Have you ever needed to increase the volume of low-level dialogue in production audio? Audio can be recorded without the proper gain structure, lowering the signal to noise ratio and making dialogue too quiet. When you increase the level of the dialogue, you also increase the level of the noise. ADX SVC (Speech Volume Control) automatically identifies speech and separates it from noisy content, allowing you to control these elements independently.

Here’s how to adjust the speech and noise elements in a mix using ADX SVC. Follow along step-by-step, or watch the video walkthrough:

SVC is compatible with these DAWs. Regardless of your DAW, the same simple steps apply.

STEP 1: Acquire the original mix

In this example, several people are speaking in a scene of a meeting, and the level of the dialogue is too quiet. First load the clip into your DAW – in this example we’re using Cubase. Choose SVC from the track FX list and activate it. Then play through the audio clip. You can also use offline bounce if this is a feature in your DAW.

STEP 2: Set options

Choose the Pitch Range of the speech in your clip. In this case, we select the Male preset from the Speech Settings.

Then select Separation options to choose which algorithms are applied to the process. For this example we’ll select AVAD (automatic voice activity detection) which will apply the processing only where speech is detected (as opposed to throughout the entire clip). We’ll also turn on High Quality, which will help isolate the voice compared to noise, and HF Boost, which

STEP 3: Separate
Press Separate and the audio is analyzed and the speech identified and separated from the wind noise.

STEP 4: Control

Turn down the background noise and/or turn up the speech to find the appropriate balance between speech and noise.

Have an idea for a future video tutorial? Let us know at support@audionamix.com.