"Digital Vinyl"? - Page 10

That's British shellac, not vinyl. The recording is from the late 1940s. I was using it as an example because it is so extreme. If click repair software can deal with that much noise without artifacting, a relatively clean LP is no problem at all.

See ya
Steve

You need to take into account how digital declickers work. They aren't a broadband noise reduction filter, so the only part of the track that receives the processing is the few samples where the click occurs. Where there are no clicks, there is no filter. It's a very precise noise gate.

So the only sound quality reduction you are ever going to hear using a good declicker is instantaneous artifacting. If you've done a lot of manual declicking, you know what this sounds like. Leave a jagged corner in your waveform or fail to smooth out the ring out from the impulse and you will hear a tiny tic or bump. Digital declickers can remove clicks faster, more precisely and with virtually no artifacting. There is absolutely no reason to manually declick anything but the biggest gunshot pops.

I know where you're coming from. I used to think my manual declicking was better than any machine. I spent four weeks full time laboriously declicking the first CD that I restored. I kept thinking that I could do a little bit better and starting over, learning new tricks as I went. I finally got to a place I was happy with and released the CD.

A few months later, I got Spark XL. I decided to test it out by pulling my raw transfer, running it through one pass and comparing five minutes of Spark's time against 160 hours of my time. There was no contest. Spark did a MUCH better job. Get a real pro grade VST declicker, and I'm sure you will come to the same conclusion.

See ya
Steve

It makes it harder, not easier. Anyone doing transfers should archive their raw capture and incremental versions of their attempts at restoration. 24 bit is much larger to back up. Also, VST plugins that fly through CD quality audio will sometimes chug through 24 bit. As I said before, if your digital VU meters have peak monitoring, finding the right level to capture at is no problem. And the dynamic range of CD audio is about double the dynamic range of most vinyl, so even if you want to capture with headroom, it's no problem.

See ya
Steve

That is perhaps what you may hear but it isn't what I hear. When the filters are set to the lowest possible values to do anything significant (level 10 out of 100), then I still hear an effect on absolutely everything 100% of the time. This effect is similar to a perfect dolby B encode and decode in terms of how it changes the music itself. In other words it is audible, but does not make the music itself significantly less pleasant to listen to. Unfortunately though, I have found the algorythm to be poor when it comes to piano over a particularly high noise floor consisting of tape hiss and with female choir vocals. It can't cope with these and the results - even with the most minimalist approach - sounds like a moderate level of MP3 compression.

So we will have to agree to disagree on the effect this program (or any other program I have tried) has on the music content. That said, this is the best I have tried by far - all the others I have tried are completely useless. In my opinion my manual edits are still superior to these programs, because I cannot hear any audible effect on the music content whatsoever, but I don't think it is worth slaving over a WAV editor for the best part of a week when this program can (in most circumstances) do the click filtering as well as I can and crackle filtering (which I can't do manually at all) and still deliver about 90% - 95% of the sonic result of the file being done completely by my hand. The author claims 99.5% of the music is kept intact, but if that is so that half a percent is still pretty audible to my ears, but as I say - not really unpleasantly so except in certain circumstances.

Sounds like your noise reduction plugin is a broadband filter, not an impulse noise gate. The level should be a threshold level, not the intensity of the filtering. Too high on the scale should start clipping off transient peaks in the music, not smearing across the whole track.

You just haven't heard what I'm referring to. Look around and you'll find a really good declicker. They're out there and they're the best thing since sliced bread. They aren't cheap though, but if you do a lot of transcription work, it'll pay for itself in just a couple of transfers. What you spend hours and hours doing, the VST plugin can do in less than a minute, and the plugin will be able to do a much more thorough job.

See ya
Steve

I think somehow we are at cross purposes here. The software I am using and commenting upon is Click Repair which I thought you were either recommending or endorsing early in the thread. But then you mentioned later you had never tried it.

If you are talking about VST plugins, I am happy to try anything at all regardless of price so long as a free demo is available that functions with my host (Acoustica).

If there is something out there that alleges to produce the results with no absolutely audible effect on the music content, I am very keen to try it and judge that claim for myself.

Will 100 bucks for a turntable, cartridge, adc, and phono amp produce a digital file that sounds like analogue?
Unlikely.

Search around. You'll find something. I can't recommend any specific ones to you other than Spark XL (which is a Mac audio editing program), Sound Soap Pro (which isn't quite as effective as Spark, but still good) and the declicker built into CEDAR (the best one available). Those are the ones I've heard. The WAVES declicker might be good. I haven't tried it.

See ya
Steve

Thanks. I thought CEDAR might come up in conversation at some point. I believe I tried the WAVES declicker and I wasn't anywhere near as impressed with it as I was Click Remover. I do have to say that for $40 the failings of Click Remover are relatively few and it certainly has by far the best performance / price ratio of any I have come across.

Maybe Waves X-Click + X-Crackle combination ... Waves | Bundles | Restoration

Also there are other's to try as like
iZotope's RX iZotope, Inc - Audio Signal Processing Hardware, Software, Plug-ins, Technology Licensing
Acon's Studio Declicker - Audio Editing, Recording, Restoration and Mastering Software
Arboretum Systems' Ray Gun Pro (maybe discontinued)
Roni Music's Decrackler - !Slow down and transcribe with Roni Music software - slow down the speed of music without changing the pitch
Wave Art's Mr Click - Wave Arts


jiitee

A crackle filter is more likely to be a broadband filter than a click one. You want a transient noise filter.

See ya
Steve

Was this meant for me ?

Roni Music - Decrackler


Waves - X-Crackle


jiitee

There are a few types of noise filters...

An impulse filter applies a gate to the sound. It looks for instantaneous bursts or quick bits of super high frequencies and applies a filter to just those quick moments. The filter can either be some sort of high frequency attentuation or in more sophisticated impulse filters, it would be pink noise that matches the sound around it.

A broadband filter applies an overall filtration to the whole track. It's usually some sort of frequency attentuation or digital smearing designed to turn crackle into a mushy hiss. The ear is more sensitive to uneven noise than it is to a steady bed of hiss.

A dynamic filter applies broadband filtration with more filtration in quiet passages than in loud ones. This is based on psycho-acoustics- we require a broader frequency spectrum in louder passages than we do in quieter ones.

A bandpass filter allows frequencies in a range to pass by unaffected, but the frequencies above and below are filtered.

A notch filter is a very narrow bandpass filter designed to take out hum at specific frequencies.

Turnover and rolloff affect just one end of the spectrum or the other.

There are probably more that I'm just not thinking of right now.

See ya
Steve

Thanks for the lesson (IMO, a Jeep can be used on a highway too...). While defining/programming my RIAA filter software, I ran into some of those terms/definitions.

Did anyone try the iZotope RX ... by the trailer/videos/docs it looks like being a quite capable software for restoration work too (I don't have such "bad enough" quality vinyls here so I could try it my self for this task).

BTW, Adobe Audition 3 do have nice restoration features too.
ADD, do you mean the Adobe's Click Remover which is bundled with Audition 3?

jiitee

Re-Mastering 78s, Vinyl To CD - Noise Reduction

Thought this might be of interest. The new Graham Slee has preset curves for NAB and FFRR which continued to be used alongside RIAA in some cases as late as the early 1970s. So anything on Decca, MGM, EMI, HMV, RCA Victor or UK or US Columbia from the 1960s could use non RIAA eq.
Motown certainly used NAB on all their 1960s output which is why those old singles sound so tinny with RIAA...