Thumps may last for many hundreds of milliseconds, so conventional declicking processes are unsuitable for restoring audio containing them. Furthermore, the spectral content of thumps will usually overlap the genuine signal, so simple filters cannot remove them without degrading the underlying signal.

Dethump uses the data in and around the damaged signal to build up a picture of what the low frequency data should have been had the thump not occurred. The process then replaces the thump with restored low frequency audio, leaving the undamaged high frequency data unaffected. This makes dethump the world's best tool for removing many of the previously intractible problems associated with optical soundtracks, as well as for restoring damaged cylinders and discs, and for cleaning modern recordings when, for example, microphones and stands are bumped.

Dethump utilises floating-point processing to ensure the highest possible sound quality throughout the system. Processing is very rapid, thus allowing near instant evaluation of the result.,