Why a Top NYC Post House Switched to Acoustica 8

How an Emmy-winning New York post house replaced their old restoration workflow with Acoustica 8, without slowing down.

Changing audio repair tools mid-career is a big ask. When you’re mixing to deadline, there’s no spare week to learn a new suite and rebuild your workflow around it.

That’s why we were so pleased to hear from the team at String and Can, a New York City audio post house that has been mixing film, television and independent documentaries since 2010. Their mixers moved from iZotope RX to Acoustica 8, and in their words, the switch was “very seamless.”

We sat down with three of them to hear why.

Meet the mixers

• Ian Stein, re-recording mixer and supervising sound editor, has worked across almost every corner of audio post.
• Brian Bracken, re-recording engineer, works on non-fiction and scripted programming. He has 10 Emmy nominations and three wins so far.
• Lou Teti, re-recording mixer, has been at String and Can since it opened in 2010, mixing film, TV and independent docs.

A switch that didn’t break the workflow

“The problem with using a new suite of plugins is you don’t always have time to figure it out and change your workflow. I’m sort of set in my ways. To be honest, switching from RX to Acoustica has been very seamless.” — Ian Stein

Part of that comes from how Acoustica 8 is packaged. You get the full toolkit in one purchase, not a starter set with add-ons to buy later.

“It’s the whole entire bundle. It’s not like you are getting only a few plugins that you then have to buy additionally after the fact. You get everything all in one package.” — Brian Bracken

The full Acoustica, right inside Pro Tools

Round-tripping to a standalone editor is fine once or twice. Doing it all day adds up. Acoustica 8’s ARA integration puts the complete editor inside Pro Tools, with nothing stripped out.

“One of the really nice things about the ARA version of Acoustica is that it’s not the stripped-down version of the plugin. It’s the full plugin. The same features you get in the standalone app, you get right inside Pro Tools. Round-tripping to the standalone app starts to become pretty cumbersome when you’re doing that all day long.” — Lou Teti

Speed is everything

In post, every minute spent waiting on a render is a minute not spent on the client. That was the point the String and Can team came back to most often.

“Processing AudioSuite with some of the other plugins takes a really long time, enough that it’s cumbersome. I actually went as far as to time them. Acoustica is really fast. It’s the fastest one that I have used.”

“DeNoise 3, that render time is fantastic when I use it in AudioSuite. Speed is everything. You need to get things done as fast as possible so that you can focus on pleasing the client and not worry about your audio quality.”

Dialogue cleanup with minimal artifacts

For day-to-day dialogue repair, the team leans on three tools.

• DeHum 3 removes hum with a single slider and very few artifacts. “It’s kind of a no-brainer.”
• DeNoise 3 handles broadband noise quickly, even when rendered in AudioSuite.
• Extract:Dialogue 2 lowers a static noise floor and tames reverb tails that run too long.

“Extract:Dialogue 2 is great when you want to get a static noise floor lowered. You can also tune in your reverbs if they’re too long. It gives it a nice trail with very minimal artifacts at all, if ever. It would be my go-to for cleaning up dialogue at this point.”

Spectral edits without hard edges

Acoustica’s spectral editor lets you feather selections, so repairs blend into the surrounding audio instead of leaving a visible, audible seam.

“Feathering in the spectrogram is fantastic. Whenever you go in to edit anything out, you don’t have a hard edit within your spectrogram window. You can feather and crossfade the ins and outs, creating a nice transition from the original audio to the affected audio.”

Remix: fixing the music you were handed

Post teams often receive finished music with vocals where the dialogue needs to sit. Acoustica 8’s Remix tool separates a mixed track into stems, so you can pull the vocals, bass or drums without going back to the composer.

“A lot of times we’ll get music from clients and they’ll say, ‘The dialogue is here, can you get rid of the vocals?’ Since it’s all mixed together, we couldn’t do anything. It’s very helpful to be able to do that, or to pull the bass away or take out the drums. It’s pretty amazing what it can do.”

Perpetual licences that scale to a whole facility

For a multi-room facility, pricing isn’t about one seat. String and Can runs six mixers across 10 to 12 suites in several locations, and sessions move between people. When they adopt a plugin, they adopt it everywhere.

“The perpetual license is huge for us. When we buy a plugin, we commit to it for the entire company, so we sometimes have to buy 10 licenses. Acoustica is priced in a fair way that we can afford that for the entire company, where we can’t do that with some other plugins.”

No subscription means no recurring bill per seat, and no risk of a room losing its tools when a payment lapses.

Ready for Atmos

Immersive delivery is now routine, and plenty of restoration plugins still don’t support it. Acoustica does.

“I’m excited to use Acoustica in an Atmos format because a lot of plugins aren’t compatible in that arena, and it’s nice to know that Acoustica is.”

The verdict from String and Can

“I would take Acoustica extremely seriously if you’re a professional in post-production, because it can give you outstanding results at a fraction of the price of the competitors. I think it can go neck and neck with RX, which is the industry leader, and can one day take it over. And again, the non-subscription makes it a no-brainer for me.”

Try Acoustica 8 in your own sessions

If you’re weighing up an alternative to your current restoration suite, Acoustica 8 gives you:

• A complete restoration and editing toolkit in one purchase
• Full ARA integration in Pro Tools, with nothing stripped out
• Fast AudioSuite rendering for DeNoise, DeHum and Extract:Dialogue
• Feathered spectral editing and Remix stem separation
• Atmos compatibility
• A perpetual licence, with no subscription

Download the free trial of Acoustica 8 and run it on your next dialogue edit. Our thanks to Ian, Brian and Lou at String and Can for sharing their experience.