Room Reduction

Room Reduction takes the echo out of a voice in a big room: a church, a hall, a gym, a room with bare walls. The voice keeps its words and its closeness; the tail that hangs after each word is turned down. It is a step of a source’s processing and adds 11 ms of delay.

How it works

A room rings after every word for as long as its walls keep the sound. Room Reduction follows how long that is, the room’s reverberation time, and turns down what is still sounding after a word has ended. The first reflections, under 50 ms, stay, so a voice still sounds close.

It only ever takes away. A held note, such as a sung one, loses up to 3 dB, because the step hears a steady sound as the room’s tail; speech, which stops, does not.

Listen to the Room

Listen to the Room hears how long this room rings. Have someone speak for 20 seconds at the speaking position, in sentences with short pauses, while the step is on. The window then says Rings with the time in seconds and when it was heard. Until then, it says Not heard; 0.7 s assumed.

When the listening fails, the window says why:

The window says	What to do
Heard no sound: is the source live?	check that the source’s sound arrives: its meter moves
No room heard: pause between sentences; Voice Isolation hides it	speak with pauses; turn off the Mac’s Voice Isolation for the microphone

With a venue in use, the venue keeps what was heard, and the next show there starts from it.

The settings

Setting	Does
Strength	how much of the tail is taken away, 0 to 100 %
Max Reduction	the most any part of the sound is turned down, 3 to 18 dB, so the voice never goes hollow

The Preset menu has Default, Light and Strong. In a dry room, under 0.6 s, or on a lav close to the mouth, the step takes less by itself.

Read more

• Reduce a room’s echo
• Venues
• Clean Voice