The new processing is designed to enhance bass sounds and bring clarity to a users’ low end as well as give a well-defined foundation for each track. At first, I thought this was to make the low end sound louder, but that’s not what this is intended for. Ozone 9’s Master Rebalance allowed me to make them much louder - which, in this case, resulted in an uglier end-result, of course.Īnother new module is Low End Focus.

I tried this with a piece from a perfectly mixed and mastered opera CD where the vocals are at some points almost drowning in the orchestra sounds. The same can be done for the bass and weak-sounding (or too loud) drums. Master Rebalance and the neural engine behind it are good enough to bring the voice forward without affecting the midrange, even if the “mix” has been determined by the location of the microphone. Imagine having captured a live concert with one microphone and the singer constantly moving across the scene. It allows you to correct and change instrument levels without needing the original tracks. Ozone 9’s Master Rebalance is a good example of how that works out.

Ozone 9 builds further on the philosophy of giving users a well-sounding head start and then allowing them to stamp the audio master with their skills and signature, which, with a sound engineer who knows their trade, gives much better results than you’ll ever get out of one-knob-cures-all tools. The former will often like the time savings the neural-engine driven Assistant affords them, while the latter know they can always start over again if they mess up in the process down the pipeline.

Professional sound engineers and enthusiasts who have a grasp of the mastering basics will love the Assistant that was introduced in previous versions. Ozone 9 is all about improving a mix to the point of perfection and doing it as quickly as possible with a modular interface that helps to chop up the mastering process into easily digestible pieces. Erik Vlietinck takes it for a test run to see if the company is still working its Voodoo magic! Review: iZotope's Ozone is now on version 9.

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