who else performs any kind of audio restoration?

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since the mid 90s i have used a variety of analog and digital techniques to restore sonically corrupted phonographic audio recordings. i much prefer to listen to my collection of thousands of old records [LPs, 45s and 78s] and tapes [cassette and open reel] on the convenient digital medium and sans any sonic contamination. who else here on the Wrong Planet does likewise?

I use CooEditPro - which has been bought and modified into something called Adobe Audition now, but I've not worked with the new incarnation. I did use SAW (Software Audio Workshop) years back, but it was rather big and clunky compared to CoolEdit. I have messed with SoundForge a little bit, and it certainly had lots of bells & whistles, but more than I would ever use. CoolEdit is more of a sportscar than a Cadillac Suite - built for ease and speed. Great for editing, looping, multitracking or filtering - it's really good at cleaning up clicks and pops and surface noise from old vinyl. I've taken a couple of old Disney LPs from the sixties that I got from the Gulf dealer when my folks filled up the station wagon, and restored them to Cd quality. One of the things I like is that not only will it automatically filter an entire song or section as a whole, you can zoom in to a specific point and remove a noise that's only a sixteenth of a second long, so you don't end up with a falter in the tune's rhythm.

<----Uses SAW Studio (72x24Ch audio mixer /Recorder written entirely in Assembler), as well as Steinberg WaveLab with a LOT of VST plugins.

I don't particularly care about removing the pops and clicks from Vinyl and old Wax recordings, or removing Tape Hiss, but I can 'polish a turd' fairly well. I know a local guy that has a CEDAR/sADIE setup.

okay- this fanatic uses the following software-

*a prehistoric version of SoundForge 4.0a
*Pristine Sounds 2000
*Dartpro 24
*Dcart Millenium
*Acoustica 4.0
*Click Repair
*Munoise
*Virtos Noise Wizard NR tools
*Cool Edit Pro
*Sound Laundry v2.1
*Magix Audio Cleaning Lab 10
*Acoustica Audio Tools [declicker, noise, declipping, treble rebirth]
*Sound Forge NR tools
*PSP audio tools [stereo processing, stereo synthesis]

i also use the following hardware-

*Marantz Digital Audio Toolbox ISP "sound enhancer"
*a CEDAR DC-1 Declicker i got off of EBAY for relatively cheap
*Roland SN-550 Digital Noise Suppressor
*a Rocktron Hush II dehisser

i got to hear what the CEDAR Decrackler and Dehisser could do and was only moderately impressed- on typically trashed LPs the decrackler tended to blunt the sharpness of musical transients and the edge off of brasses unless the setting was so low that some of the fine buzzy crackle slipped through, but otherwise it cut-out the buzz and grunge on 78s pretty well. the dehisser didn't work so well with dense 78 rpm noise- it would give strange swishy metallic artifacts unless the setting was so low that most of the noise was slipping through. it worked very well on moderately thin tape hiss [from good condition cassettes/open reels], though. the CEDAR DC-1 Declicker has the most bang for the buck, though, when bought used. i got lucky with finding one used, they are very rare. the Roland unit has a fair digital noise suppressor [especially when used in conjunction with the Rocktron unit] and a truly fine dynamic hum notch filter, and sucks out AC line hum without cutting the bass.

as for the software, SoundForge is the most versatile and stable. Pristine Sounds has a unique rumble suppressor which uniquely suppresses the rumble without killing the bass at all. it also has a fair dehisser with adjustable frequency band sensitivity, and a fine parametric eq. the Sound Laundry has a fine broadband noise filter which lets you hear what you are taking out. the Dcart has a great multiband dynamics processor which lets me take the shoutiness out of many 78s without killing the upper mids and treble. the Click Repair does the best job of declicking without removing the transient musical information. Munoise is perhaps the best [and FREE!! !] dehisser plug-in, it also lets you hear what is removed. the SoundForge NR tools has a very useful large gap extrapolation/interpolation tool, which lets me fill-in or replace up to a half-second audio gap. the Acoustica tools and the Virtos Noise Wizard let me subtly and transparently add MIA trebles to recordings in which the treble was scraped out of the grooves or worn off the tape. the Magix lets me literally "spectrally retouch" or "paint-out and replace" extraneous noises such as squeaking chairs and audience coughs and such, totally unique in its price range of $40 and a screaming bargain. but ALL of the tools i listed [and some i didn't] are used for specific tasks which they do best.

for those who don't want to $pend a whole lot of duckies on audio restoration, and they had to choose one or two apps with which to concentrate their fundage, i would recommend dcart millenium and dartproXP and maybe pristine sounds 2005 for later [next IRS tax refund], as with those you can do quite a bit of restoration, IOW lots of bang for the buck. just an aside. oh, and munoise [dehisser] is FREE- [donation-ware].

audio enhancement on the cheap-

become familiar with EBAY or with one's local pawnshop or goodwill store. find an old preamp or integrated amp with a "mono" button- on monophonic recordings you play on such an amp, hitting the mono button cuts a BIG amount of out-of-phase noise and distortion.
if you can find a used octave-band [10 sliders per channel] equalizer, use this to roll-off excess phonographic rumble in the deep bass and hiss/crackle in the treble, and to make compensatory EQ curves.
some old stereo audio receivers have a "DNR" [dynamic noise reduction, a product of National Semiconductor Corp.] button which dynamically filters out hiss without substantially dulling the trebles. use it on your old noisy cassettes.
if you find an SAE 5000 or a Burwen TNE 7000 impulse noise blanker, use these to tamp down the crackles and clicks on phonograph records.

if you have an old dolby pro logic surround sound receiver or amp that has audio line output rca jacks, hook this unit up between a phono preamp [or any preamp your turntable is connected-to] and a power amp, or put it in the recording loop of your receiver or integrated amp- then if you have any noisy monophonic LPs or 45s or 78s or tape recordings, just play 'em through this set-up, with a stereo splitter for the center-channel output of the dolby pro logic unit. this setup will remove all the out-of-phase noise from your noisy monophonic recordings.

there are some folk who swear by wet-playing their LPs and 45s- they wet the album then play it just once, sufficient for archiving it onto CDR. play 'em after the one wet treatment, though, and the sound quality is trashed forevermore. but wet-playing makes the record sound brand new, with no surface noise, no crackle, as though the layer of water were isolating the stylus from all the high-frequency surface imperfections.

for records that are too fragile for phonographic playback with a stylus, there is the ELP laser turntable, which uses focused lasers to simulate a stylus of optimal shape, to read the groove undulations with no physical contact. unfortunately, this device costs as much as a new car [$13k] and requires costly transoceanic service calls, and has a problem with surface noise, especially crackle, which is why it is offered with an optional CEDAR-derived black box digital impulse noise filter, for another cool 3 grand. perfect for the millionaire who doesn't have everything yet.

what i wish some smart techie would perfect, would be a method of extracting the audio information from record grooves using an ordinary 3d photographic scanner. there is an israeli hobbyist who posted some audio examples of his own work using a 2d scanner, and the results were valiant but sad just the same. anybody on WP have a high-rez 3d scanner and knows sufficient coding language to make an app for this?

i once had a lp that had a crack going all the way through it, with just the label holding the record together. playing this record had a loud POP! twice per revolution, that even my trusty CEDAR declicker could only soften to a "thup" - so i ended up having to manually repair approximately 1200+ loud clicks- each click responded individually to manual repair, and with some of the clicks, only a cut/butt would work, which shortened some of the tracks by several seconds, which i sometimes had to compensate-for by using digital time stretching.

in the old days of audio restoration, this was the only way to remove impulse noises [clicks and pops] from old 78 rpm master recording dubs onto tape, by physically grease-pencilling the areas on the tape found by manually rolling tape on an editing block with an oscilliscope display indicating the start and end points to mark, then using a razor blade across a gap to slice the offending click out at that point, then using splice tape to join the tape together. some of 'em had hundreds of such splices, and to minimize wear and tear on the chopped and taped-together reel of tape, they usually dubbed it onto yet another tape, yet another generation removed from the original master disc. many old manually declicked recordings sound inferior to the masters for that reason, with markedly less treble "snap" due to accumulated generations of wow/flutter, modulation noise, and tape hiss. at least with computers, you don't lose any generations, thank god.