Hey guys,

Looking for the best de-esser. Something very clean and transparent, almost unnoticeable. I've been using Pro-DS and Pro-MB since the beginning but I wanna perfect my results. Any suggestions are highly appreciated.

Have a good Sunday!

 

try soothe

 

I've haven't tried much, but out of a number of dynamic EQs and a handful of dedicated tools like T-DeEsser, Accusonus DeEsser, I've liked SSL HF Comp best so far.

 

Weiss Deess, Oek Soothe, and of course if you want ultimate perfection and if the situation requires it you might want to manually edit stuff.

 

You want it better? Do it by hand.

 

Handmade.

 

No professional audio editor depends on de-esser plugins. If you want it perfect then practice doing it manually. That being said, the Fabfilter one and "Sibilance" by Waves are pretty good in my experience.

 

Last edited: Apr 21, 2024

I like Fabfilter Pro-DS, for non-vocal sibilance. But if price didn't matter I'd go with Oxford SuprEsser. I do not like it $200 more than Pro-DS.

 

Volume Envelope.

 

DMG Essense and/or Multiplicity. There's literally nothing more transparent on the market.

 

Fabfilter Pro Q-3 as dynamic EQ.

 

input envelop then sonible smart deess

 

Manually.

Or Sooth2 or Nova GE (two bands, one for 6k/tsch and one for ess/10k).

 

- Acustica Dove (better results than soothe2)
- Acustica Fire The Dees
- Plugin Alliance Lindell Audio 902 De-Esser

 

Split band & spectral de-essers are awful for vocals since they create a lisp. Pro-DS in single band mode is the best I've heard, a bit better than Essence (though Essence is better for non-vocal material imo)

Pro-DS has more accurate ess detection than Essence, whilst Essence can have even MORE lookahead which creates particularly smooth gain reduction & is as configurable as a de-esser can possibly get (though, again, ess detection seems to just be a basic threshold rather than comparing the loudness of the low-range vs the high-range like Pro-DS does)

Airwindows acceleration is a good high-frequency "limiter" yet still preserves "sheen" (like all airwindows plugs you really have to try it to truly grasp what it does)

Airwindows de-bess is also good, but lookahead is too good not to have in a de-esser imo (admittedly it's a dirty trick that isn't particularly "sophisticated" or "pretty", and latency obviously suffers)

 

I own Weiss, Essence, Soothe, Eiosis, Sonnox Suppressor, MH Precision Dresser, Lindell 902 all of which are good but the best are RJ Studios Limited S & TDR's Arbiter these mastering grade using different approaches and are incredible bargains, especially Arbiter.

 

If you're talking about vocal de-essing, there's an important part the whole topic seems to be missing.

Make sure it's a wideband de-esser.
High frequencies are very prevalent in sibilants (duuuh), but they don't consist of high freqs only. And if you try to lower them in multiband, your vocals will end up sound very lispy. You need to lower the whole signal once the sibilant starts in order for it to sound natural.

To that end, I do recommend Pro-DS in wideband mode (its multiband mode is for instruments and busses) above all other I know of.

If you really want to figure out how it works, you can try and use Pro-C 2 instead. Cut everything below the highs in its sidechain section (it'll make the compressor only "hear" and react to highs, but it won't cut the actual signal), set the algo to "vocals" and lookahead to max.

With Pro-C 2 you can also combine compression and de-essing. It's pretty simple actually, just set it up like you usually would for vocals, and up the highs in the same sidechain section by 10-15 dB. Don't be afraid, it won't change the dynamics of the normal vocals in a significant way (just make the threshold about 3-5 dB higher), but it will overemphasize the sibilants for the compressor.

 

Sonnox Surpressor