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For many years BC [before computers] I suffered like a dog chained in the yard with a bunch of firecrackers popping all around] whenever I listened to my favorite records- not even 78's then but ordinary lp's and 45rpm singles- plagued with loud clicks and pops [impulse noises, in the parlance of audio folk], and intrusive hiss on cassettes, especially those recorded with improper bias and Dolby level. At this time [the 70's and early 80's] I knew nothing about professional tools for single-ended noise reduction [Packburn #323A, manual editing block] nor had I seen the consumer equipment available then [Burwin TNE7000A Transient Noise Eliminator, KLH Noise Filter, et al] until 1983, when the local hifi place got these miracle boxes in their shop for folk like me to ooh and ah over- at least in theory, since there was precious little demonstration going on- these 2 boxes cost $500 EACH in 1983 dollars, which was more moolah than my 23-year-old self had seen up to that point, but I finally was able to persuade the store owner to put on a record and demonstrate to this "waste of his expensive time" music lover what good analog noise reduction tools could do to make phonograph-listening a more aesthetically pleasing experience for me, provided I could "pull myself up by my own bootstraps" and get some $$$ and buy this stuff from him sometime soon [HAH!]- the turntable was a Denon with their moving-coil cartridge, a pair of large Mirage speakers, a Mobile Fidelity half-speed remastered lp playing some bombastic classical piece with bass drum and low brasses blatting away in reverberant sonority but with an overlay of hiss and crackle- Mr. Sound Man switched the noise reduction in, and to my inexperienced amazement, all the surface noise just disappeared [at the time, there was too much traffic noise outside to really hear the quiet sounds of the record, otherwise I would have noticed that with the crackle and hiss gone, record rumble really becomes intrusive, even on top equipment with top-quality pressings] and from that time [until I started being able to "do it myself" in 1995 with the advent of consumer-level digital audio tools such as Wave for Windows and a 486 PC with 16 megs of RAM - those were the days- and a newly-purchased Sony DAT recorder] I became even more obsessed with getting the crackles out, and searched pawnshops and used equipment places until I was able to find a working old SAE5000A and a KLH noise filter- I was never able to find a working used Burwin TNE7000 which was really the Lincoln of declickers then [the Packburn #323A was the Rolls-Royce of Single-Ended Noise Reduction]- and then I set to work making "quality" cassette copies of my crackly old flat friends run-through these 2 filter boxes, expecting miracles like I remembered hearing in that magical "rich-person's" audio heaven I'd been in 5 years before- and getting... noise and distortion! [ just altered in timbre and volume]. If I spoke Japanese [like my mother], I woulda sputtered, "NAN DESKA! Honto Deska?!" [roughly, "What is This!" "Is This True?!"] My jaw sorta dropped and I became a little depressed and even paranoid ["I was ripped-off! This can't be the real stuff!"] Alas, I heard other examples of what this primitive equipment could NOT do- through headphones at least, a person with average hearing acuity could hear "thuds" replacing sharp clicks, and POP!s remained as explosive as before, with nary a dulling of their volume. The Hiss filter, OTOH, turned hissy discs and cassettes into swishy [no jokes, please] discs and cassettes- when I tried to get rid-of the swish, the music was damped-down into pillow-stifled dullness, making the platter rumble that much more obvious. Sooooo... my search for audio panacea renewed itself with vigor, and it wasn't until I read an article in a 1988 issue of High Fidelity magazine, about the then revolutionary Sonic Solutions NONOISE system, which was reviewed in remastered recordings of Leadbelly and The Blue Mountain Boys, on RCA's Heritage label- in which David Ranada explained how the system worked, [namely, on a modified Macintosh computer with expensive daughterboard modifications, to the tune of $40,000] and I became obsessed with getting my own similar system, someday- when either 1] "I jerked myself up by my own bootstraps and got rich" or 2] and far more likely, the stuff would come down in price in some diluted form and I could go into hock and beg, borrow and buy it. So I reluctantly was dragged kicking and screaming into the computer age- up to then I had never used a computer nor knew anything about the temperamental beasts with their sputtering daisy wheel printers and cackling hard drives that stored about a spoonful of data- but I reluctantly sought-out information on how to use the infernal machines to accomplish a dull imitation of what I had read in that hifi rag in 1989. I went to Tower Records and Silver Platters in search of CDs treated with NoNoise [and a bit later, CEDAR, which stands for Computer Enhanced Digital Audio Restoration], and YES! Found them in various Columbia [now Sony] and RCA Bluebird CDs of Jazz artists such as "Fatha" Earl Hines and Bix Beiderbecke and Louis Armstrong, et al- I took these jewels home in their long boxes [anybody remember those?] and put 'em on the box and heard... noise and distortion!!! [with due respect to Sonic Systems and CEDAR ltd.]- I heard a fancier version of what I experienced with the inexpensive consumer noise filters I'd gotten a while before- silenced crackles but only muffled pops on the CEDAR, along with swishy treble noise aliasing- and muffled crackle [but the loud pops were gone] and dulled trebles [or intrusive remnant hiss] on the Nonoise-treated CDs- along with doses of chopped-up brass [NoNoise]- I realized years later that these faults were operator shortcomings, that both systems are capable of [relatively] clean
reduction of surface noise but certainly not totally transparent noise elimination. I eventually was able to get a CEDAR X-series Declicker off of Ebay, for a substantial discount, because the original owner obtained an AudioCube system which was an upgrade. Anyways, [based on what I had heard on CDs treated with CEDAR] I eagerly put an lp on the platter [I'd finally found a used Denon turntable with moving coil cartridge I'd heard years ago in that magical mercenary hifi audio salon] I heard- you guessed it- Noise and Distortion! My guess is that the algorithm CEDAR uses has an easier time declicking 78s than it does lp's with their greater treble energy- the discrete clicks as well as the background crackle were GONE[!] with no defect, when I had a 78 playing- but when I put on a direct-to-disc lp of Les Brown and his Band of Renown, the brasses degraded to the sound of worn cloth ripping. So I turned the click sensitivity control back to 8 o'clock, and the clicks returned but were reduced in number, and the cloth trumpets regained their brassy blattiness. So again I searched for a better way- and found [to my pleasant surprise!] an economical software set by a company in Germany called Virtos GMBH- their program is called Virtos Noise Wizard Noise Reduction Tools, it is available as a try-before-you-buy shareware program at
www.hitsquad.com, aka Shareware Music Machine. The particular tool I use most often, is their Declicker/Decrackler, I have found to perform better than my CEDAR on lp's, [It doesn't chop-up the brasses as badly but passes slightly more crackle on most 78rpm material]. So, I use them both in a complementary manner. [The reader will notice that each program I talk about has strong points and weak points, which I will discuss in more detail later]
The best general noise [static hiss and roar] supressor I have found, is Sound Laundry [also available at hitsquad.com ] - it allows me to hear what I am taking out [just like Virtos Noise Reduction tools] but I can get a superior amount of rumble and other low-frequency grunge removed with this particular tool. For spot-cleaning and precision cut-and-paste edits, I've had very good luck with Sonic Foundry's [now also Sony] Sound Forge wave editor, with DX plug-ins for noise reduction which allow for cut-less click elimination by filling in the space where a loud click or pop was, with an extrapolation of the waveform a millisecond or so in front-of and behind. Pristine Sounds 2000 has a unique rumble-reduction filter which doesn't kill bass instruments and seems to allow for bass channel separation as well, and it works on MONO [single-channel with
no stereo channel differential noise cancellation going-on!] materials also! In addition, there is a decently-priced product from MAGIX called Audio Cleaning Lab 10, which has a feature that is available elsewhere only as a CEDAR product which cost as much as a house- their Spectral Cleaning utility allows the user to visualize any noise as a 2-dimensional image in frequency space and time, and you just draw around the noise [a coughing classical music hater, a ringing phone, a honking car horn outside, etc.] and eliminate it! Granted, Pristine Sounds also has this feature but MAGIX was the first affordable product to also use frequency extrapolation/substitution for the edited noise, so you don't hear as much of a "hole" in the music at the edit point, and the visual spectral workspace is much larger and more detailed in the MAGIX product compared with Pristine Sounds. I also use DCART Millenium [well-priced and available as shareware, with powerful filters- originally developed to restore Edison Diamond Discs] as well as a revised DartProXP, which has a greatly improved declicker and denoiser compared with the first version I got way back in 1995.
One thing I want all readers here to see- what proper restoration involves is not simply removal of noise, but "tailored" alteration of sound- it's not enough to remove hiss and crackle, there is groove roar and rumble ready to take the place of the rice crispies noise- and at each step in the process, it is possible to miscalculate and take out too much sound- so most audio restoration folk leave in a trace amount [some leave in much more than that] of broadband noise which serves as a sort-of "acoustic dither" that fills-in the missing trebles in some old 78rpm discs. I do this but I also use a modified noise gate to subtly modulate the remnant noise so it is not as obtrusive in quiet sections of music. Custom EQ is usually indicated, to compensate for the telephonic coloration in many older disc recordings, as well as to give the impression of clearer trebles. Sonic excitation [heterodyning and/or digital spectral synthesis] can also revitalize the sound of older or poorly-made records, recreating treble and bass energy which are MIA on many old acoustically-recorded 78's [the kind where the musicians huddled around the mouth of a huge horn and shouted into it, vibrating a needle cutting an undulating groove into a spinning wax disc].
[BTW, Virtos Noise Reduction Tools also has a good Spectral Enhancer tool, which is useful in this type of muffled recording]
Also note, that not every recording can be [really] restored, in terms of "making a silk purse out a sow's ear"- sometimes one is lucky just to get a cloth handbag out of it! The music-lover sometimes is left with only their imagination, to render listenable some old discs just beyond the pale.
The gist of my ramble, is that "it takes a village" [sorry, Hillary:+)] of software to properly restore most noisy audio recordings, that no one particular piece of hardware and software can do it all by itself, to my satisfaction. It also takes superior monitoring equipment to properly hear what you are doing- I made plenty of coasters [crappy CDs] because the rotten headphones I'd been monitoring with obscured too much treble for me to hear that I'd been leaving in swishy "star wars noise" [aka "Noise Reduction Aliasing"] and/or taking out too much treble, making for dull and lifeless recordings. So on that end, I heartily recommend Sennheiser headphones such as the precision 580- or for those with bluer blood than I, the 600s, which are about as revealing and neutral a headphone one can find.
For folk who cannot be bothered with the exacting details ["quick and dirty" restoration results in "quickly listened-to and forgotten" and "dirty rotten shame it was a half-
&$$ed job" results- I will guide you step-by-step, if you wish to give it a try], I am available to do the job for you, for a bargain rate, if you are patient- I am only one person, me, myself and I;+)- and I can do only one job at a time, and since I refuse to do "quick and dirty [see above explanation], a quality restoration will take as much time as it takes for little ol' me to do it. I may charge either per the job or per the hour, depending on my estimation of a project's exigencies.
Post your comments and requests, and I promise [though I can't guarantee] that I will try to answer every single person who bothers to read this blog and write to me with questions.
I thank you all sincerely, for taking time out of your busy day to read me:+) I never thought I could do any of this "web stuff" and am glad Blogger.com was created, so that even luddites like me could spout boilerplate on the web, and try to help a little corner of humanity.
I don't know about you, but I find Ebay to be a somewhat complicated affair for sellers and not much better for buyers. Ebid seems to be simpler to use. Give it time, it will grow...
