lpdeluxe
The Precision Bass Guy
An older lady brought me an acetate that her uncle recorded in 1946 of her singing "Shortnin' Bread." It had been stored for probably 50 years, and was covered with mildew and gunk. She asked if I could transfer it to CD. Of course, I said.
I cleaned the record with distilled water (what ever happened to my old Diskwasher brush??) and let it air dry. I plugged my turntable into my studio stereo receiver (ain't much, but it's got phono input, which makes it worth its weight in gold in these situations), patched the receiver into the digital mixer, and had at it.
Did I mention, "1946" predated the 33-1/3 RPM conversion? This thing was recorded at 78 RPM...and my (relatively) modern turntable doesn't rotate that fast.
Anyhow, I opened up Adobe Audition, armed the tracks, and recorded 9:24 of the most gawdawful noise you can imagine. In some places you could not distinguish a voice! Then I moved it to Edit View and, using the stretch (not preserving pitch or time, since I was speeding the whole catastrophe up by 234%), turned it into a 3:45 or thereabouts (after trimming for length) of correctly pitched audio. Then came several passes of click & pop removal, and ditto noise reduction (set at around 50%), until I had something that resembled a human voice. Some tweaking on individual phrases, and erasing some extraneous noises, and I had an intelligible recording of little 5-year-old JoAnne G. ready to burn to CD.
I know it ain't perfect: I wasn't using the correct-for-78 RPM RIAA frequency curve, and there were some artifacts I had to ignore...but damned if it doesn't sound pretty good.
I cleaned the record with distilled water (what ever happened to my old Diskwasher brush??) and let it air dry. I plugged my turntable into my studio stereo receiver (ain't much, but it's got phono input, which makes it worth its weight in gold in these situations), patched the receiver into the digital mixer, and had at it.
Did I mention, "1946" predated the 33-1/3 RPM conversion? This thing was recorded at 78 RPM...and my (relatively) modern turntable doesn't rotate that fast.
Anyhow, I opened up Adobe Audition, armed the tracks, and recorded 9:24 of the most gawdawful noise you can imagine. In some places you could not distinguish a voice! Then I moved it to Edit View and, using the stretch (not preserving pitch or time, since I was speeding the whole catastrophe up by 234%), turned it into a 3:45 or thereabouts (after trimming for length) of correctly pitched audio. Then came several passes of click & pop removal, and ditto noise reduction (set at around 50%), until I had something that resembled a human voice. Some tweaking on individual phrases, and erasing some extraneous noises, and I had an intelligible recording of little 5-year-old JoAnne G. ready to burn to CD.
I know it ain't perfect: I wasn't using the correct-for-78 RPM RIAA frequency curve, and there were some artifacts I had to ignore...but damned if it doesn't sound pretty good.
