.
An
employee of Bellaphon Records has dived into the archive to retrieve
old audios of Costa Cordalis and daylight. He came with the 1/4 "masterband of his first album "Folkolore Aus Aller Welt" from 1966 and some vinyl singles.
This
material now had to be digitized and, if necessary, worked up.
To
my astonishment was the sound that came from the 1/4 "band very
well, the sound was stereo and there was almost no noise to hear. The entire album was only produced with two acoustic
guitars and a lead vocal. With the pegeltone I fixed the azimuth of the machine heads. Then I set the recording level so that the loudest
passages were about -10 to -6dB. In total, there should be 13 tracks
on the album. To my surprise, there was a bonus track, which was
refereed and additional announcements to the individual titles in the
appropriate languages of the songs. These takes were
played at the end of the tape. I bounced them together after the
digitization to the individual songs. In a particular title, the noise
in Intro was a bit strong, so at the request of Bellaphon, I ran away
from the section in question. For this job I have several tools of
iZotope (RX7) and Steinberg available.
De-noiseing is generally about
reducing noise without affecting the sound of the music. My plug-in
is available with the Voxengo Gliss Equalizer in combination with a
dynamic equalizer. Both components have intervened very little in the
program. Adding both tools quickly stopped the noise without
affecting the amount of music.
Much more
complex was the challenge of optimizing the sound of old single-vinyl
records. Here
was a whole range of imperfections to work on. The
sound was mono, contained plenty of disk crackers and sometimes quite
unsightly distortions. First
of all, I played the vinyls (dry) as they were. When
digitizing it was only about the plates properly in an appropriate
level to play in the calculator. Again, I kept the level at -10 dB to
-6dB. Also
for eliminating the cracker software from Wavelab and IZotope is
available. Here
the RX 7 worked very well. The cracker I could eliminate it. However,
it was necessary to individually identify and mark each cracker and
calculate or render with the correct threshhold. If I chose the
section too long, because two crackers were relatively close to each
other, then the tool "killed" the punch of the snare drum because it considered the transients of the drum to be a crackpot.The
RX 7 was also able to eliminate distortion on some passages because
it has kept the distortion over transients. This
worked very well on some passages, in other places a more specific
solution was needed.
I
experimented with a multiband compressor in combination with a
de-esser. Distortion in most cases affected the voice in the
frequency range between 2000 Hz and 4000 Hz. With the compressor, I
reduced the critical frequency range by about 2-3 dB.
It turned out, however, that this reduction was not enough on the one
hand, but on the other hand, with a greater reduction, the voice
became noticeably too quiet. Therefore, I did additionally with the
de-esser very selectively reduced the tearing frequency. This
narrowband processing allowed me a further reduction of 2 to 3
dB. Once again, I've found that a
plug-in for a specific application does almost miracles, but does not
provide a usable result for another problems. In any case, it is necessary
to deal with the matter exactly. Simple "plug and play"
tends to destroy the program rather than achieving a good result. I
am amazed at what is now possible with modern software.
Stefan Noltemeyer
