Supertone Clear Review: Is AI Noise Cancellation Worth the CPU Hit?

Bottom line up front

If you’re serious about your meeting audio, the bottom line is this: Supertone Clear is, without a doubt, the best vocal denoiser for remote work.

Noise, noise, noise, noise

The single biggest persistent problem I’ve faced with remote work, whether I’m at home or on the road, is managing background noise. Whether it’s dogs barking, air conditioners, lawn mowers, or people stomping around on the floor above you, the world is filled with sounds you don’t want coming through when you’re in meetings.

To a large degree, you can mitigate these sounds using noise gates. However, the critical flaw with gates is that when the gate opens for your voice, it lets all the background noise blast through as well. This creates an unnatural, “pumping” effect: you transition instantly from dead silence to a noisy room. Furthermore, the gating often makes your voice sound slightly fuzzy. The effect is highly obvious, and the stark contrast between gated and ungated noise undermines your vocal clarity.

In some cases, you can acoustically treat your room to deaden it as much as possible, but for me, that’s never been an option. At home, my office is a small, square, wooden-floored room filled with right angles and few soft surfaces. I could do some things to improve the room, but the room is fundamentally an acoustic nightmare.

On the road, the rooms in our motorhome tend to sound surprisingly dead, since there are lots of soft and irregular surfaces that absorb sound nicely. On the other hand, it’s a small shared space in a constantly changing environment, so I’m always right next to an air conditioner, a running washer or dryer, TVs, traffic, etc. The room itself is nice, but my environment is still very noisy.

This is precisely where dedicated denoisers become essential. They use advanced techniques to remove the persistent hums, rumbles, and screeches; the kind of sounds we instinctively filter out in person but become grating and distracting through headphones.

The problems with other denoisers

Most denoisers work reasonably well, but they tend to have major downsides. Some sound very artificial or introduce audible artifacts. Some sound great but introduce too much latency for meetings. Others avoid those problems but require constant tweaking. Most of them also have somewhat unintuitive interfaces.

Enter Clear

Supertone Clear is a powerful plugin that leverages a proprietary neural network (think AI, but not like ChatGPT. It’s closer to audio magic) to separate the vocal signal from both the ambient noise and voice reverb. It then provides intuitive controls (knobs) to blend the gain of all three components as they are mixed back together.

While soloing the “voice” track (pushing it to the extreme) sounds slightly unnatural, the quality is still impressive. I’ve found the sweet spot is achieved by lowering the ambience and voice reverb by 10 to 20 dB, allowing a tiny, natural amount of the room sound to bleed through. It’s very intuitive and quick to set up. What is really nice is that it works equally well in quiet and loud environments, adapting to whatever noise is present. In practical terms, this means that if the air conditioner three feet away suddenly kicks on while I’m speaking, I don’t have to scramble to relearn the noise profile or manually adjust any thresholds. It’s truly a “set it and forget it” workflow that works marvelously! It also somehow manages to pull it off without much CPU load.

My one significant complaint is the latency. Out of the box, it sits at 36 ms. While you can activate “eco” mode to drop this to 24.5 ms, that latency is a tight constraint. You only have about 30–40 ms total available before audio delay becomes noticeable and disruptive. This is low enough for me to comfortably use on my own mic input, but high enough that I can’t justify using it on the meeting output to clean up other people’s noisy feeds.

Clear in action

Here’s a short recording with some pretty bad fan noise, to see how well Clear can cope with it.

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You’ll notice that it does a really good job removing the noise in the silent portions, but you can still hear it in the background when I’m speaking. In cases like that, I’ve found it often works well to combine multiple noise reduction plugins in a chain (just be sure to dial them back a little bit, so things don’t get out of hand!). Here’s what it sounds like when I run the audio through Klevgrand Brusfri (which also struggles with this noisy audio clip), with its main noise reduction control turned a down bit, followed by Clear:

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Overall impressions

Like I said, Supertone Clear is the best vocal denoiser for remote work. It regularly goes on sale for about $55, and for what you get, it’s absolutely worth it.

Buy Supertone Clear here