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Edit Review: Audio Ease Speakerphone

Aug 1, 2008 12:00 PM, Reviewer: Gary Eskow

Powerful cross–platform post tool places audio in almost any virtual space.

Let me risk being repetitive and say once again that the tools being placed before the audio-post community keep getting better, easier to use, and less expensive. Software designers such as those at Audio Ease understand that in order to maximize their customer base, the products must balance power and ease of use. In the past, we've discussed Altiverb, Audio Ease's flagship convolution-reverb product (see digitalcontentproducer.com/
soundforpic/revfeat/
audio_ease_altiverb). This month, we'll take a look at Speakerphone,the company's latest application. If you'd like to increase the chances that you'll be able to keep your audio-post work inhouse, this is a product you should know about.

Speakerphone ships with more than 5GB of ambience samples, 500 presets, and one goal: to help you place your audio files in almost any virtual space imaginable — such as in a stadium, on the radio, or over a megaphone.

For example: You recorded a pair of actors directly to a hard drive in your studio, but according to the script, they're speaking on the telephone. No problem. Not only is there a classic phone preset, there are others that will place the actors in a variety of environments — and you can choose from multiple land-line and cell-phone connection types.

Speakerphone is a cross-platform product. I installed it on a Windows XP computer. For some reason, my first attempt did not properly execute the installation; the plug-in installed, but the associated samples did not. Running the installer a second time solved the problem.

If you're squeamish about tweaking audio parameters, the Speakerphone presets will suffice most of the time. But it's easy to edit the program's parameters. Perhaps your film begins with a scene set in the 1920s. You've licensed a piece of orchestral stock music written in the rhumba style, but the recording is too clean.

You choose “78rpm-wow and crackles” from the preset list, and it sounds good. Your clean track passes through the impulses of an ancient 78rpm machine like the one your great grandma used to play her Enrico Caruso collection. Doing so makes it sound like an authentic historical recording. But you want to highlight the grainy quality of the images onscreen even more, so you go into the phono quadrant of the software and raise the level of the ticks.

Good, but still not quite right. So you click on the speaker area, and you are presented with a list of alternative record players you can use to play back your music. Once you've chosen the perfect record player, the director (you, as it turns out) decides he likes the music so much he wants to use it later in the film when the lead actress is riding down a country lane in her Model T. To tailor the music more specifically to the moving image, you turn on the tuning parameter (which emulates the sound of a radio's frequency band being scanned), choose “AM bad reception” from its preset list, and automate this feature so that you can mirror the movements of the actress as she searches for a station on the dial.

Of course, if it turns out that a Model T from this time period never had a radio, you're either out of luck or extremely creative. By the way, if you don't want to hear an effect unless an audio file is playing, you can select Speakerphone's Mute When Stopped button. Unfortunately, you have to turn this button off and on again each time you edit a parameter — a limitation which I hope Audio Ease will address in the near future.

Speakerphone borrows heavily from its older brother Altiverb, using many of the impulse responses that were created for the earlier product. The simulation of guitar-amp cabinets is one of the hot areas in audio software development, and Speakerphone contains quite a few impulses of this kind. Even without any audio-engineering experience, you'll be able to place guitar loops inside amplifiers easily and radically change the effect of the music.

I own a 1962 Fender Deluxe Reverb amplifier. I loaded the “breakfast in the field” preset, which features a 1967 Deluxe Reverb, to test its accuracy. Then I dragged a four-bar guitar loop of a standard blues shuffle onto a stereo audio track inside Steinberg Cubase 4. I was extremely impressed by the authenticity of this preset. The signal passes through the Fender to a plate reverb, and because its creators found the effect amusing, samples of a dog barking and field ambience are activated in the sample bay portion of the interface, which you can turn off.

But don't stop there. Every parameter comes with its own dropdown list of presets, so we'll swap out the “breakfast in the field” compressor settings with others and see how they affect the sound. For some reason, when you go into these lists, the active preset is not highlighted, which I found a bit annoying. To get back to the original settings once you've played around with them, you'll need to reload the preset.

Behind its charming GUI, Speakerphone offers a powerful amount of processing power. In addition to the compressor, there's an equalizer that contains high- and low-band pass filters and two channels of parametric EQ, a gate, and a delay unit that can be synced to the tempo of your host sequencer.

Studying Speakerphone's presets will teach you a lot about how to use these devices. The series of “beat crusher” presets is designed to be used on rhythmic loops. For example, load up a drum loop, swap out several of these presets, study the settings on the delay, and then apply these settings to other material. You'll quickly get a feel for the way these effects work, including standard ones such as the EQ device and more esoteric processors such as the codec.

The codec is a wonderful processor that could only have brought into being by a company that is obsessed with the creative ways that audio can be mangled. For starters, you pass your audio through various codecs in order to replicate the sound of different cellular and land-line phones authentically. Audio Ease took things a step further, however, and built presets that let you turn speech — or other audio — into a robotic monotone or a whisper. Experiment by passing your audio through different codecs and a variety of speakers, and soon you'll be creating your own presets that you can save and apply to other audio tracks in the future.

Finally, there's the sample bay itself to consider. When you call up a preset, this area (located at the bottom of Speakerphone) automatically loads all of the sounds that ship with the plug-in. You can add to this library by using the application's browser to locate any other .wav files on your hard drive. You can also use your MIDI keyboard to play presets against picture in realtime. The Speakerphone guided tour (www.audioease.com/Pages/Speakerphone/speakerphone_themovie.html) says that you can drag files from the sample bay onto audio tracks in your host DAW, but that didn't work for me. I contacted tech support and received an email saying that Cubase 4 is one of the few digital audio workstations (DAWs) that does not support this drag-and-drop operation. If you're using any other DAW besides Digidesign Pro Tools, it would be wise to contact the company before making a purchase if this functionality is critical for you.

If it sounds as though I'm an unabashed fan of Speakerphone, it's because I am. This is a product that is suitable both for the technically trained audio-post engineer and the video producer looking to save money by posting audio on his or her own. Beyond audio post, the applicability of this product to the music industry is obvious. Speakerphone is easy to use, has plenty of power under the hood, and tackles some familiar territory in a fresh way.

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bottomline

Company: Audio Ease
www.audioease.com

Product: Speakerphone

Assets: Ships with 5GB of ambience samples and 500 presets to imitate a variety of amps and loudspeakers (including telephones), tackles some familiar territory in a fresh way.

Caveats: Potential minor usability issues with some host applications.

Demographic: Tech-savvy audio-post engineers, video producers looking to tackle audio, musicians.

PRICE: $460

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