Nugen Audio's Dialog-Check is a plugin aimed at helping post-production audio mixers ensure that dialog tracks are clear and intelligible. Positioned as a tool for both broadcasters and film sound professionals, it offers a range of features designed to focus on speech clarity. Dialog-Check is inserted on your master fader and supports mono, stereo and multichannel formats up to 7.1.4.
It’s important to know going in that Dialog-Check is a powerful “dual AI neural network” metering device that recognizes the human voice and provides analysis tools made to guide the user to make mix adjustments, but in and of itself, contains no effects to rectify dialog intelligibility problems. It will give you insights into your mix so that you can make informed decisions. Also contributing to this plugin development was input from Netflix to ensure that the film mantra of “dialog is king” is front and center.
One of the highlights of Dialog Check is its ability to visually represent the audio like its Nugen predecessor VisLM, offering a spectral display that allows users to pinpoint where problems may lie in the frequency spectrum. The plugin provides detailed analysis of the dialog, highlighting areas where clarity might be compromised. This is accomplished with a linear, tiered graph on the timeline where green represents good intelligibility, yellow represents probably unclear, and red means the dialog intelligibility is very poor. Audio selections that contain no dialog are greyed out. There are four numerical readouts paired that give momentary clarity and average analysis of the audio that correspond to the three categories of intelligibility on a 0-100 scale on which 100 is the best. Dialog is analyzed for recording quality, EQ, background noise and reverb.
The plugin is equipped with a set of preset profiles tailored for various types of content, from film and TV to podcasts and voiceovers. These presets serve as a useful starting point, and you can also save your own presets.
Dialog-Check is a great tool for audio professionals seeking to ensure dialogue intelligibility. Its straightforward interface and visual feedback make it easy to understand. Sometimes when you are mixing dialog and you have a script and already know what someone is saying, it’s helpful to have an objective ear. Aimed at rerecording mixers, dub stages and audio engineers who are navigating dialog intelligibility versus ambient sound, sound effects, and music, it provides a strong analysis of audio that can help you make sure you have a highly technical yet easily accessible analysis that your dialog is clean and clear. $399
