anybody else use computers for audio restoration work?

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I never tried using a computer for restoration but used to do it old school. (1983)
I remember having a HQ turntable with almost non-existant rumble or hum. I couldn't hear it at full blast (120w per channel).
My amplifier had a distortion of .005% With the 20 band eq w/imx expander and a high end tape deck
I made such great copies that they were louder than the original.
I agree about the reverb board they create awesome effects on otherwise boring tracks.
I never really liked dolby noise reduction in any form it took away too much of the high end sound.
Anyone else agree? I found just adjusting the EQ the right way worked much better.

surely the original pressings back in the day were not so colored with crackles and hiss and rumble, sans the aging effects of time and repeated plays. so what is so holy about wear and tear that such noise and distortions should be preserved rather than ameliorated via modern tech? just wondering...

dolby NR only works as designed with properly calibrated record/playback decks and tapes, they work together as a synergy and when either element is off by even a bit it all falls down to the point where one hits the "off" button on the dolby so as to not listen to a recording that sounds as though it were made under a pillow. having a fine-tuneable record bias control helps a lot to this end. but a lot of worn tapes have lost too much treble energy for dolby to work as designed. that is the thing about all analog tape recordings made with narrow track widths and speeds below 3&3/4th" per second, they have [in the parlance of audio engineers] "fugitive trebles," IOW such tapes [cassettes and 8-tracks] can't retain treble energy for very long, so they end up sounding more and more muffled over the years. my collection of decades-old cassette tapes all have lost their top octave and have gotten very hissy.
as for EQ it can do only so much to fix things. dynamic eq is better in that it can duck around the noise.

I used to invest in only HQ Metal/Chrome bias tapes which extended the play back quality by almost double the years.
I used to mess around with tapes like dj's do on a turntable. I could duplicate almost every effect except scratchin.
One of my decks had a flaw that became fun in which I could carefully tap the rewind button without stopping the tape
and create that repeat effect. I not only had a pitch control on the turntable but created one for my tape deck also.

wow you sound like an audio engineer who could actually work in a recording studio. that was my youthful dream, to work professionally in the sound field. as for the DSP effects that now are fairly common, i dream of what i could've done with such 2 decades+ earlier when i had keener hearing and more energy.

Thank You! I was 12yrs old at the time!
The idea for the pitch control on the tape deck was easy I put a adjustable power supply on it and then with the twist of a knob could slow or speed up the motor.
Televisions in the 70's did not have audio outputs so I made my own and even though the signal was usually mono
I ran it through my stereo and it made like early surround sound especially fun with my old atari games!
I did that to my first tv at 6yrs old.

6 years old? when i was six i could barely read. you sound a lot like my jack-of-all-trades/master of all trades brother who can fix anything. i remember reading about what you did, when i read about how the late johnny carson was dissatisfied with the tinny sound from his tv speaker, so he got an electrician friend to wire the sound output to his stereo.

This is clever! I`m going to use something like this on drum track...apply gate, flip phase, reverse track with loud hits, add reverb, reverse back, mix back...cool, there are lot of things one can do in such a way. I`ve been using invert phase trick in sound design, but it never occurred to me to include gate in all this. Thanks!

david younglove, on one of the audio technician forums, invented a fine decrackling process that involves running a signature-based noise reduction on a crackly file [after the coarser clicks/crackle have been first removed, leaving behind fine crackle], then copy/invert/mix with the original unaltered file which leaves just the noise [and a bit of signal] removed. do a high-pass filtering on the noise above 2000 cycles, then declick/decrackle the dickens out of that filtered noise-only file, then copy/invert/mix that back in with the noise-only file which will leave just the inverted fine crackles which you then mix back in with the original [fine]crackly sound file, thus cancelling out almost all the fine crackle without touching the good clean musical signal. this is essentially what CEDAR DeCrackle does, the "split and recombine" technique. but it's a lot cheaper than CEDAR.

Not only cheaper but also a lot more creative
I must admit that I do like crackles and hisses...and looks like there is crackle genocide going on

i am the sworn enemy of noise.

I am unable to find a trial of R-mix, or any download of it, anywhere. Any place I can download it and have a play? as i'm currently using a combination of AV music Morpher, Audacity, and Adobe Audition for "Stereo" mixes of "mono only" songs.

i wasn't able to find any trial versions either. but (clicky) on this for a program called spectralayer pro that goes r-mix a LOT BETTER!

but it is pricey.
p.s.- can you tell me how you do the digitally recreated stereo mixes on your mono selections?

Today I transferred some vinyl, and I transferred one of my Beatles 45's. I transfer 45's at half speed to get better fidelity, and I transfer at my cards full resolution.

I cleaned this up, summed to mono, and here it is. It sounds great. It has a lot more energy and power than the cd versions:

http://soundcloud.com/goodiesguy/the-be ... ll-get-you

I have used MAGIX audio lab to copy some vinyl to my laptop. Had to do minimum cleaning of the tracks.

until i got iZotope RX, i used magix audio cleaning lab to do spectral retouching of problem spot noises in my old phonograph recordings and live recordings [coughs and such].