Riverside’s Noise Suppression Feature

Someone recently asked me about using Riverside’s Noise Suppression feature when recording participants who have “noise” in their audio signal.

Riverside describes their Noise Suppression feature as: “Remove background noises such as AC fans, heaters, and other ambient sounds. This does not affect clicks, pops, and other transient sounds.”

Here’s my response to their question about using that Noise Suppression during the recording process:

I haven’t done any testing on the quality of Riverside’s Noise Suppression, but in general I would only RECORD using noise suppression/reduction if BOTH of these are true: 

• I won’t have the ability in post-production to do any noise reduction (which is virtually the same as their noise “suppression”)
• The participant has significant background noise which they CANNOT turn off or remove before we start recording.

And here’s the main reason you would not want to categorically use Noise Suppression on every participant in every recording session: Noise reduction in general can do significant damage to audio if it’s not done properly and/or it’s overdone. If someone has good audio with very little background noise you would NEVER want to use noise reduction on their audio because there’s no need, and because it could degrade the audio significantly.

What has your experience been with recording using noise suppression/reduction?

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