Re: [ARSCLIST] Restoration Software

[Angie Dickinson <angie@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Several years ago, I was asked to clean up the audio on a cassette copy
of a wire recording.  The wire had long since been lost.  The copy was
all he had.  The recording was very noisy and unintelligible in places,
but I did what I could.  If I remember correctly, I was used DC-Art.
The gentleman was amazed at what I had been able to do and commented
that they had been unable to get good results with Sonic Solutions of
which he had free access.

Though I've never used Sonic Solutions, the conclusion I drew from this
statement was that it was more a case of the operator not knowing how to
use the software effectively than a fault of the software itself.

There are many programs and plug-ins available that allow for decent
results at all price levels.  But the bottom line is that its less about
the software used and more about understanding the process that is the
key to getting good results.

I rarely use DC-Art for broadband removal these days and instead use a
variety of EQ, Multiband and De-noise plug-ins in SAW Studio.
Parameters can be set in SAW Studio while the audio is being digitized
in which speeds things up quite a bit.

Angie Dickinson
Avocado Productions
www.avocadoproductions.com

Dave Nolan wrote:
> I have to agree that for broadband denoising, the Waves X-Noise really
> isn't as great as its $1000+ price tag might suggest.  Invariably when
> friends have played me audio denoised with X-Noise that "sounds great" to
> them in their studio monitors (or on the home stereo), I could hear all
> sorts of flange-y underwater-y artifacts by listening through a basic pair
> of Sony 7506 headphones.  Many monitors, even fairly expensive ones in
> common use (Genelecs, Mackies, KRKs, etc...) seem to mask a lot of those
> artifacts at normal listening volume, but they're there.
>
> The only way I trust whether a denoising job has been truly "transparent"
> is by putting on the phones (usually at a higher-than usual volume for a
> brief period of time) and making sure the denoise parameters were not so
> aggressive as to create those artifacts.
>
> dave nolan
> nyc