Noise Reduction – How Effective Is It?

Today’s covert recordings are mostly from inexpensive digital hand held recorders. Typically we find that the recordings come to us when speech and other human sounds are either extremely low in volume or over driven to the point of distortion. In the first instance if the speech was buried in continuous noise, (the recorders themselves generate noise, often called “self noise”) computers could not differentiate it from noise effectively. Current technology allows us to dig deeper into noise to extract more usable speech and utterances than ever before. In the case of digital distortion (called clipping), which is often interpreted as noise we can filter the digital bit stream so as to greatly reduce distortion artifacts rendering speech more intelligible. Most importantly the speech remains unchanged so the interpretation of it is as accurate as possible. AVFL uses forensic procedures and the latest noise reduction technology from Cedar Audio to assure both reliability and repeatability of the results. A full report of just how the material was processed is also provided.