Mix suggestions for this cassette taped handbell choir

McMike1

New member
Hi.
I have a thirty year old tape recording of a hand bell choir. Probably done on a basic portable cassette recorder. I want to burn a CD, and I've got it to the PC with decent levels. But equalization is the problem.

In the raw recording, the bass and mid octave bells are too quiet, the mids are a bit muddy, and the treble bells too loud and shrill. The presence is pretty good in terms of bright natural reverb. But warmth seems more elusive.

So I tried to EQ (using audacity): tried a sort of flat-topped inverted W on the EQ, rolled off sharply above and below the extreme frequencies. It was a definite improvement. But the bass was then too boomy, the mids got a little muddy, and the treble still shrill, or if I rolled the treble off more, too flat. Bringing up the bass also accentuated the mic noises, perhaps movement by the operator, but I can live with that. I did a noise reduction sample to get out the tape hiss. Any way, additional efforts at tweaking sent me down the rabbit hole. I can live with it as it stands under my first iteration, if I could just pull back a bit of the shrillness to make it more listenable. My goals are modest, just a listenable recording to share among a couple friends.

I do not believe that dolby was used initially, but not certain.

Any generic advice? I've attached a brief mp3 of the raw recording. Thanks.

Thanks.
 

Attachments

  • Bells raw recording sample.mp3
    1.6 MB · Views: 28
I hear a lot of distortion from the lower quality recorder. Every time the louder bell(s) chime you can hear it 'kick out' the mic or auto-level being used by the recorder. It was a common effect on cheaper equipment back in the day, the same way early digital video in our point and shoot cameras and phones had an acceptable amount of visual noise but was cheap to implement as a feature.

I think it sounds okay considering the challenges. Is there room for improvement? Hard to say, there's definitely some audible limitations to what you'll be able to get from this. At some point you'll just have to accept 'good enough'.

if you feel like uploading the raw WAV file (before you do the noise reduction, etc) I'd be willing to take a quick stab at it with the tools I have. I don't expect it to take much time to try otherwise I wouldn't offer, so no inconvenience.
 
I can't listen right now, but one of the problems I always had when I tried to resurrect old cassette recordings was with the distortion.

Most of the time, the thing, or frequency that distorts the recording is the one you are trying to eq out. Unfortunately, when you eq it out, you aren't left with much usable audio, since the distortion obliterated anything behind the sound causing the distortion.

Smallish adjustments with a parametric eq can push it in the right direction. It works better when you try to bring up background things while taking down things that are too loud. Doing both will get you farther than just trying to take out what there is too much of.

Also realize that the magnetic field of the earth has been slowly erasing the tape for 30 years, so the top end may not be what it once was.

Good luck.
 
Thanks for the feedback and the offer to edit. I've run out of time, and so I used noise reduction and some modest EQ mixing and am calling to good. Happy new year.
 
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