315. Devin Sheets On De-Feedback

In Episode 315, Sean and Andy get the lowdown on a relatively new live audio tool that took both NAMM and the online live audio community by storm over the last year as they talk with Devin Sheets, founder and owner of Alpha Labs, to learn all about De-Feedback. This episode is sponsored by Allen & Heath and RCF.

A much-talked-about plugin in live audio of 2025, there are lots of myths and misunderstandings, rave reviews and reticence about this new tool for fighting feedback, handling overly reverberant rooms, and dealing with noise in live reinforcement and broadcast environments, so we get it all straight from Devin, including a live demo of exactly what De-Feedback is capable of.

Devin Sheets, founder and owner of Alpha Labs, grew up in Salem, Oregon. His father Duane founded and owns Alpha Sound, a regional live audio production company, so Devin grew up in the busy environment of one of the largest PA rental and installation companies in the Pacific Northwest during the 1990s and 2000s.

After graduating from Azusa Pacific University with a degree in music, he and Duane turned the focus of the family business toward high-end corporate and house of worship work. Devin had his industry standard bag of tricks for fighting feedback in these environments, but felt that “the answer” had not yet arrived. After years of unfruitful communication with many leading audio manufacturers about the issue, he decided to try his hand at a custom approach involving AI software. After paying large amounts of his personal money to various coders around the world in an attempt to make something work, the team finally struck gold in mid 2024 with a novel AI model of their own making, using training data largely produced by Devin himself, on a computer they built in-house. He used the beta version throughout the year for his own shows and events, and installed it in several churches in the area.

By late 2024 there was pressure to begin selling the algorithm to the public, and so Alpha Labs was formed as a software partner company to Alpha Sound, a website launched, and sales of De-Feedback V1 began November 11 of that year. Within days, the plugin was being used on some of the biggest tours and events of the Christmas season. The software continues to be adopted by many of the world’s top engineers and venues, while Devin and his team concentrate most of their time and energy developing newer, better versions.

We've also uploaded a clip of Devin's demo of De-Feedback without our usual dynamics chain, for folks who want to listen to it as raw as possible, which you can download here: https://bit.ly/s2n-de-feedback (as a bonus, that clip is g-rated in terms of language, as well)

SPECIAL OFFER: As a limited time bonus for Signal to Noise listeners, Alpha Labs is offering 10% off purchases with coupon code “SIGNALTONOISE”, valid through Feb 6, 2026! Just enter the code at license checkout, and the discount will be applied to all products in your order!

Episode Links:
Alpha Labs De-Feedback
De-Feedback Official User Group
Thinking Out Loud w/Friends of SoundBroker, Devin Sheets
Alpha Sound
Episode 315 Transcript

NOTE: Mike Green, the artist who performs “Break Free” that opens every episode, has some new music hitting the market starting today, available on all streaming platforms as well as DSPs that support spatial audio. And, Mikegreenm

Transcript

Signal To Noise, Episode 315 Devin Sheets On De-Feedback

Note: This is an automatically generated transcript, so there might be mistakes--if you have any notes or feedback on it, please send them to us at signal2noise@prosoundweb.com so we can improve the transcripts for those who use them!

Voiceover: You’re listening to Signal to Noise, part of the ProSoundWeb podcast network, proudly brought to you this week by the following sponsors:

Allen & Heath, whose new dLive RackUltra FX upgrade levels up your console with 8 next-generation FX racks – putting powerful tools like vocal tuning, harmonizing, and amp simulation right at your fingertips. Learn more at allen-heath.com 

RCF and TT+ AUDIO.... Delivering premium audio solutions designed for tour sound and music professionals for over 75 years.  Visit RCF at RCF-USA.com for the latest news and product information.

Music: “Break Free” by Mike Green

[00:00:58] Andy Leviss: Hey, welcome to another episode of Signal to Noise. I'm your slightly raspy host, Andy Leviss. And with me is always the artificial to my intelligence, the equally raspy Sean Walker. What's up Sean?

[00:01:10] Sean Walker: What's up buddy?

[00:01:11] Andy Leviss: See, that one wasn't terrible, right?

[00:01:13] Sean Walker: no, no. And fitting for today, so

[00:01:15] Andy Leviss: Yeah, right. I know. I try and keep on themed when I can. Uh, Sean and I are

[00:01:18] Sean Walker: NAMMthrax here,

[00:01:19] Andy Leviss: was gonna say we're both still in post NAMM recovery mode,

[00:01:22] Sean Walker: forgive the sniffles and gravelly voices. You know, other than nobody really cares.

[00:01:27] Andy Leviss: Yeah, we'll try, we'll try and mute when we have to cough or blow our noses or stuff. Uh,

[00:01:30] Sean Walker: Yeah, right. Totally.

[00:01:31] Andy Leviss: we'll see what, what various plugins can do about nose blowing. Um, so.

[00:01:36] Sean Walker: Totally. What'd you, what'd you see at, damn, that was, that was awesome dude. You wanna do a like quick one minute about what we saw that was cool. In addition to our awesome guest? Or you wanna

[00:01:44] Andy Leviss: I was, I, let's get it, because I think we can dive into that in like its whole own, own episode. I mean, I, I had, I ended up leaving a day early 'cause of all the, what did they call it? The, a prolific snowstorm in the

[00:01:55] Sean Walker: Snowpocalypse 2026.

[00:01:57] Andy Leviss: Yeah, so, and I, I was originally gonna fly out Sunday morning after everything wrapped.

Then went to, okay, I'm flying out Saturday night to, because I was gonna land at the point that it was like 12 to 18 inches on the ground already. And so I was like, great, I'll fly at like 9:30 PM Saturday night. I'll get in right as this is starting in New York. It'll be great. And then they preemptively canceled that flight, which I was like, I booked a nonstop to make sure that didn't happen.

And I like, I got my premium select on Delta. I was like first in line for one of six available Delta one live flat seats. I was like, this is gonna be baller. And then it got canceled. So I found one that left at like 2:00 PM which was a, I have enough time to go over, tell everybody at the YAMA booth like, Hey guys.

I need to be sent now, really? Sorry. Um, props to my teammate Jonathan, who held down the tech support team for all of the public day am Saturday solo without me because of that. And, uh, but we made it home. Got home to the kid and the wife. I,

[00:02:55] Sean Walker: Well, since I was on the West Coast and not dealing with snow Apocalypse 2026, I was. Able to stalk our current guest today

[00:03:01] Andy Leviss: yeah.

[00:03:02] Sean Walker: minutes at the show, but probably email and then at the show. And, uh, I had a few specific questions and he was like, uh, I'm literally in the other hall right now answering those questions.

And I was like, well, I'll stop you dumb. I just walk over there and we can talk about it in person. So ladies and gentlemen, Devon Sheets from Alpha Labs

[00:03:19] Andy Leviss: yeah.

[00:03:20] Sean Walker: are you buddy?

[00:03:22] Devin Sheets: Uh, I'm good. I, I, I also have. The NAMMthrax, unfortunately, so

[00:03:28] Sean Walker: Totally.

[00:03:29] Devin Sheets: we're, we're all powering through it.

[00:03:31] Andy Leviss: yeah.

[00:03:32] Sean Walker: Well, thanks for being here and being a trooper. Dude, we appreciate it. Everybody, uh, is asking about De-Feedback and new voodoo magic that you have created, and they're all stoked to hear about it. I, uh. You know, initially started hearing people talk about it needed a special computer and a specific interface and it had to do all this, this, this.

And I was like, oh my goodness. And then, uh, somebody mentioned, Hey, I think it also will run on the waves live box. And I was like, well, I've got one of those. So then I emailed stocked him, and then stocked him in person. And he was actually at the waves booth. All NAMM talking about how it runs on live box and I was, stop.

So, uh, tell us about the voodoo magic you do and how it runs on the different hardwares and what people's options are. Man.

[00:04:15] Devin Sheets: Yeah. Um, so I mean, kind of the, the short story, uh, behind de feedback is that, um, so I, I grew up in a family business doing live audio. Um, you know, we're a regional sound company here in Oregon, so I grew up doing shows, festivals, installations, um, you know, you NAMMe it. And, um, I don't know, around like, I would say like 2019, kind of right before COVID hit, um.

I, I, I went to NAMM and I was walking around going, everything is amazing. Everything is so amazing. We have all this amazing technology. But it still struck me that like the most basic problem with microphones and speakers, the most fundamental problem. The fact that when you get 'em in the same room, they can feed back.

We, we, we don't have this sort of simple, elegant solution that just fixes it. In the way that like previous problems in the industry, you know, I don't know, like, like, like the hums and buzzes, for example, in noise. Like we have balanced audio now that this just solves it. It's, and now it's everywhere, right?

So like, I don't know, I, I realized it's interesting that we just haven't solved this problem. We have all these techniques laying around that people collus together and I've got my bag of tricks, things I, I do. But, um, you know, and it can work. But like, I don't know, that was interesting to me. So I thought some companies gotta solve this.

So I started, you know, banging on all the doors of the big companies that, you know, I, I have inside relationships with. And I was like, look, I mean. Is someone gonna solve this problem? And the engineers are all like, eh, it's harder than you think. And, um, I don't know, around 2023, I think it was just, I was like, you know what?

We gotta, we gotta solve this, and I think AI is gonna do it. I don't know anything about that. Um, but the big companies just, every year goes on and they're, they're not, they're nothing's coming out so. Maybe I can get some cash together and pay some coders to take a crack at this. And so, um, I, I paid some, I paid some people and we did some things that didn't work.

And, um, but eventually I, I found, I found some guys around the world and we came together. And, um, by the summer of 2024, we had a prototype, an AI based, um, a De-Feedback. Solution, and I was using it for my summer shows and events, and I put it in some church installations that we did, and by November. We, you know, we're getting pressure from people, like, Hey, how can I buy this?

You know, because I, I, I had initially designed it just 'cause we did, um, we did these installations in Catholic churches where the priests wanna wear these lves and walk around in these very reverberate spaces and in front of the speakers. And it was like impossible to get gained in some of those situations.

And that's, that was like the, um, the impetus for like, why. I wanted to do this was, I wanted to solve my problems in those situations more elegantly than I I had been. So, um, you know, November 11th we launched, um, and I mean, it's just, it's the, the adoption trend here has been insane. I, I,

[00:07:36] Sean Walker: I mean, that's kinda what you want when you bring a new product to market, right?

[00:07:39] Devin Sheets: yeah, I, I mean, within.

You within. Okay. So we, I, I launched the website that, you know, it, it, it's this dinky website. It just has like a link where you can click and buy a license and, and within 48 hours, uh, we had Mariah Carey touring with it. You know, Paul Falcon just like picked it up and just was like, I need this on her tour, she's out on the thrust and it's hard and, you know, so that was in this Yeah.

Like,

[00:08:06] Sean Walker: 48 hours and you get an on Maria carries tour without like. Calling and doing

[00:08:09] Devin Sheets: No, no cold calling. No,

[00:08:12] Sean Walker: That's amazing.

[00:08:12] Devin Sheets: advertising nothing. I mean,

[00:08:14] Andy Leviss: Well, and I just, I. I wanna flag that too technically, and we can get into this more later, but like, 'cause like we've had, you know, like the FBX and all these like feedback destroyers for years that are like really narrow notch EQ and like the one thing they are absolute fucking absolutely terrible at is shit like Mariah's whistle range.

'cause they don't understand that. That's not like I've seen. Churches where like they've got a canter who like doesn't have any vibrato and holds that pure clear tone and like a note or you know, a quarter note or so into that note. Suddenly it ducks out. 'cause the feedback, destroyer mistook it for feedback.

So like the fact that that's working on like Mariah's vocal is like mind blowing.

[00:08:52] Devin Sheets: yeah, yeah. And you know what it is, this is, I mean, it's like how does it work? Everyone wants to know how it works. Um, so what it is, is it's, um, an inverse ir. So it doesn't use eq, it doesn't use compression, you know, it doesn't use any of these types of things. What it is, is it's a, it's an IR that the, the AI is listening to the vocal tone, and we've trained the AI to be able to distinguish between human vocal and everything else.

And then we, we have it listened to everything else. Like here's the category of all things not human vocal, and we see what, what can we take in that and what can we. Bake into the IR that we're constructing in real time. So anything we can target, whether it's, you know, the feedback itself or whether it's, um, room reverb or background noise.

And if we can figure out how to get that imprinted in the IR that we're constructing in real time and constantly updating in real time. To stay ahead of reality. Then we just take that ir and we flip it out a phase and we con involve it with the original incoming signal and we cancel out whatever we don't want and we leave the vocal totally intact.

[00:10:04] Sean Walker: Wait, it does more than just feedback.

[00:10:07] Devin Sheets: Yeah. Um, in fact, it's not so people, this is a misunderstanding a lot of times. Um, it does remove feedback when it happens, but the real magic is that it stops it from happening largely in the first place. And that's the trick. You don't want it to happen and then play whack-a-mole and just like squash it later.

I mean, we, it does that too. If, if, if, you know, if some, if something breaks free and defeats the algorithm and you have like, you would have feedback, you can hear it start, but then it squashes it. That is what it does also. But the big, the real magic is in the first place. It, it largely prevents the feedback from starting because it's listening.

For these, we've trained it to listen for these micro so cues in the signal that. It runs a statistical probability calculator. It says, how likely would it be that, okay, I'm listening to this one little part here. If I don't do anything, how likely is it that in the future this would turn into feedback and if it breaks that likeliness threshold, then it takes action now and it includes that in the IR preventatively.

So it's constantly doing that at like a microscopic scale.

[00:11:14] Andy Leviss: So it's like, it's sort of like the feedback equivalent of coherence. If you're like measuring and smart, it's like doing that, like how much can I trust or can I know that this is, that's pretty cool.

[00:11:23] Devin Sheets: Yeah. And so, you know, that is a situation where we can target, uh, feedback preventatively, but then we can also target runaway feedback. If there's an extreme situation, like we tell people out of the gate, you should expect about 60 B more gain before feedback usable. Depending on your situation, you might get more, you might get 10 or even 12, like depending on just what's going on.

Um. But you know, if you push it, if you get some idiot, you know, that just does something crazy

[00:11:50] Sean Walker: Hey, hey, hey. I'm sitting right here, dude. Easy, easy,

[00:11:53] Andy Leviss: This is why

[00:11:53] Devin Sheets: but you know it, no. If, if something happens and you, and you're gonna have, you would just otherwise have raging feedback. Typically speaking, you'll, you'll hear it, try to, but then it'll very, it'll just like almost instantaneously squash it. Um, and, um, and then we, yeah, we can target the room reverb and then we can target some amount of background noise too.

So, um, it's all, and by the way, this is the whole point, is that. It's running at zero latency, and that's our big claim that most people kind of, you know, freak out about. They're like, what? How is that even possible? How do you, how do you do all that at, at zero latency? And so, but yeah, the plugin does not add any additional latency.

[00:12:31] Sean Walker: Dude that's sick. Is that, uh, I've, I've heard that it requires special computers or special hardware. Is that how you do that is ke to keep it zero Latency and the buffer size down on the. On the, uh, the, the plugin host, whatever that it, it needs a pretty burly computer, or can you talk about what our options are for computers and processing and how that works?

[00:12:56] Devin Sheets: Yeah. Yeah. So, um, given that it's an ai, it's running a local neural net. Each instance of the plugin is running a local neural net on the machine. That is incredibly intense. I mean, it's hundreds of times more intense than just most normal audio plugins. And this is the thing that really, you know, people struggle with is they're like, oh, I just wanna run it on my computer, whatever.

And they try and it crashes their computer, or they have to, their, their buffer size and their DAW has to be so high, you know, thousands of samples or whatever to make it run cleanly. Um, so, um, what we did was we. Launched the plugin and realized we, we want people to have a good experience using our plugin and they're gonna try it on their own machines and it's not gonna be a good experience.

So we gotta give people some way to be able to run it reliably, and that's gonna require specialized hardware. Now there's a lot of options. Going way, way back, we could have taken the route of like an FPGA solution. This is like a standalone rack mount unit. All it does is run de feedback. You plug in your io whatever it is, and you just turn it on.

We could have done that, but we, we, we we're a small startup company. That's very, very difficult to do. Maybe it's some point someone will do that with us or for us, but like. Um, low hanging fruit, just release the plugin version, but then you gotta have hardware that can run it. So this is the big bottleneck and I don't want to be, I don't wanna just say everyone go and the only option out there is like stuff like the live box.

'cause no, there's very few people perhaps that can afford that compared to the general market of people who want to use De-Feedback. So if I force people say, look, it runs on a life box. That's it. I, so I wanted to give people a more affordable option if they're just, look, for example, they just wanna get into like one channel of de feedback.

A lot of churches, for example, are in this position where they just need one channel in their pastor's microphone, wears a lav out in front of the pa and it's terrible. So like you want to get into one channel of de feedback, fine. We will make a computer, a little nook computer, these square things that don't have a screen or a keyboard or mouse or anything.

We'll set up a situation where you can buy one of those for, you know, a couple hundred bucks. And, and then we'll have a team of IT. People sit down and look at this computer for six months and we will get into the bio settings, we'll get into the os, we'll dig deep and figure out how to get this machine to run one channel of De-Feedback reliably.

And then we went through an audio interface selection process. I bought like 30 different audio interfaces and tried 'em all. And um, the problem is that when you're running our program on a CPU. It starts to mess with the audio driver. So any regular audio drivers, it might be great audio drivers for like really nice, expensive interfaces.

They don't play well with our software on the same CPU. And so we had to find an audio driver for a device that actually worked and that wasn't super expensive and it, it actually so happened to be the case that the focus Right. Scarlet was it just, it just worked. Actually we didn't even use the publicly available driver, that focus right offers.

We had to get them to give us a, like a development driver that had some, some different things about it. So we found like the driver that works for the focus right interface and those little computers. And that is a very economical way to get into a couple of channels of De-Feedback. And that's all it does is sit there and run de feedback.

But then for people who wanna run more channels of de feedback, like eight channels with some other plugins, they want digital io like Dante and Maddie. The live box, which took us six months to validate. We can now say runs De-Feedback reliably. And um, so there you go. You know, and there's probably other hardware out there, but it takes a long time to, to test these things and, and you know, um, but yeah, we'll see what happens.

I mean, the live box right now is the only one I know of that runs it at low latency. I mean, you can get in and out of the live box at three to five milliseconds, something like that. You can run like eight channels of feedback with a couple other plugins, so

[00:16:57] Sean Walker: That's pretty awesome dude. That's, that's super awesome. And how cool that. You landed on the Scarlet Interfaces that I would say a majority of people already have, especially in our community for PA tuning or whatever. Like they're, they're super cost effective and easy to use and stuff, so how cool did that end up being the right solution, even though you went through a zillion other options.

Like that's that kind of, that's perfect.

[00:17:23] Devin Sheets: Yeah. And look, I mean, we may still entertain the idea of doing, you know, other things like an FPGA based solution or whatever other hardware we continue to validate other hardware. I mean, there's a bunch of companies we're talking with that, that have hardware pieces out there that we're, we're working with them on trying to figure out how do we get De-Feedback to run on it.

Uh, you know, um, so, and, and like at NAMM, you know, so here we are set up at the Waves booth at NAMM doing, doing demos. On the, on the live box. I mean, how that happened was just waves. They got wind that I was using it successfully on the live box, and they're like, Hey, you wanna come to NAMM and do demos on, on our unit?

I was like, sure. So, you know, there, there's no like, exclusive relationship there or anything. That was just a, a really simple cross promotion. It was, and it was great. I'm happy to promote any hardware that runs De-Feedback successfully.

[00:18:13] Sean Walker: That's awesome. And it's, I mean, that's a. That's a good place to be as a new plugin manufacturer, to be invited to the Waves booth at a trade show like NAMM to, you know, say, Hey, dude, this other company that we have nothing to do with runs on our hardware and does it well. And everybody's asking about both.

So, Hey man, let's make this good for everybody. Like, that's pretty sweet, dude. How cool was that?

[00:18:37] Devin Sheets: Yeah. Yeah. Um, and yeah, NAMM was just a crazy experience. I

[00:18:43] Sean Walker: Molly did. Holy mo. Holy

[00:18:46] Devin Sheets: all, I, you know, I forgot there's no lunch breaks, so

[00:18:50] Sean Walker: any breaks,

[00:18:51] Devin Sheets: there's just a constant stream of people that want to come by and hear a de feedback. I think I had like breath MITs for lunch all three days. Like, I mean, that's, it was, you know,

[00:18:58] Sean Walker: yeah, right.

[00:18:59] Andy Leviss: diet plan.

[00:19:00] Sean Walker: totally. Dude, that's funny. So you were doing demos. I get to hear one of the demos. You said you brought a little demo rig to this. You could show us a little bit how this works

[00:19:10] Devin Sheets: Yeah. Yeah. So actually, yeah, let's see here. I'm actually running this microphone through De-Feedback right now. So for example,

[00:19:17] Sean Walker: Let us mute real quick so you can show people how it works.

[00:19:20] Devin Sheets: okay, so I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll do the thing. I'll, all right, so I, I've got, um, here, let's see if I can turn the computer. And you see like I've got, uh. The live box pulled up here. So I'm actually running it through the live box, through the little DM three here, and I've got a Yamaha speaker there. So, um, okay, so let's do this.

First of all, I'll, I'll turn, I'll turn D back off. Sorry. There you go. So e immediately you can kind of hear that some of the background noise has picked up a little bit. Here I'll turn it back. Turn it back on. Turn it back off. Okay, so let's push that a little bit further here. Let's turn on, uh, some background noise through the speaker here and just in the room.

And again, De-Feedback is not on right now, so you hear that background noise kind of coming through. So I'll turn feedback on and then. I'll turn D back off. Okay, so that's a, you know, general amount of, of background noise that it removes all at zero latency still. So then I'm gonna, um, artificially introduce a reverb here.

Check, check, check, check, check. One, two. All right. And we're gonna turn De-Feedback on. It takes a second or two to kind of figure it out. And now here we go. So that's a pretty significant, like reverb reduction as well. No. De-Feedback. Check. Check with De-Feedback. Check, check, check. One, two.

[00:20:53] Sean Walker: I think every corporate and. Arena audio front of house person just sent you marriage invitations, bro, that's fucking unbelievable. you get proposals in the mail, you gotta start reading them out loud on the next show. Dude, that's unreal.

[00:21:08] Devin Sheets: Okay, so now let's do this obviously just the, you know, the. The, the main event here is the feedback. So I'm gonna turn my microphone on through the monitor just in the room here. I'm sitting like two feet away from it. Okay? Check, check, check. Hear that, hear the feedback. All right. Check, check. One, two. Hey, hey, check, check, check.

One, two.

[00:21:27] Sean Walker: Oh gun.

[00:21:29] Devin Sheets: So no feed, no De-Feedback one, two with De-Feedback.

[00:21:33] Sean Walker: Dude, that's killer. Can you do all of those at the same time? Can you put on the reverb and the background noise and the feedback and see how much of that it can clean up? I don't expect to be perfect, but it would be nice to see kind of what can we stretch it to do.

[00:21:46] Devin Sheets: Here's with De-Feedback, here's with the reverb, here's with the background, the noise. It's all coming through here. And check, check. One, two. Hey, hey, hey. Check one, two. That's with De-Feedback on check, check,

[00:21:59] Sean Walker: Dude, that's unbelievable.

[00:22:00] Devin Sheets: 2, 2.

[00:22:01] Sean Walker: I'm so glad I have a live box. I'm about to stock this thing full, bro.

[00:22:07] Devin Sheets: Yeah. Um, so, you know, that, um, was not easy to do

[00:22:13] Sean Walker: I

[00:22:14] Devin Sheets: we tried a lot of things that didn't work and, um, I spent, uh, a lot of money, uh, and had nothing to show for it for a long time. Um, we got to the point where, I mean, honestly, I mean. V one of the software, that's what's available right now is basically the results of, of, of me running out of money to, to spend on coders.

My wife was like, you're not allowed. You can't, we have to start making money on this or else if this doesn't work, we are gonna be in debt for a long time. So I was like,

[00:22:49] Sean Walker: the money or go to the couch. Those are your options. And you were like, oh man, I'm gonna start selling this V one thing right now.

[00:22:57] Devin Sheets: We're just gonna put it up. I mean, honestly, and I, I tried to be as objective as I could about the whole thing. I just said I give this maybe a 4% chance of success. I mean, think about it. It's like I have no background in ai. I'm just an audio engineer in Salem, Oregon, and I'm gonna pay, I'm gonna go like, first of all, I also found all of my coders.

On social media and like, we just have a telegram text group. I've never met them. I just immediately started making bank transfers to places like China and I was like, let's see what we can do guys. And fi it was, it was, it was so crazy. In the beginning, my bank shut me down. They're like, we don't like this.

Something's we don't, so I had to get, I had to get a different bank.

[00:23:40] Andy Leviss: Oh

[00:23:41] Sean Walker: Oh my

[00:23:41] Devin Sheets: were like, this is whatever you're doing. Oh. So I had to switch banks and um. Yeah, six. It took six months before we had anything that actually worked. It was crazy.

[00:23:50] Sean Walker: Well it works now, man. Good job. That's awesome. That's pretty incredible.

[00:23:53] Andy Leviss: that's why. And like, I'm glad we're having you on to do some myth busting. 'cause I know even as much as like a day or two in the discord. There's lots of, as happens so often with things in not even exclusive to our industry, but in our industry there's lots of very matter of factual statement of things that aren't actually facts.

And it feels like there's a lot of, okay. Is it actually like being processed by like AI live or, well, no, it's just an algorithm that AI was used to develop, but it's a fixed algorithm. But it's, but you're saying it is actually running a neural network

[00:24:24] Devin Sheets: Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I can explain more about that, by the way, just in case anybody does ask, if there's like little clicks and pops in the audio that you're hearing on the podcast, it's my. It's my dumb routing setup with my computer and how I'm using like loop back and all this stuff. And so I, I think there's some like drift correction going on.

Don't attribute that to the, to the plugin that, that's not happening. It's a, it's a, anyway, it's just if anyone asks or if it comes through at all, I can hear it in my headphone.

[00:24:50] Sean Walker: We can't hear it. You sound great.

[00:24:52] Devin Sheets: well, whatever. Um, so yeah, so what's happening is that, um, offline. We have our own training machine. It's this machine that's got all these GPUs in it, and it sits there in a, you know, it server room and we dump training data on it.

A lot of the training data I made myself, I ran around to all of my venues, I installed sound systems and asked the janitors, Hey, can you just like, let me in at 3:00 AM and I wanna do an impulse response of your room and stuff like this. And um, so we have our own machine, we have our own training data set, and then.

Um, we built a base model from scratch. That's, that's actually very unique because most other companies that are doing anything AI related, they're not building base models. I mean, they're, they're just using off the shelf AI parts and pieces and kind of, you know, collusion 'em together. So we realized very quickly to get to zero latency, we need to build our own model.

And so we built our own model, training data, training machine, we trained it, and then what happens is when it's done. It produces an algorithm and then you have to do something with that algorithm. And so you could like put that algorithm on an FPGA, you could put that algorithm onto, into a VST three plugin or whatever.

But so basically what happens is once the algorithm is, is, is done, you have to implement the algorithm in real time. And that itself requires a mini ai. So you have to, it's not like just a static filter. It's not like an eq, you can just set it and leave it in that sense. It, it has to constantly be updating the IR filter that runs in the background and the decisions about what to include in that filter and how much, and that has to be, those decisions have to be made in real time by an ai.

So we run a local AI in the plugin itself in real time, and that's making the decisions in real time. So the other thing that, you know, a lot of people, um. They have misconceptions about what it means to say that you're running at zero latency. So when we say we're, we're running at zero latency, what we mean is that our plugin doesn't arbitrarily add any more latency than just what the DAW buffer size is.

So if you're running your do at 48 K with a 32 sample buffer. It is fine with just that 32 sample buffer and then just the latency is just whatever the IO time of the whole system is getting in and out of the machine io going through the buffer. The CPU, it's like if you were to bypass De-Feedback, just you take a latency measurement of your system.

Okay, so inserting the live boxes, whatever. Let's say it's, you know, let's say it's four milliseconds because that's just the settings I have on, on in, in the device. Four milliseconds. Then you add an instance of De-Feedback, it doesn't add any more latency, and then you're just left to run as many De-Feedback instances as the machine will handle till you overload it.

And if you want more, you gotta increase the buffer size of the daw. So

[00:27:53] Sean Walker: That makes total sense. And for all of you, they're gonna complain about waves crashing. You can't load 40 instances of deep feedback on the live box. He said eight fellas.

[00:28:02] Devin Sheets: Well, and you know, here's the thing. I mean, I've been, I've been running it for, I've got, I mean, this one I've got here, I bought one of the first ones and. I've never had it had a problem. It's been a hundred percent solid and I've done some crazy tests on it. Now, of course you can overload the audio engine, but during normal usage, you know, if, if it's like, if it's reporting as being like, fine, I haven't had, I've not had a single problem with it.

So it's been a hundred percent solid. Now I have to say, I have no experience with any other waves, anything, this, I'm very new to Waves, so the live box was my first experience with anything waves ever, and I've had a hundred percent positive experience. So.

[00:28:41] Sean Walker: Yeah, I was. I was given some of the other engineers a hard time that are going to, you know. Light me up later. But a lot of people have problems with waves crashing on their shows, and I would say by and large, that's because they try to add 2000% more plugins than the, than the machine will run, and then they blame it on waves.

Whereas a lot of us. There's a lot of people running very successful shows on waves, very stably that are like, oh look, the green bar in the front, I'm gonna keep that at like 50 or 60% instead of 90%, or whatever, you know what I mean? So I was just busting some people's shops who are gonna tear me to pieces later, but that's fine.

I don't care. Uh, I'm, I'm actually really stoked. I gotta, you know, low serial number live box too. I had a client call and say, Hey, do you have this thing yet? And I was like, click by you. Sure. Do you know what I mean? Like of course I do. And it's been great, man. Couple of firmware updates later and everything's just peachy, you know?

So that's, that's cool. I'm stoked that that's a, a vi really viable option for this new thing everybody's asking for. That makes it great for us. What, uh, tell me about the, uh, installs. So when you do installs, 'cause a lot of our, our listeners here are. Integration also, or do both. Kinda like a lot of our listeners are exactly, you man, regional sound company does live events and also some installations of integration.

When somebody says, can you do this? You're like, of course I'll take your money. Yes I can. Right? So like, how are you guys leaving that so that it just runs all the time in a church or something like that, rather than having to like. Teach the volunteers how to reboot it, how to insert it, how to do the thing, or you know, how do you keep it stable and not get a bunch of phone calls and just make everybody go, oh my goodness, pastor sounds amazing today, every day.

[00:30:23] Devin Sheets: Yeah, well, I mean, in our installations for these Catholic churches especially, there's no operator there. I mean, it just has to run 24 7 and it has to recover from things like power outages and internet outages, whatever. They're, you know, just like stuff like that. Um. And so that was, yeah, part of the design criteria, starting with our tiny computers.

And then, you know, the live box can be configured in a similar way to where if the thing loses power, then, you know, as soon as it gets power again, it just boots up and starts running audio in its last state.

[00:30:53] Sean Walker: Oh, that's pretty smart. So a lot of those, the little One channel Nook and a solo or duo two I two or whatever it is to make it do its thing. Is that what you're saying?

[00:31:01] Devin Sheets: Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I've got a ton of them, ton of them sitting in racks that are completely unattended. They've been going for some of them for over a year now, and

[00:31:10] Sean Walker: Killer

[00:31:12] Devin Sheets: yeah. Not a, not a hitch. I mean, it's so, you know, um, yeah. And that's, that's a, so it's, it's, it's great for those environments where you don't have a regular operator.

Um, it's great, you know, for environments where, you know, there's a lot of people that are, that are touring with it. Um, you know, it's, it's, um. It works indoors, it works outdoors. A lot of people are confused. They're like, wait, but like, does it work outdoors where there's like no room, uh, reverbs, you know,

[00:31:43] Sean Walker: yes, of course it work. I towards too. Doesn't know where it is yet.

[00:31:46] Devin Sheets: Uh, yeah. There's no, it doesn't, there's no, that's, it doesn't have a learn period. It doesn't have any calibration. It doesn't have any, there's the UI here, I'll show you.

[00:31:56] Sean Walker: They can't see it's, it's not a video podcast,

[00:31:58] Devin Sheets: Oh no. Dang it. Well, anyway, if you could see, if you could see it is. Blank UI except for like, there's a strength parameter, which is just basically wet, dry,

[00:32:08] Sean Walker: it's just a gray box.

[00:32:10] Devin Sheets: Yeah, it's a gray box.

[00:32:11] Sean Walker: you just turn it on and it does its dang thing.

[00:32:13] Devin Sheets: yeah. Yeah. You just turn it on and don't think about it ever again. It just works. So, um,

[00:32:19] Sean Walker: That's perfect for guys like me.

[00:32:21] Devin Sheets: the current version is, um, the current version is. Only calibrated for human vocals. Um, so just be aware of that. It does include choirs though, so you can use it on choirs too. Um, a very common question we get is, can I group vocals together?

Like,

[00:32:41] Andy Leviss: you're taking the

[00:32:42] Devin Sheets: does it

[00:32:43] Andy Leviss: can ask them.

[00:32:44] Devin Sheets: yeah. One per vocal or, so here's the situation with that. It's an obvious answer is, well, if you have a bunch of nons simultaneous vocals, like a, like a. Panel discussion or something, then yeah, you can group 'em all together. Especially if you're, if you're doing like Dugan or something, like Best practice is still best practice, use your Dugan and then send the post Dugan mixed down of, you know, all 50 lofts on stage or whatever to, uh, the one channel of de feedback and that should work fine.

Um, in these Catholic churches, a lot of times I have. You know, a couple of podium mics, a couple L of mics, handheld mics that roam around and yeah, I just subgroup all those because there's it, they're all being spoken into individually. They're not, you know, they're differentiated in time. There's never a simultaneous content.

Um, when it comes to like things like background vocals for a band, I mean, sure you can subgroup them. I mean, people do it all the time and they think it sounds fine, but I personally feel like there's a leading edge on the. In the high frequency, especially if you do one instance per vocalist. So you really just have to decide.

You have to listen to it and decide what you want. Um, and then, you know, of course for, for choir it works fine, but with with choir, you're starting to get into. The, the plugin really does demand that at least 50% or more minimum 50% or more be the d like the dry, direct vocal that you're trying to isolate.

And if there's too much ambient noise, if there's like a drum set right behind the choir mics or if there's, you know, if it's, if it's too ambient, right? If someone is standing so far away that. You know, it's, uh, basically 50% room and 50% vocals. It, it may struggle a little bit with that. There, there may be some artifacts and stuff, um, but it's also not a generic noise removal.

Um, it does, it does well with, with things like low level pink noise and hiss and stuff like this, but it's not gonna like remove your drums. It'll help a little bit. Um, but that's not what it's aimed for. Version two might actually be more aimed at that, we'll see. But, um, it, uh, it does, it does some amount of DiGiCo as well.

It's another thing we get asked about. Um, some people at the NFL level are starting to use it for the ref mics and stuff like this and, um, that wasn't what it was targeted to do, but it actually is kind of a byproduct, a happy accident. It actually does help with, with echo. Um, and, and we'll probably ramp that up a lot

[00:35:03] Sean Walker: Wait, I'm sorry to

[00:35:04] Devin Sheets: for each two versions.

[00:35:05] Sean Walker: I just, I. To wrap my mind around what the fuck you just said. Devin launched in November 48 hours, Mariah Carey, and now the NFL.

[00:35:16] Devin Sheets: I mean,

[00:35:16] Sean Walker: What kind of voodoo magic did you do on that website, bro?

[00:35:20] Devin Sheets: I dunno.

[00:35:21] Sean Walker: Oh my God, that's amazing.

[00:35:22] Andy Leviss: say like the, the reason like we've been talking for a while about getting Devon on is 'cause like, just like we're just spread like wildfire. It's like, it is rare for a tool in our industry to like, just like everybody's talking about it, whether they love it, hate it, have an opinion on it, don't whether that opinion's founded, don't, it's like.

Everybody's talking about it. Thinking about it, it's, it's been wild to see. And I like a, a little inside baseball, like I do a lot of the booking of guests for stuff and I've like, as I've been dealing with flu season stuff, like Devon's been on my list of folks to reach out to. 'cause folks wanted 'em on.

And Sean totally scooping was like, yo, I reached out to Devon, I got the GI got 'em coming on the podcast. So of props where it's due to Sean for, uh, moving his ass when I wasn't.

[00:36:06] Sean Walker: That's a rare occasion. Usually it does the heavy lifting around here. I was just like, I wanted to know about the live box. 'cause I heard the rumors, so I just reached out. I was like, yo man, does it do live box? And he was like, yep. I'm like, good. I'll see you at the booth.

[00:36:17] Devin Sheets: Yeah, no, I mean, it, it's been nuts. Absolutely nuts because, you know, I, my, my conception was, well, what we're gonna do is start out small and humble and it'll take a couple years to kind of, like, I'll be just, you know, screaming it from the rooftops on my social media pages, which, you know, it was nice 'cause I actually had a kind of social media footprint before all this with Alpha Sound.

I made YouTube videos. Some of them got, you know, millions of views and I was kind of known for. Being like Mr. Yamaha nexo online. And, um, you know, so I, I kind of had this like, base of people that followed me. So then I was talking very publicly all through 2024 about this new crazy AI project I was throwing money at.

And so everybody, there was a block of people that kind of got to see the whole journey and then like finally it's here. Like we launched the website, you can buy it. Um, and so. You know, but I just figured like this is gonna be the small, passionate base of people that maybe years from now we'll get like some big, you know, big players involved.

And, um, even the whole, the whole hardware conception. In the beginning, all we had was the two little computer options. They're relatively inexpensive. It's just a focus right. Line level, you know what I mean? This is not like the live box came much later. Um, and of course, you know, now, now I look back and.

I realize maybe I, I didn't understand the nature of the situation enough to realize that it would be the case. Actually, if you think about it, that people like Robert Scoville and Pat Ell, you know, Todd Windmill, drew Aldridge, Randy Lane, like this group of people at that level who are picking this up and pioneering it so early on.

Actually, that makes sense to me now because. They're where they are in the industry because they're the kind of people who would recognize something like this early on and be early adopters and pioneer it. That's why they're at the top. And so actually it, you know, retrospectively it makes a little bit more sense to me now, but it's, we're playing a lot of catch up from the implementation side because.

You know, it's a, for now, those, like, look, pat Bald itself put, uh, the little nook and a focus right in his dialogue rack. I mean, you know, that's amazing. He's willing to do that right now because what he needs is something that works. He can't have, he's, you know, in the middle of mixing the Emmys, he can't have.

Whatever new thing he's trying crap out or make a weird noise or something. And I, I told him, we have validated that tiny computer with the focus. Right? That's what we had at the time. We didn't have live box yet. We hadn't validated it on that piece yet. And he's like, you know what, I'm just gonna do it because it, I just wanna do what works.

And maybe that's why Pat's where he's at because he just does what works. You know, he's not necessarily interested in, well, this isn't like the right form factor, just look professional yet. Or it's like he's willing to say, look, this is where you're at. You have this amazing technology. I'm gonna do what works.

I'm gonna use it how you recommend. And I don't know, may, maybe at some point he'll, he'll try a live box or something, but like, yeah, that's been an interesting experience interacting with some of these guys. That's what I've realized over the past six months or so. You know, starting with guys like Robert, like maybe, maybe this is all just natural.

Like they, of course they'd pick this up because they're who they are,

[00:39:41] Andy Leviss: super interesting to like, think about that, like that bell curve of where folks fall in their career and experience and where they're willing to, like, this is a cool new tool. I don't fully understand it, but it might work, so I'm gonna try it. As opposed to the folks who are like, it's been working fine, ringing stuff out with my ears for years.

Like, I don't need to try this new thing.

[00:39:59] Devin Sheets: Exactly. Exactly. And that's the, that's like, in fact, it was early on when, um, you know, there was a lot of noise early on, on like Facebook and Instagram. I would make posts and people would regularly jump in and be like, just use your ears. Just, just learn to EQ or whatever. And then literally guys like Robert would jump in and be like, so I'm using this at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Do I just need to learn to eq like what you know, and you know that, so I actually, I, I, I, I had Chad GPT mock up like a collector style patch that had our logo in the middle that said, just learn to eq. And I thought about it. I was like, somebody, I should make like a, like a limited run of collectors' version and hand 'em out to some of these early adopters.

You're in the Just Learned EQ club or something? Yeah,

[00:40:44] Andy Leviss: Yeah, well, it's a, yeah, there's like, so like, I mean, I know Ken Newman's been using it for Barry Manalow. Um, and then like our friend that Brian was alluding to earlier, Brian Maddox is, you know, like king of the corporate world. And he, like, he was raving to us about, he's like, no, this is like a life-changing piece of technology.

And like in, like, Brian does not like, does not offer praise like that faintly, so.

[00:41:08] Sean Walker: I mean, none of

[00:41:09] Devin Sheets: I mean it's, it's

[00:41:10] Sean Walker: None of the list of guys he just listed or you listed are like just praising stuff for the sake of praising stuff. Right. Like that's what they all have in common. Like Devon was just saying they're, they, they know what time it is. They're awesome and they've earned it. Right.

And they know when they need to find a tool to do the thing. And when they need to just use the tools, they've got better. And they found a tool that is way better than what they've got now. And they all went, yep, I'll take it. Let's do it. And it's, it's kicking butt for 'em.

[00:41:35] Devin Sheets: Yeah. And like, I mean, I even had people, so like Robert Scoville, um, came out and, you know, he, I, I'm, I'm paraphrasing, but be, he basically said. I'll, I'll never do another show again where I've got speakers and microphones in the same room and without de feedback on my vocal, and people were messaging me, accusing me of paying him to say that they were calling him a sellout.

They're like, Robert, clearly he would never, that's, I know Robert, he would never do that or whatever. That's like, that was totally organic. It was almost

[00:42:04] Sean Walker: you know Robert, why don't you shoot him a text message and ask him about it,

[00:42:07] Devin Sheets: I know, that's what I said. I was like, well, you

[00:42:09] Sean Walker: at me bud.

[00:42:10] Devin Sheets: he's very open. Like you can just text him. You can, you can just, you know, message him on social media.

[00:42:14] Andy Leviss: thing too. 'cause it's like he, if he would never do that, then you also know him well enough to know that he would never sell out just for some money.

[00:42:21] Devin Sheets: I know. Exactly. No, that's the thing. All of this is totally organic. I mean, I, the point

[00:42:25] Sean Walker: manufacturer, your size doesn't have enough money to

[00:42:27] Devin Sheets: I don't have a

[00:42:28] Sean Walker: Yeah, totally.

[00:42:29] Andy Leviss: he works for a W and used to work for

[00:42:31] Sean Walker: Yeah, totally.

[00:42:32] Devin Sheets: What money am I gonna use to pay Robert Scoville to

[00:42:35] Sean Walker: right.

[00:42:35] Devin Sheets: I don't

[00:42:36] Sean Walker: You already spent it. The wife's got you on the couch as it is, dude, like,

[00:42:40] Devin Sheets: I spent a couple of bucks in the

[00:42:41] Andy Leviss: sale one couch.

[00:42:42] Sean Walker: not on the couch. Right? You started selling plugins and the wife, wife let you come hang out again.

[00:42:47] Devin Sheets: you know? Yeah. Well, you know, in the early days I did pay a couple of bucks to boost some Facebook posts. That was it. I mean, other than that, I, you know

[00:42:56] Sean Walker: Hey man,

[00:42:56] Devin Sheets: what, I, I guess I've, I guess I've paid UPS shipping to send some people some demos, but, uh.

[00:43:00] Sean Walker: bro. That's just how business works, man. That's not.

[00:43:03] Devin Sheets: Other than that, it's all organic. Yeah, it's, and it's crazy.

It's totally insane.

[00:43:08] Sean Walker: That's amazing dude. That's freaking amazing. How, how cool dude. Well, what, uh, you mentioned something about maybe a V two. Is that in the works or is that just like a, hey, someday there will be a V two 'cause that's just how software goes and yada, yada, yada.

[00:43:23] Devin Sheets: Yes, we are actively working on V two. So the issue is that AI is hard and, um,

[00:43:30] Sean Walker: What?

[00:43:31] Devin Sheets: yeah, and you know, we're trying stuff that's never been done before, so we don't know what's gonna work. So like we, we, it's truly r and d. It's not like there's a clear path forward here. We're trying stuff that's never been done.

And so we try things that we think will work. Spend three months and then it doesn't work. And we're like, okay, well we have to just scrap that and try something else. So,

[00:43:52] Sean Walker: There goes several stacks of high society that I'll never get back anyway, so I guess we'll try something else now. Well,

[00:43:58] Devin Sheets: but V two, V two is in the works and the, the, uh, we're gonna be. I don't wanna like over promise, but like we're trying to get more aggressive d echo and de-noise. That's our main concentration for V two. And, um, on the sort of nons so side of things we're trying, we're trying some things like, uh, our own USB activation ability, a lot of people have been asking for that.

I just wanna run around with a USB stick and do it. Um, you know, just cleaning up, you know, some things about the UI and, and stuff like this, but like. Yeah, on the sonic front it's gonna be that, and then we're already thinking about V three. Um, you

[00:44:40] Andy Leviss: you looking at past vocals?

[00:44:44] Devin Sheets: say what?

[00:44:44] Andy Leviss: Are you looking at like instruments and stuff like that at

[00:44:46] Devin Sheets: Oh yeah, that, yeah. Past vocal. Yeah. So, um, yes. Um, instruments could be next. The problem is, you know, vocal is, uh, it just so happens to be the case that vocal is, um. Um, the lowest hanging fruit, so to speak,

[00:45:04] Andy Leviss: Oh for sure.

[00:45:05] Devin Sheets: for, for doing de feedback because of the

[00:45:07] Sean Walker: that the one that it can, it can most clearly define between that and noise. Is that

[00:45:10] Devin Sheets: Yeah, yeah, yeah,

[00:45:11] Sean Walker: most obvious of, Hey, this is not the. Background.

[00:45:15] Devin Sheets: yeah, yeah. Noise reverb feedback. It's

[00:45:17] Andy Leviss: and also the most likely to like be in a situation that it's getting

[00:45:20] Devin Sheets: That. Yeah, it all kind of works together. It's like nicely. It works out because typically vocals are what you struggle with mostly. And that's probably the largest market sector for de feedback. But obviously people wanted to work with instruments too, right?

So, um,

[00:45:33] Andy Leviss: Gimme amp buzz.

[00:45:34] Devin Sheets: oh yeah. Well, and, and also what you want a lot is to remove instruments from your vocal, so that's another thing, de instrument, you know? Um, but that's hard. That's a, there's a lot

[00:45:44] Andy Leviss: my moving overheads.

[00:45:45] Sean Walker: Oh my God. Can you get my drum kit outta my lead vocal on a bar stage that's literally right behind it

[00:45:51] Devin Sheets: Yeah,

[00:45:52] Sean Walker: Like, solve that problem. Sell more plugins.

[00:45:54] Devin Sheets: give, give us a minute. We'll work on it.

[00:45:56] Sean Walker: Yeah. Word. Perfect.

[00:45:57] Devin Sheets: Actually we are working on it. We are working on it. Um, but, uh, you know, here's the other thing too, I've sort of set us up right now is like the zero latency plugin company. Like that's what we are. So my guys are always yelling at me like. Just let us have, you know, five milliseconds of latency or 10 milliseconds of latency.

We could do so much. And I'm like, yes, we could. But right now we're gonna see what we can do at zero latency before we open the floodgates to arbitrary latency. I wanna see how far we can push it at zero latency. What can we accomplish there? And once we feel like we kind of are hitting, you know, a ceiling there, then maybe we'll start to introduce latency and we'll have like.

You know the the zero latency mode and then the higher latency mode, that's a bit more sonically capable. I mean, you can do a lot of stuff with latency. That's not really the point. I mean, for live sound, I just wanted to be able to say, we're running at zero latency and here's how it works. And try to just get that as best as we can right now.

So,

[00:46:53] Sean Walker: And, and for a lot of applications that really matters. Sometimes it doesn't, but a lot of times it really matters. So that's awesome, man.

[00:46:59] Devin Sheets: Yeah, we wanted, we didn't wanna start with a bunch of different plugins that were tailored to, like different purposes. And we could do that too. We could have like, here's like the one for, you know, this application and here's the one that's, I don't know, maybe in the future we'll do that, but right now I just, I wanted the one universal plugin that works in all circumstances, that doesn't have any UI parameters.

There's nothing to do. You just turn it on and it just should work. And so, um, you know that, yeah. Um. The, the basic philosophy is that, look, I mean, if you're listening to the mic. And you can tell that there's like feedback right on the edge, like, you know, somehow deep inside your, in your soul that if you push that fader, another five db, it's gonna feed back.

I mean, it's not feeding back now, but you just know it. How do you know it? Because you've mixed 40,000 shows and you have gut instincts somewhere in your brain. You're running a probability calculator that this is likely to feedback. If you can do it, the AI should be able to do it and it's just a matter of time and training and.

You know how well we can build the model. That's kind of our goal around alpha lavs.

[00:48:04] Sean Walker: Dude. That's awesome. That's super awesome. Where, uh, for those of you who are just tuning in, where can they find alpha, lavs and De-Feedback to download it?

[00:48:14] Devin Sheets: So, um, you can go straight to it@defeedback.ai. So that's DEDe-Feedback. De-Feedback, do ai and then, you know, alpha lavs audio.com is the general website. We also have another plugin. I mean, obviously everyone's interested in De-Feedback, of course, that's like the big thing. But we also have another plugin that I think is really cool.

Uh, it's a, it's called Transient Magnifier. And, um, it, it, uh, it, it does what it says it does. It boosts the transient in a super transparent, clear way that I, we all think is really, really cool. Doesn't get much attention, gets way overshadowed by IDe-Feedback, but it's also out there.

[00:48:50] Sean Walker: acoustic guitars kind of vibe.

[00:48:51] Devin Sheets: Oh yeah, try I, if you want, like if you, if you want to see its true power, throw it on your kick drum and just see what happens.

You know, that's like a, like a outta the gate, you are gonna love your kick drum sound. Um, so percussion of all kinds, um, even, even some instruments, people are using it. But anyway, so that's there on the website too, but it doesn't require any special hardware 'cause it's just a regular plugin. It's not, uh, we did some unique things in there, but it's, it's, uh, it's not, it's not like De-Feedback.

[00:49:21] Sean Walker: That's a lot closer to a transient designer than it is to the AI neural network running behind the scenes, but just hot rotted and better.

[00:49:27] Devin Sheets: Yeah, we, I mean we, we, for years, you know, I've tried all sorts of dyNAMMic enhancers and all sorts of stuff, and some of them work better than others, and I just thought, you know what, no, no plugin that I know of just does it the way it works in my head. Like it should just boost things that are transient and not touch anything else.

Can we just do that please? I, I just wasn't able to find something, especially, especially something that runs at zero latency. That was the problem. There's all sorts of plugins that do kind of what I wanted, but they have high latency. They have to have all this look ahead and everything. So transient magnifier does it at zero latency, and it does it really, really nicely.

[00:50:05] Sean Walker: Dude, that is awesome. Thanks for making a bunch of kick ass tools for our industry to use, man. We appreciate you. Thanks for going

[00:50:13] Devin Sheets: of other stuff and so, you

[00:50:15] Sean Walker: Be sure to tell the wife, thanks for not freaking throwing you out while you're going through all that dude and making something awesome for the world.

[00:50:20] Devin Sheets: We came close

[00:50:21] Sean Walker: yeah, right, totally.

Is there anything we haven't asked you yet or haven't talked about that you wish we would or that we should have before we start asking about food in Salem?

[00:50:29] Devin Sheets: food in Salem, huh? Well, the only thing I.

[00:50:31] Sean Walker: I'm driving down to come say hi at some

[00:50:32] Devin Sheets: Oh, let's do it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The only thing I would say is that, um, uh, just, just to clear up some confusion possibly, um, alpha Lavs is a separate company from Alpha Sound. Alpha Sound is the legacy family business. It's like, I still kind of on social media, I still operate under Alpha Sound.

Like, I just basically think of Alpha Lavs as like the software split off of, of, of Alpha Sound. So Alpha Lavs is its own company and everything, but um, you know, if people are looking for us online, um. It's all Alpha sound. So this is the YouTube, Instagram, Facebook. That's where I'm most active. Mostly Instagram and Instagram stories, but it's under Alpha Sound.

[00:51:08] Andy Leviss: Cool, and we'll link to all that in the show notes.

[00:51:10] Devin Sheets: Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

[00:51:13] Sean Walker: Dude. Cool. Devin, thank you so much for coming on and hanging out for the hour and chat with us about your baller ass new plugin and how it works and getting it all sorted out. Uh, thank you to Allen and Heath and RCF for letting us yap for the fricking 970,000 billionth time. That's the pod y'all. See you next week.

Music: “Break Free” by Mike Green