The “clipped intervals repaired” hit counter at the bottom is always a point of amusement for me as it always reminds of that scene in Hot Shots 2 where they make fun of a famous Rambow scene. RX is a hugely popular suite in post production circles and their De-clip plug-in is something quite special indeed. IZotope have been developing their RX audio restoration suite of plug-in for a number of years now. Clipped audio is easily identified by ear, but it’s easier to see by looking at an audio waveform: There’s no warmth, character or quality to the sound of clipped distortion compared to “creative” styles of tasteful distortion that you typically get from guitar amp simulators or tape plug-ins. Clipping is a form of distortion artefact… not the type you want. In this test we put three popular de-clipper plug-ins up against each other in a blind listening test. Often poorly recorded audio from a camera, Lavalier or shotgun mic will be kicked down stream to patient post production engineers to sort out as the take is often the only take available and has to be used. In such cases most engineers simply rerecord clipped takes in favour of clean sounding recordings but in situations such as location recording opportunities for second takes are not always available or repeatable. There are those occasions when a brief oversight ruins the perfect vocal take or dialogue recording passing the red lines of no return. It can be very easy to “clip” an input signal at the analog to digital convertor on the way into “tape” resulting in unpleasant and distorted sounding audio. One of the first and most important digital audio recording fundamentals to learn is digital headroom.

G clip plug-in