Find a way to insulate out train noise

You should hear the drag racing video I filmed many years ago with just a camera mic, when played back through the surround system with the sub you could feel the earth move LOL, I was standing on the start line when filming.

I hate to state the obvious, but this is a function of amplitude more than frequency. Yes, anyone can feel 10Hz if it's played LOUD enough. Drag racers - and Lord knows I hate to argue with a drag racer - have lots and lots of amplitude so there's pretty much no frequency that you're gonna miss. :)

However, as far as *hearing* it, no, you don't hear below 20Hz, and an increasing population neither hears nor has the equipment to reproduce down there. They just have "thumps" and call it good. And most of those thumps are synthesized harmonics to simulate lower freqs.

Ponder5
 
Well it seems Mr Shinzon must have figured out what to do all by himself or...he's just an ungrateful bastard for not saying thanks for all the help and awesome advice the HR.com team has showered upon him :laughings:

Comes here once ask for help and never comes back to hear what we genius's have to say :mad: ... Oh well I guess the take away here is if you're buying a house and planning on doing recording in your home you should definitely have noise pollution as one of your criteria in choosing your new abode.. i.e. don't buy a house just a half a mile past the railroad tracks ( excluding Alice's restaurant )
 
The BBC's Maida Vale studios is only 100mtrs or so from an underground line ('subway' to our colonial friends) and you could still hear the odd rumble on the radio.

If the technical and financial resources of the Beeb could not keep the trains out I doubt anything OP can do will have much effect?

Dave.
 
If the technical and financial resources of the Beeb could not keep the trains out I doubt anything OP can do will have much effect?

You may have a really good point there, especially if they did as you say and put some real juice into it. No contest.

At the same time, BBC is a huge company and like huge companies everywhere, all it takes is some nitwit middle-manager with a spreadsheet to completely eviscerate everything worthy in the project, leaving a monument to stupidity. Seen it many times, unfortunately.

But hey, i don't know either way.


Ponder5
 
You may have a really good point there, especially if they did as you say and put some real juice into it. No contest.

At the same time, BBC is a huge company and like huge companies everywhere, all it takes is some nitwit middle-manager with a spreadsheet to completely eviscerate everything worthy in the project, leaving a monument to stupidity. Seen it many times, unfortunately.

But hey, i don't know either way.


Ponder5

Hmm? The BBC WAS unlike most monolithic companies 'back in the day' when sound quality was king and the Bean Counters hardly got a look in, so I think MV would have been done to best possible practice.

I am afraid you might have to resort to the M.O. my son used for his songs? 2am recording and sometimes a lot of re-do's due to a dog, a car or in the dawn a pigeon! Mind you, goods trains might be more common during the night!

Last resort. Train noise is fairly 'periodic'? The noise reducers that use an inverted sample might be ok used with taste and restraint? I think there is one in Reaper?

Don't buy any 'booteek' gear with the much vaunted (daft IMHO) 'all DC coupled audio path'. Almost as silly as those that break into the Medium wave RF spectrum!

Dave.
 
No Sign of the original poster?

Is it because we gave the information that they did not want to hear?

We need more information about how much noise and type of noise? Vibration, wheel squeal, locomotive noise?

Without this we are wasting our time talking about it.

Alan.
 
just to let you know.... I live 200 feet from a train line. I was searching for isolating it and ran across this thread. I enjoyed the conversation and learned alot from it. I also learned that for a small fortune I can possibly isolate it.... but then again if I had a small fortune, I wouldn't be living 200 feet from the tracks :) .

I do have a question though...... Are you saying that I can possibly engineer out the trains rumbling? another question..... Can I Isolate enough to get rid of the train whistle?

Brad
 
Are you saying that I can possibly engineer out the trains rumbling? another question..... Can I Isolate enough to get rid of the train whistle? Brad

You can try using a high pass eq filter for the rumbling as pictured below. You just want to make sure you don't have to go over 100hrz or it will start sucking out all the lows in your audio. If you are just recording speech, you can fudge a little bit on that to around 150 or even 200hz.

As far as the train whistle goes, I doubt it. The freq range as well as the volume of the horn would be the determining factors. Others may have some better advice or ideas on that.

View attachment 100740
 
just to let you know.... I live 200 feet from a train line. I was searching for isolating it and ran across this thread. I enjoyed the conversation and learned alot from it. I also learned that for a small fortune I can possibly isolate it.... but then again if I had a small fortune, I wouldn't be living 200 feet from the tracks :) .

I do have a question though...... Are you saying that I can possibly engineer out the trains rumbling? another question..... Can I Isolate enough to get rid of the train whistle?

Brad

There is soft ware which allows you to take a sample of the 'noise' and insert it in the reduction 'engine' and it is then subtracted in some clever, digital fashion that this old valve amp jockey will never fathom.
There is such a facility in my copy of AA 1.5 and I would guess in Reaper* (Mack will know) The technique is not foolproof! You can only make SO much reduction otherwise the wanted sound gets garbled.

As Mack says, a train whistle is probably beyond treatment. This is the curse of voice overs, lots of editing and re- doooos!
Pertinent to re-work. This is why you should pay great attention to consistency, in levels, room quality and any added FX (basically don't) . Any re-dos/drop-ins must sound the same as the original even if made next day, next week, di-dah. Of course! If it's all for the bud pluggin' pod zoning masses and you don't care? Give 'em the trains!

*Sony Sound Forge had some excellent noise reducers in it. Bought up by Magix I think but you still might be able to grab the 30 day trial?

Dave.
 
There is such a facility in my copy of AA 1.5 and I would guess in Reaper* (Mack will know) The technique is not foolproof! You can only make SO much reduction otherwise the wanted sound gets garbled.Dave.

Yes Dave, in Reaper it is called ReaFir. It has 4 functions I believe and for removing noise it is called "Subtract". Like you said above, these filters are meant to remove small items like slight buzzing, electrical interference, ceiling fan motor noise, AC duct noise, slight pops, clicks etc.

The key factors are volume level and freqs. The noise you are trying to remove must be well below the audio level you want to preserve. If not, it will just sound awful. It also has a lot to do with the freq as well. It is much easier to remove the low end of the spectrum than the high end, well, it is for me anyway.
 
Thanks guys..... I only record for myself (and completely in the analog world), so I’m probably going to have to live with it. It’s kinda funny.... I’ll be recording and start hearing a rumbling..... my mind is going “can I finish before the whistle?”.... then I try to mentally speed up the click track....... :)

It never works though, but I know then I have 30 minutes until the next one comes through..... (of course.... the next take, the furnace will come on......)
 
Thanks guys..... I only record for myself (and completely in the analog world), so I’m probably going to have to live with it. It’s kinda funny.... I’ll be recording and start hearing a rumbling..... my mind is going “can I finish before the whistle?”.... then I try to mentally speed up the click track....... :)

It never works though, but I know then I have 30 minutes until the next one comes through..... (of course.... the next take, the furnace will come on......)

Well, you could 'clean up' for next to nothing? The Behringer UCA 202, $30, will get taped sound in and out of a PC with no extra degradation. Reaper is free until the guilt kicks in then it is only about 60 bucks.

Nobody will ever know you have used a dastardly digital device and WE won't tell'em!

Dave.
 
Well, you could 'clean up' for next to nothing? The Behringer UCA 202, $30, will get taped sound in and out of a PC with no extra degradation. Reaper is free until the guilt kicks in then it is only about 60 bucks.

Nobody will ever know you have used a dastardly digital device and WE won't tell'em!

Dave.

That’s not a bad idea Dave! I have an old alesis Io that I could use. I’ll have to see how to hook it up to a Linux machine.......
 
That’s not a bad idea Dave! I have an old alesis Io that I could use. I’ll have to see how to hook it up to a Linux machine.......

Well! "Hai know nah'thing Mr Fawltey" (old valve amp man) but there is a guy, Folderol over at Sound on Sound who runs Linux audio (NI KA6) . If Linux does 'Generic USB' the 202 might work? You don't need C squared latency?

Pretty sure Reaper runs in Linux.

Were you Chelsea UK I would lend you my UCA 202.

Dave.
 
Thanks guys..... I only record for myself (and completely in the analog world), so I’m probably going to have to live with it.

If you venture over to the digital world, you can improve your sound. Just so you know, even high dollar studios that record in analog, always finish in digital as far as I know.

Well, you could 'clean up' for next to nothing? Nobody will ever know you have used a dastardly digital device and WE won't tell'em! Dave.

Your last sentence is funny. Remember when no one would tell you their mixing and mastering secrets? Now you just YouTube them and get them for free. The video below shows how to remove the BG noise in Reaper using ReaFir. I just finished it. It also shows what you can, and can not do concerning noise removal, regardless of what you read on their websites. p.s. Anybody want to tell me which letter of the alphabet I forgot that was referred to in the video? You can scrub to 30 secs to skip the intro.


 
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Heh! I was joshin'! More having a pop at the 'purist' analogue guys. Bit akin to the valve purists/beardy types in the guitar amp world!

Dave.
 
Heh! I was joshin'! More having a pop at the 'purist' analogue guys. Bit akin to the valve purists/beardy types in the guitar amp world!

Dave.
I'm not a purist...... just real comfortable in the 1980's :D ......... sooooooo..... ya'll have a town named after Chelsea Oklahoma??...........
 
Thanks for that video Mack...... I've made a note to come back to that. I really like the idea of reducing my number of takes.

Brad
 
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