sonic surgery -- help!

[Jerry Kahn]

hi.

I am trying to repair a recording made of a live musical show for a theater group I am in, in NYC. It done about a year ago(not by me). It was of a Gilbert and Sullivan show, Pinafore, and included large pit orchestra and solo vocals and chorus. The recording was done digitally to minidisc right off of the theater soundboard, and then the minidisc were used to burn to CD. The minidiscs are gone, but I now have the CD.

The problem is there is this ongoing buzziness that acompanies most of the recoding in varying increases. I am not sure what initially caused this buzzing: I don't think it was the mics (flat PCM stage mics that are of pretty good quality). It might have been some distortion that developed at some point in the chain, or some problem with the soundboard, or something else. The buzzing increases as the frequencies rise, so that it tends to be the worst at the high soprano parts, but it can also be heard in the lower frequencies as well.

So I ripped the CD tracks and read them into my DAW. After some futzin around I was able to improve the sound to a great extent via an EQ plugin that comes with my software, SawStudioLite. But it seems that if I kill enough of the buzz in the higher bandwidths so that the sound becomes tolerable, than I lose the nice part of the highs/mids, and much of the vitality.

So here's the dumb questions, rapid-fire style:
1. Should I even be attempting such a fix with an EQ software plugin?
2. Are EQ software plugins at all comparable to actual units.
3. If I could get my hands on a high-end unit, at least temporarily, what procedure
would you recommend for the resurrection of this recording?
4. Are there other types of units/plugins that I should be thinking about?

Thank you all greatly,
jk

 

[MILLSY5]

As a newbie i'm afraid i cant suggest a solution to your problem, i can however answer point 2.

I have been reading a lot of literature on computer software and i own both outboard units and computer driven applications.

The gap between the two is now so small that in most cases you cannot hear the difference. Software can emulate a large selection of studio equipment almost perfectly and it has the obvious advantage of a large display (computer monitor). In one of the uk's largest studio magazines (future music) steinberg's soft sampler Halion won sampler of the year.

I am sure that there is a piece of software somewhere out there that can fix your problem and its probably cheaper than the physical equivilent

Sorry its not much help!

Keith

 

[Jerry Kahn]

thanks Keith.

I guess I am afraid of the old "no free lunch/ you get what you paid for" syndrome. Most Saw Plugins run at about $150, whereas a good EQ box I figure runs in the thousands.