Re: [ARSCLIST] The Hope of Audacity Was--Re: [ARSCLIST] Seeking recommendations for oral history digitization equipment (fwd)

["Richard L. Hess" <arclists@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 10:49 PM 2008-08-15, Bob Olhsson wrote:
> -----Original Message-----
> From Richard L. Hess: "... once you
> normalize the signal or do fades, then there might be differences..."
>
>
> I should hope the utterly stupid practice of "normalizing: is not a part of
> anybody's  archival process. It buys you nothing but extra noise and
> distortion.

Hello, Bob,

Alas, "normalization" is part of some of my oral history workflows 
(although generally not my music workflows until the mastering stage).

Look at this scenario: There are 100 cassette tapes that need to be 
digitized and you've bid the job at one-pass digitization (i.e. no 
preview). You're digitizing 24 bits, the client wants to burn their 
own CDs from my WAV files.

You have no idea of the levels on the tapes--it may go from full 
saturation to buried in the noise.

On a given tape the only thing that may be close to saturation are 
the start and stop pulses. Everything else is say -20 dBFS peak. Do 
you let someone dither or truncate that 24-bit file to 16? NO! YOU 
control what happens and the -20 dBFS peak conversation gets brought 
up to say -0.5 dB peak (the start/stop pulses are either removed or 
just not included in the normalization).

This ends up with a much better result in these cases for these clients.

Yes, the noise level is brought up, but it is now the defacto 
dithering signal as well <sigh/smile>.

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.