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Topic: Vinyl Restoration Problem (Read 6793 times) previous topic - next topic
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Vinyl Restoration Problem

I've been gradually transferring my record collection to CD using Adobe Audition 2.0.  For most records I have been derumbling and declicking with good results.  Occasionally I also use the Younglove decrackle technique.  I've posted a short 32 bit, 44.1 KHz WAV file of an old Kiss song that got played too much.  It has been derumbled, declicked and decrackled.  Is there anyway to clean up the "distortion" you hear at the beginning and that's less noticible throughout?  How would you even describe the undesireable sounds that are present?  I'm still learning.  Thanks.

http://home.comcast.net/~mrmatheson/Sample_WAV.wav

Vinyl Restoration Problem

Reply #1
Clean the vinyl and try again.

Vinyl Restoration Problem

Reply #2
Yeah, that's periodic with the rotation of the record (it's a 33, right?) and therefore physically related.

Besides cleaning the record (recommended), you can try playing the record a few times and hope that the stylus smoothes out the grooves a bit. Amazingly enough, a few authorities believe this to be a good strategy for removing pops and ticks.

Vinyl Restoration Problem

Reply #3
Everytime you apply a digital operation of some sort, you're distorting the original wave somehow.  I'd settle down with the derumbling, declicking, decrackling, dewhatevering.  While it might initially impress you to remove some clicks and pops, you may not realize just how badly it's damaging the sound.  Your sample wave has some dreadful distortions in it... I can't say from what but it is pretty unpleasant.

I prefer to record in 44.1/32bit and then just do a single noise-reduction based on a noise profile obtained from the last break between songs on the record (where groove distortion is the greatest).  That'll effectively remove rumble and background noise without obsessing over clicks and pops which you'll never be able to remove without taking some of the sound with them anyways.  That's part of the character of vinyl though.  If you want it click and popless then but the CD.  After the noise reduction, do an RMS normalize then downsample to 16bit with a half decibel of noise-shaped dither and you'll be good

As was said, cleaning the vinyl might help.  Without knowing your setup, it's hard to say if that could be easily improved.

Vinyl Restoration Problem

Reply #4
FWIW, when I did vinyl restoration I visually found the major pops/ticks and zoomed in to remove them with the auto pop/tick remover.  I let the smaller stuff just pass for the most part.  I did use a high pass to take out the rumble and only used the automatic pop/tick/noise redux on the very quiet parts between tracks.  Too much distortion when using the auto NR/pop/tick remove on the music typically so I agree with "curtor."
Was that a 1 or a 0?

Vinyl Restoration Problem

Reply #5
.
X-RAY;

Thanks for the flashback!



:-)

Seriously, man, what does the LP look like when you visually inspect it?  Sounds to me like you've spent an inordinate amount of time attempting to repair what is, in reality, an easy to get your hands on LP - one that you'll find in every other used LP shop in North America.  In fact, I was just holding it in my hands and looking at it this past weekend in my local vinyl emporium!

If you've done all of that work, and it still sounds like shit, (perhaps even shittier than when you started), man... just go and pop for another used copy of it.  And while you're there, pick up a few more of these:

http://www.its-official.com/kiss.html

Sorry to sound like an ass, I'm just trying to be ultra- realistic here man.

Andrew D.
www.cdnav.com

.

Vinyl Restoration Problem

Reply #6
OK, this is a little off topic, but do other forum members have problems with the automatic e-mail notification not working?  My experience has been that it only works about 30% of the time.  Here I have been patiently waiting for my e-mail and finally deciding that nobody cared.  But alas, I've had five replies!

Well, I really do appreciate all the comments.  But I was also really hoping to not just be practical and replace the old record.  It did get a lot of play on an entry level Panasonic mini turntable in the summer of 1975.  I was hoping that I could learn from the masters here and actually make this recording sound much better using digital sorcery.  Oh well, the record grooves were probably just damaged a little too much while I played way too much air guitar in my apartment living room.  By the way, regarding my setup, it is currently pretty sweet.  All of my records first get washed (including the Kiss sample) with a Nitty Gritty vacuum device before I do any recording.  The recording is then done with a SOTA turntable, SME 309 tonearm, Shure V15V-MR cartridge and a quality external Echo professional sound card.

I also believe in not doing heroic processing, in order to preserve as much of the original sound as possible.  But I have found the following restoration routine to be pretty safe and not distort the original sound.

1.  Clean record.
2.  Record single WAV at 44.1 KHz, 32 Bit Depth.
3.  Run entire WAV through high pass FFT filter set at 25 Hz.
4.  Run entire WAV through Auto Pop/Click Eliminator set on my own customized, "minimal" setting.
5.  Manually remove clicks if a few big ones were missed or incompletely removed.
6.  Infrequently make a noise profile from the "silent" grooves between tracks and do a Younglove decrackle on the entire WAV.
7.  Normalize entire WAV to 97%.
8.  Trim leading, between sides and ending silence and then split into tracks.
9.  Convert to 44.1 KHz, 16 Bit Depth using a "dither depth" of 0.5, "triangular" p.d.f. and "noise shaping C1".

Steps 5 and 6 are probably only done about 20% of the time.  Perhaps my current routine is producing some undesireable distortion of which I'm not aware.  But I have been really pleased with the results of the first 40 LPs, except for this Kiss album.  Please comment if you feel I should make some changes in my approach.  Also, Curtor you mentioned you like to do a single "noise reduction" using silent grooves for your noise profile?  Could you expand on this a little.  I assume you don't mean the Younglove method, but instead do an automatic noise reduction on the entire WAV?  What sort of settings do you use?

 

Vinyl Restoration Problem

Reply #7
I'm just not a fan of most pop/click eliminators and certainly not in combination with a high pass and noise reduction.  I use a very standard noise reduction: centre the wave (always!), build a profile on the innermost song-gap, and remove it 100% from the entire album wave.  FFT size (I'll use 4092-8192), spectral decay rates, etc aren't a big thing for me... I've played with them but don't note any dramatic differences.  That removes any rumble, any groove distortion, and a good sampling of surface noise all in one step.  It's like a lazy-man's Younglove (which just gathers the profile from all of the song-gaps and puts them together) that's a bit more automated.

I like everything you're doing except perhaps I'd obsess over the clicks a little less.  That's the character of vinyl.  If you rip them all out, you can't help but to lose stuff with 'em. 

Nice setup, btw ;-)

Vinyl Restoration Problem

Reply #8
I can't attach here, so my sample is in the upload forum, in the third post of the thread
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....mp;#entry543310

I suspect much of the audio is destroyed or no longer present on the LP. Therefore, even the best efforts cannot recover it. When you want to rescue the performance and composition, regardless of whether or not the audio is perfect, more can be done if you are willing to put in the time and effort.

I worked on the first three seconds of your sample, I didn’t even check to see if there were other problems. More could be done with this, but probably only manually. I did eight passes of auto declicking, with procedures I worked out over the past few years, to make it possibly acceptable. I’m sure it would never sound like what you could get off a better quality disk, but sometimes such better disks are not available.

Vinyl Restoration Problem

Reply #9
AndyH-ha, nice work!  The beginning, especially, sounds a lot better.  The horrible initial grating sound is so much less noticeable.  So it only took eight passes, eh?  To try to characterize what you did, would you say you basically applied much more agressive click/pop removal and repeated several times?  I guess I wasn't even certain how to characterize what I was hearing.  I wouldn't have called them clicks however.  I may not have to repurchase that old album yet!

Vinyl Restoration Problem

Reply #10
I try to avoid spending too much time to test the built-in functions, because I've a lot of LP need to be process, I'm using this:

http://www.jdklein.com/clickfix/

It works fine in my system(s), you can download a trial version.

It may not better than manual click removal but I'm sure it's fast and easy.
Hong Kong - International Joke Center (after 1997-06-30)

Vinyl Restoration Problem

Reply #11
Quote
... would you say you basically applied much more agressive click/pop removal ...

Not exactly. I did it all within a variation of the Younglove process. The declicking was done only on extracted noise, which was then processed through inverting and mixing back into the original.

Many possibilities exist; I do most such work with three different declicking settings (and combinations thereof) in the ClickFix plug-in and the Sonic Foundry NR 2 plug-in. It may be possible to match these with Audition’s tools; it is definitely possible to work many many variations with Audition’s Pop/Click Eliminator. All those parameters can be confusing, however.

I have been able to make a number of badly abused albums quite listen able this way. As I wrote above, it may not sound as much like the original as we might wish (assuming we have any clue at all about what the original sounded like) but the composition and performance are intact and the music has been made enjoyable, if you can tear you mind away from the fact that it is heavily processed.