I wasn’t sure if the E²Deesser needed some getting used to as well, but I sure as hell intended to give it a fair review, so I took that into the calculations. Perhaps I’m a slow learner, but E²Deesser grew on me as well. When I watched the videos of it I was pretty impressed, but when I used it myself I thought it took a little too much work to get good results, so I often ended up going back to more simple de-essers. But stay with me! Let’s find out what’s unique about this piece and what the ups and downs are.

Unique approach

Eiosis claims that the E²Deesser has a unique approach to de-essing. Perhaps that’s the case, certainly no de-esser that I’ve ever used is constructed this way. When you’re first faced with the plug-in window you might feel a little lost, especially if you come from something like the de-esser in the Digirack, because there are a whole lot more knobs and controls here. If you just take the time to study the interface you should rather quickly come up with an idea of what’s what, but I found it to actually take some time for the actual functions to blend in with my brain. Furthermore I discovered that to get the most out of E²Deesser, I needed to stop thinking about it so much as a de-esser and more as a general tool to change sounds - such as esses. Sounds cryptical? Well, maybe it’s just my brain, but to me there’s a difference.

The E²Deesser is nicely divided into sections, namely detection, sibilants and voiced. There’s also input and output knobs. I’ll try to give you the overall idea of each section, and hopefully you’ll understand how this plug-in works.

The detection section has controls for reduction and response. Reduction controls sibilance reduction and balance between equalization on the sibilant and voiced parts. Response is a timing parameter, and to my understanding somewhat similar to timing parameters on a compressor (i.e., attack and release).

Both the sibilant section and the voiced section have typical EQ controls, which means a way to choose type of band, frequency and Q knobs. A great addition to all sections is the ability to isolate them and listen to them independently. Sure, many de-essers have listen functions (including the Digirack de-esser), but this is even better.

I probably should mention the presets as well. There are a great deal included, for instance for voices, bass and percussion. Not surprisingly it features similar preset handling as AirEQ. This means banks, dual presets and… Well, overall smart preset handling.

Click the little image to see a big picture of the E²Deesser.

In use

I use de-essers on a little bit of everything depending on the song. I guess I’m not alone in using them on vocals and bass, but I’m no stranger to use them on other things as well, such as delays. As I said before, E²Deesser forced me to think of it as something else than just a de-esser to find it’s full potential. More like… A dynamics processor with EQ capabilities without being a typical channel strip. Or something along those lines. I think the videos on Eiosis website give a true representation on what’s capable on achieving with it, but it took me a while to find out how to work it. The manual was helpful (it’s actually pretty good) and along with some old fashioned work, I was able to grasp the E²Deesser.

When you get used to it it really isn’t terribly slow to tweak, as I first thought. Some will probably to much extent ignore the EQ on the plug-in, while some will probably ignore on using separate EQs on the track that’s being processed because of E²Deessers capabilities. In the end it’s a matter of your personal workflow if you want to use a separate EQ or not, but using the built-in certainly has it’s advantages since it can EQ sibilants and voiced signals independently. In fact, it’s kind of sad that the frequency knobs don’t go lower than 1kHz. I’ve had luck with it on multi-instrument loops as well as drum loops. In my last session I used it on a picked acoustic guitar with very good results. Removing attack, fret noise and such is a no-brainer, but it can also be rather nice to enhance those things as well sometimes without changing the overall sound.

Conclusion

Eiosis response to the somewhat lack of de-essers wasn’t really a de-esser. Sure, it can do what a de-esser does, but also more. I personally find it hard to categorize a plug-in like this and I think we’ve only seen the beginning of what it’s capable of. Independent processing of sibilant and voiced parts of the signal are key here, but we shouldn’t forget smaller features that proves to be good additions, such as independent listening functionality and the typical Eiosis preset system. The new wave of de-essers have already started coming. Sonnox has presented their solution, as has McDSP, and we’re waiting for Massey to launch his. It will be interesting to see how Eiosis will stand against these. It’s of course impossible to say at this point. I’m fairly confident in that regardless of if it’s better or worse than the competition, it will definitely stand out as unique. The big questions for many will probably not be so much about sound, but if they want all those controls… And how the heck you get that little “2″ from a Mac keyboard!

Eiosis