Baby Audio Smooth Operator Pro

Baby Audio escalate their war on bad‑sounding audio with a vastly more powerful toolset for tackling problem resonances.

Baby Audio are the very model of a modern plug‑in development company, with a readily identifiable visual aesthetic, a wealth of novel ideas and a laser focus on ergonomics. Their plug‑ins usually manage to offer a usefully broad range of control without over‑burdening the user with parameters, and so it was with their take on the concept of resonance suppression or ‘de‑harshing’. The flip side was that their original Smooth Operator didn’t offer quite as much to the power user as rival plug‑ins such as Oeksound’s Soothe 2.

Four years after Smooth Operator appeared, Baby Audio have returned to the idea, but rather than create a version 2, what they’ve done is more akin to a ground‑up reinvention. And, as the addition of the term Pro to the product name would suggest, it gives the power user everything they could want and more.

Greater Operator

In the original Smooth Operator, nearly every control appeared only as a graphical node on an EQ‑type curve. This was elegant on paper, but in practice was not quite as intuitive as it might have been, especially with regard to the interaction between different controls. Baby Audio have retained the EQ‑like interface in the Pro version, but they’ve made things a lot more editable, and have given up on the idea that the curve alone can accommodate all the necessary settings. Instead, an inspector‑type panel to the left of the window allows you to adjust global controls, whilst a parameter list along the bottom displays settings for the selected node.

Each node has its own set of EQ‑type parameters: frequency, bandwidth and offset from the global threshold, which is represented in the same way as gain in an EQ curve. Offsetting a node downwards with respect to the global threshold makes it more likely that Smooth Operator Pro will apply processing in that band, whilst lifting it above the global threshold tends to exempt a band from processing.

The nodes also inherit numerous dynamic and spatial parameters from the global settings, which are grouped under the labels Focus, Comp(ression) and Imaging. By...