AI has found its way into many industries and has become an inevitable part of our daily lives even if we don’t realize. As someone who loves to explore the next generation of technologies, I have been wondering how my life in audio could directly benefit from the use of AI. What Alpha Sound has done is one of the most impressive use cases of AI for live sound and only the beginning of revolutionizing how audio engineers approach live sound.
I first learned about Alpha Sound through a post they did surrounding a voice-controlled Yamaha console. Soon after that gained some traction, I started to see videos and examples of this new plugin they were releasing—De-Feedback V1. It essentially does exactly what it says it does. It gets rid of feedback.
How, you may ask?
I will not be able to explain this better than the owner of the company does. I would encourage you to watch his video. In short, you can kind of think of it in the same way noise-cancelling headphones work. In realtime, it is inverting what it intelligently understands to be anything but the direct signal and cancelling it out. Trust me, the 13-minute video explains it way better than I do.
First off, Alpha Labs will tell you themselves that it is just a VST plugin. You can definitely load it up on any plugin host and give it a shot. They have a trial mode that will mute the signal every few minutes, but apart from that, it is the full plugin. There is a single control: strength. This is essentially a “mix” control, but it is generally advised to keep it at 100%. It truly is a plug-and-play plugin. There is no tweaking or any potential to get it wrong. If you can run the plugin, it will work.
This is where things get tricky. Running the plugin and having it be stable has sent me down a very strange rabbit hole that I do not fully understand. Alpha Labs sells two different PC machines through a company called Simply NUC. Simply NUC loads a custom Windows 11 LTSC operating system (which is a highly modified version of Windows by Alpha Sound and is not susceptible to all the usual Windows bloat). One model is an incredibly basic tier Intel N95 and the other is a much more respectable Intel i7. Both of these machines are to be paired with a 4th generation Focusrite interface. As someone who owns one of these setups, I can confirm it is everything they claim: low latency, stable, and easy to use. The rig is relatively simple. Once I got everything setup through the FAQ section on the website, I am able to run everything without a keyboard, monitor, and mouse—all I have to do it plug in power to the computer and it boots correctly everytime.
The ironic part of this situation is that they have created a plugin that, to some extent, can really only officially be supported as a hardware insert. After briefly talking to the owner, the initial reports of running De-Feedback on something like the Fourier Transform Engine, the Waves LiveBox, or even on a high-end Apple Silicon machine resulted in poor CPU performance. The plugin could not run efficiently on those machines. Yet, it runs incredibly well and is quite stable on an Intel N95 CPU; a chip that is effectively a mobile processor.
As for my experience, I have gotten to try this rig out in a few different environments, at churches, a musical, and some corporate events. I will say that it is not perfect. I don’t think Alpha Sound claims it’s perfect. You can defeat the algorithm if you try hard enough, and you will definitely have a bad time. However, it puts you in a much better position much more quickly than traditional tools like EQ, gates, and expansion. More so, when combined with those tools, it results is a much more natural sounding mic in less than ideal environments.
Regardless of the irony, I wholeheartedly support the Alpha Sound + Alpha Labs guys. They are doing spectacular work. They are paving the way for useful AI integration into the job I get to do day in and day out.
Check out their website - https://www.alphalabsaudio.com/defeedback/
MSRP - Total $1,048
Plugin - $499
Focusrite Solo - $139
Single Channel PC - $410
If you have any other specific questions, feel free to email me at josh@spacebearaudio.com