[Table of Contents]

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: [ARSCLIST] Beginner's question RE: digital recordings

Hi Lisa:

If I understand the press releases correctly, these are voice recordings, of the gentleman describing the collection he gave your museum? If so, you can be pretty aggressive about digi-filter/digi-cleanup and still retain audible human words. One thing to consider -- this kind of processing is actually a skill, not necessarily a "by the pants" thing, and you might fare better with a professional. One guy I'd talk to right off the bat is Art Shifrin (www.shifrin.net), who is expert at transferring grooved disks and then cleaning up the transfer without sucking the life out of it. Even though it's "only" speech recording, it's possible to go too far (for instance, some Radio Spirits reissues of old radio shows) where you remove so much that all is left is a digi-haze of jangly noise and not enough voices to clearly understand what is being said.

Monitoring on headphones is a good idea, but also make sure the end result is clearly audible on whatever kind of speaker you would use with an exhibit, if that's the final goal (probably something akin to a computer speaker -- small and trebly).

On the other hand, something like SoundSoap might be fine. If the man's voice is somewhat low-pitch to begin with, you can just filter out all the digi-janglies that might appear in the upper frequencies and be done with it.

With distorted grooved recordings, I've found that sometimes the distortion is a specific band of "fuzz" that, if filtered out, renders the recording much clearer -- it's somewhat akin to a guitar amp rattling a snare drum head. But sometimes, it's a wide distortion that makes everything fuzzy and hard to decipher. In that case, sometimes a tuneable filter can take out things like table resonances or room echo and suddenly the voice appears clearer even though it is still distorted. I had great luck with that method on a series of cassettes of college lectures once -- the whole thing was over-modulated but became perfectly clear and easy to listen to once the resonance caused by the table on which the cassette recorder was placed was tuned out. Go one step further and tune out the rumble of the room air conditioner and then even the student questions became somewhat audible. The Bell System experimented and wrote reams about how little frequency spectrum is needed to reproduce a voice audibly. What seems to be key is keeping consonant attacks and "s" "th" type sounds.

Hope this ramble threw some ideas your way.

-- Tom Fine

----- Original Message ----- From: "Lisa NnNnNn" <waterchild7@xxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <ARSCLIST@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Friday, August 04, 2006 2:57 PM
Subject: Re: [ARSCLIST] Beginner's question RE: digital recordings


Hi Tom,

Thank you for the suggestion. The recording engineer at the company we've been working with (www.cuttingarchives.com) has been very helpful and candid with their methods, so I'm sure he won't mind me probing further into the matter. I have no doubts as to their level of skill in doing the conversions, but it would indeed be helpful to know how they went about it. The reference I made to "too high" levels was taken from a paper that representatives from cutting corp and the field museum gave to an ARSC conference this spring, where it was posited that distortions in the grooves in the sonobands themselves were caused from the recordings having been made at an improper levels. Other theories for the misalignment of the grooves centered around the bands shrinking over time, or being distorted due to their manner of storage.

Lisa

From: Tom Fine <tflists@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Reply-To: Association for Recorded Sound Discussion List              <ARSCLIST@xxxxxxx>
To: ARSCLIST@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [ARSCLIST] Beginner's question RE: digital recordings
Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2006 14:26:17 -0400

Hi Lisa:

One question immediately comes to mind -- do you know any details of how the recordings that were digitized were done? The "too high level" could be a lousy transfer job. You'd want to know where the transfer person took the output of the sonoband machine (I'd bet they don't have a standard line output) and some details about their process. There is probably a certain amount of distortion inherent to this recording medium, it appears to be a low-fi in-the-field format. So there may only be so much you can do. High noise levels, though, for instance, might be indicative of an impedence mismatch between the Sonoband recorder and the digital recorder. And "too high level" distortion could be a level mismatch (too high output vs. expected input). So, it would be a very Good Thing to find out all details you can about the initial transfers that were done -- and get someone who really knows their stuff to do the transfers of what's left.

-- Tom Fine

----- Original Message ----- From: "Lisa NnNnNn" <waterchild7@xxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <ARSCLIST@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Friday, August 04, 2006 11:03 AM
Subject: Re: [ARSCLIST] Beginner's question RE: digital recordings


Hi Richard,

Unfortunately the museum has no audio lab to speak of, so I am essentially in charge of finding out everything we will need to work on these recordings once they are delivered to us. All I've been working with thus far in terms of reviewing the digitized recordings already in our possession has been a good set of headphones, realplayer, and my broken old laptop. Now that we have renewed funding, we're in the position to upgrade our equipment a little bit!
Yes, that link is about the project that I am working on. As for servicing the machines themselves, fortunately the company that is doing the converting of the bands to digital format has taken care of all that work. From what I can tell, they have done an excellent job cleaning up the machines and restoring at least one of them to working order.
Thank you so much for the suggestions; I'll start looking into those.


Lisa

From: "Richard L. Hess" <arclists@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Reply-To: Association for Recorded Sound Discussion List              <ARSCLIST@xxxxxxx>
To: ARSCLIST@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [ARSCLIST] Beginner's question RE: digital recordings
Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2006 10:50:39 -0400

Hello, Lisa,

What digital audio software do you already have in your lab? Many of the packages will do what you ask. I use Samplitude and it will do a lot of what you ask, and you can add Sound Laundry plug-ins from Algorithmix. I believe Adobe Audition will also do what you need.

Is this your project?
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2005-05/fm-mr050305.php

The remaining players may need service as well. I have no idea who can service them.

Cheers,

Richard

At 10:17 AM 8/4/2006, you wrote:
Dear list,

I have been reading your emails silently for a while, and finally have a couple questions of my own.

Richard L. Hess email: richard@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Aurora, Ontario, Canada (905) 713 6733 1-877-TAPE-FIX
Detailed contact information: http://www.richardhess.com/tape/contact.htm
Quality tape transfers -- even from hard-to-play tapes.

[Subject index] [Index for current month] [Table of Contents]