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Re: [ARSCLIST] Pristine Audio (?!)



Who has the audacity to make those decisions without asking? "We have standards"?! It sounds like his standards are according to his personal whims, and the final result had to sound just as "good" as all his other mastering jobs. I didn't know that's how it worked.
Phillip


Richard L. Hess wrote:
At 07:55 AM 2007-12-04, Tom Fine wrote:
With a good bit of this old source material, there is a point where the digi-tools create more unpleasant artifacts than they improve audibility. The ear is pretty good at ignoring white-ish background noise like is rampant on carefully cleaned, decent-condition 78's. The ear, at least an ear that doesn't have shot treble sensitivity, is not good at ignoring digi-hash and "sparkle-grit", compounded by digi-flangeing errors, around instruments, especially when the digital artifacts pump loud and soft with the musical content as in the Johnson sample.

I agree with Tom here. From the tape perspective, I had a disheartening experience. Between 1976-1982, I recorded several LPs for St. Thomas Church in NY City. Around 2000, two of these, and a portion of a third were re-released commercially. I did the transfers for them. When I got back test CDs, I was appalled at how "wooden" the soaring highs of the world-famous boy choir sounded. When I finally got through to the mastering engineer, he told me that the tape hiss on my tapes was unacceptably high--"we have standards, you know" and he had to apply Cedar to the whole thing.


I suggested to him that 15 in/s Dolby A 2-track tapes are not generally hissy, and he had managed to remove all the life from the trebles (boy sopranos). He asked me what that noise was then if it wasn't tape his. Oh, that. It's the organ. 30 HP of wind blowing around inside wooden boxes and leaking a wee bit here and there makes noise. So, instead of taking out tape hiss, he took out organ hiss which was a natural part of the sound and unavoidable unless the choir had been close-mic'd to the point of hearing individual voices rather than a blend.

Yes, I think digi-tools are often over-used--I may even be guilty in some people's mind of doing that myself. I try and avoid it, but sometimes it's a real tightrope between intelligibility and digi-artifacts. I leave the disc transfers to Shiffy and Graham and Tom.

I do find band-limiting in certain conditions more effective than digi-tools. When you use digi-tools, price does matter. Algorithmix Noise Free Pro is pretty clean--not perfect, can be over-used, but does a lot of things reasonably well. I can't wait to try the new restoration suite in Samplitude.

Cheers,

Richard

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.


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