iZotope RX 8 Advanced $1199

The audio repair stalwart adds and improves a few modules. Can it give a fresh sheen to James Russell’s tracks?

- James Russell

CONTACT WHO: iZotope

WEB: izotope.com

KEY FEATURES Guitar De-noise including amp, pick and squeak modules; Loudness Control helps you easily conform to various standards; Music Rebalance sees improvements; Spectral Recovery brings back your frequencies over 4kHz; Wow and Flutter compensation

Two years on from version 7, RX 8 seeks to go above and beyond the call of clean-up duty. Its new modules – Guitar De-noise, Spectral Recovery, Loudness Control, and Wow and Flutter – are joined by improvements to multiple modules. Trackpad users will be pleased with horizontal scrolling, but there’s still no pinch-zooming to be found in RX.

Guitar De-noise has multiple elements: Amp de-noise, Squeak control, and Pick control. Of these, the Squeak and Pick functions to work remarkably well, removing unwanted elements and unmasking pure musical tones – a similarly impressive try-out when the Mouth De-Click module was first introduced. That Amp De-Noise module, however, is nowhere near as good as the Spectral De-noise module for removing the overbearing hiss of a dodgy amp. Even on subtler amp hums, the Amp module seems more likely to scoop out the timbre of the actual guitar than remove the hum itself.