12-13-2009, 02:56 PM
Questioner,
That's actually a good idea about the guy at the Library of Congress. I work there, so I think I might look him up when I return to work on Monday.
You are totally correct about the processing artifacts. Gary and I looked at many tweaks, and the best we could get with gates and equalization is the same effect you mentioned--chirps right at the start of each open gate. I thought it was a VST anomaly, but apparently that's as close as you can get to not making it sound like you are intentionally gating the sound.
I was actually very impressed with Sound Soap. In fact, when I ran some of the Q'uo sessions through the application, we heard crickets in the background that were otherwise not audible behind all that analog hiss. To me, I was like.. SOLD! :-)
Granted, the sound is not going to come out perfect. There is no perfect way to eliminate everything. Some aspect of hiss will not be part of the sound canceling profile, and it will end up surfacing one way or the other. The best we can do is try to identify the "rude" parts of the hiss, while equalizing any remaining portions. At least the hiss can become like a soft "woosh", which is entirely more comfortable hearing than piercing sibilance ("ess" sound).
It's cool that there are some of you into this stuff! I'll definitely ask this thread for help if/when we find the right solution, sound profile, and can scale the operation consistently. I would need to establish a strict protocol of processing tasks for each track so that they all sound consistent and similar. I am also creating an intro and ending sountrack for each one as well, which will be batch appended. This will give the audio a little more professionalism and can help people identify the tracks in case their ipods don't have accurate filenaming.
Onward! :-)
Steve
That's actually a good idea about the guy at the Library of Congress. I work there, so I think I might look him up when I return to work on Monday.
You are totally correct about the processing artifacts. Gary and I looked at many tweaks, and the best we could get with gates and equalization is the same effect you mentioned--chirps right at the start of each open gate. I thought it was a VST anomaly, but apparently that's as close as you can get to not making it sound like you are intentionally gating the sound.
I was actually very impressed with Sound Soap. In fact, when I ran some of the Q'uo sessions through the application, we heard crickets in the background that were otherwise not audible behind all that analog hiss. To me, I was like.. SOLD! :-)
Granted, the sound is not going to come out perfect. There is no perfect way to eliminate everything. Some aspect of hiss will not be part of the sound canceling profile, and it will end up surfacing one way or the other. The best we can do is try to identify the "rude" parts of the hiss, while equalizing any remaining portions. At least the hiss can become like a soft "woosh", which is entirely more comfortable hearing than piercing sibilance ("ess" sound).
It's cool that there are some of you into this stuff! I'll definitely ask this thread for help if/when we find the right solution, sound profile, and can scale the operation consistently. I would need to establish a strict protocol of processing tasks for each track so that they all sound consistent and similar. I am also creating an intro and ending sountrack for each one as well, which will be batch appended. This will give the audio a little more professionalism and can help people identify the tracks in case their ipods don't have accurate filenaming.
Onward! :-)
Steve
(12-13-2009, 01:30 PM)Questioner Wrote:(12-13-2009, 12:08 AM)Bring4th_Steve Wrote: Questioner,
You pretty much ran down the same list I did in terms of trying to clean up the audio. I have a pretty extensive VST library, which includes some noise canceling plug-ins. Since analog tapes are one of the noisiest mediums to clean up audio from, the methods you described are great in theory, but have some crazy side effects when tweaking them.
I won't quote the whole post but I did find it all interesting.
I've also tried playing with plugins to clean up bad audio and found the same problems with artifacts. In particular, overdoing the noise removal made speech sound like chipmunks gargling underwater. And I found the same problem with gates. After a certain point, it's like how opening and closing the doors all the time is more distracting than just living with the breeze.
SoundSoap is new to me. From your description, that batch noise reduction feature will give you a quick way to get much better sound quality.
I don't have the reference right now but a few months ago NPR had a mention of some audio archivist, maybe at the Library of Congress, who was able to discover the speed variations of analog tapes and correct for the wow and flutter. This made old concert recordings really come to life once the wandering overtones got straightened out. I don't think it would make much difference with speech, though.
I'd guess that these days, sessions would be recorded into a computer and also into a standalone digital recorder?
