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.