Checking Clarity with NUGEN Audio's DialogCheck

 A software-based mono, stereo and multichannel dialog clarity meter, NUGEN Audio's DialogCheck provides a usefully objective measure of speech audio intelligibility.

Every so often, a TV show or movie is released that has people scratching their heads and wondering if they actually heard what the characters said on screen. It's annoying for the viewers, and as far as the broadcaster or movie studio goes it has everybody talking about precisely the wrong thing. The likes of Christopher Nolan are infamous for this, and the situation has got so bad that half of Americans in a recent survey say that they're watching shows with subtitles on because the soundtracks are too hard to understand. 

The idea is that NUGEN Audio's DialogCheck could help sort this out. The company says that the ability for a listener to understand a piece of dialog is affected by many factors: language, dialect, enunciation, reverb and effects, loudness of speech and background noise, as well as listener hearing ability, listening environment, placement of speakers and supporting visuals, among other elements.

DialogCheck utilizes the Listening Effort Meter (LE-Meter) developed by Fraunhofer IDMT, which allows sound engineers to visualize listening effort during mixing and conduct post-mixing checks to optimize audio quality. Designed to objectively assess the listening effort of dialog in broadcast material, LE-Meter utilizes automatic speech recognition and psychoacoustic modeling with metrics to evaluate the intelligibility of dialog.

All this should enable users to easily evaluate their audio to identify sections of speech that might be difficult for listeners to understand. DialogCheck features more than a dozen interface tools aimed at supporting engineers in their dialog editing process, such as the integrated real-time bar meter and history graph. Additionally, a distribution view and numerical statistical values provide an overview of the speech intelligibility of the entire program. This information can then be used to guide engineers to correct issues before testing again. A tracking function syncs the views with the audio playback in the DAW, while ‘Macro View’ highlights the current audio section within the wider historical view.

DialogCheck also has benefits in pre-production, allowing users to assess different mic’ing configurations, performance styles, room set-ups, etc., to ensure that raw production audio is already near to the desirable clarity levels

Pricing and Availability

The DialogCheck software is available for a one-off price of $399 / £279.