chance to see also the garbage, e.g. what has been subtracted from the signal, see screenshot below with a focus on the identified crackles:

After this first step, the audio sounds like this:

Second step is the tool “Spectral D-noise”. Most comfortable is the “adpative mode”, where you see the audio much more clearly than in the original recording:

And that’s the way, it sounds, with 12 dB attenuation of noise (default):

Another mode is the “learning mode”, where you teach the software what it has to consider as noise in the recording, and then clean it up. First, I did it with the strongest value of 40 dB reduction:

Sounds quite artifical – but drop your ear onto the last part, how clean the jingle sounds!

With some right, default is 12 dB, listen here:

This may be reduced to even 6 dB – you have to find the right balance by yourself:

To restore audio of DX MP3 clips, is not where this software is really adressed to. But even for this purpose, it’s strong algorithms perform better than any other device/software, I’ve seen in the last 50 years. And there are a lot more functions to tweak a signal further. Not really cheap, but unique. There’s simply nothing better!