GoonSquad wrote:
^^^ Thanks for the tip on that AVID boxed set! I just ordered it... When it comes in, I'll have to break out my headphones and have a nice, long listen. Most of the time I listen to mp3s with earbuds--sometimes I forget how much is lost, even with a good recording! Technology is not always a friend to music.
from what i heard, the AVID makes the recording sound quite clean and clear. the technology needs to be wielded with a facile touch, otherwise the music can be butchered. there is a lot of butchered music out there now. i've heard some horrendous restoration jobs. i think a big part of the botched restorations is due to bad quality of the monitoring transducers the restoration techs are using in some cases. for me, i can't use anything lower quality than a pair of sennheiser hd580 precision headphones together with a special sennheiser headphone amp, the pair are well-matched and are suitably transparent for me to hear all the way into the recording, which allows me to hear the tiniest flaws.
GoonSquad wrote:
Did you restore your copy yourself?
yeah, i was too cheap to fork over the duckies for the AVID boxed set, so i took my 1999 sony/columbia remastered version and ripped it onto my puter restoration suite, then went to work on it. several thousand edits later, i have the condensed version that purists would hate but i would take to a desert island with me if that were the only CD i could take with me. in order to squeeze 120 minutes of concert onto an 80-minute CDR, i cut out nearly all the applause, using crossfades so as to not seem to have butchered the concert. i used a CEDAR DCX digital declicker module to remove the lions share of crackle and clicks, then used several software apps to remove the remaining rumble, hiss, groove roar, chuffing and swishing, etc. i used an inverse extraction app to monitor how much noise i was removing to make sure i didn't cut into the music, as a quality control measure. i left out the didactic section early in the first half of the concert [after "life goes to a party"] and also i cut out "loch lamond" and "honeysuckle rose" to fit in the songs i liked the best. i raised some ultra-quiet parts further above the noise floor and using dynamic EQ tamped down some harsh upper midranges on soloist martha tilton singing "
bei mir, bist du schön." since the sony/columbia CD originally was sourced from a variety of original and copied-from-original discs, there is a lot of variability in the sound quality/noise level, this was the hardest thing to compensate for, and for this reason i had to use some treble heterodyning in order to make the inferior sourced parts sound uniform relative to the rest. the noise [mainly hiss] i left in [for the purposes of psychoacoustic dither, which made the low-level treble hysterisis less noticeable] is fairly level after all that, which i am proud of accomplishing. then finally, i decorrelated the channels to give it more of a realistic quasi-stereophonic spaciousness one would expect from a tony venue like carnegie hall. i hope this made sense.