Cassette to Digital (Poor Quality Sound Fix? Help.Me)

Posted by Tricksta on Fri, 05/02/03 - 20:02:43.

Thanks in Advance for any help one of you might offer.

I am far from an Audio Pro, yet have been trying to take some old cassette tapes and restore the sound quality they originally had, and enhance it even. As for this file in particular it seems to have lost its high's and mids. When I run it through a simple EQ plugin I just dont get the clarity I need, it just sounds worse.

Here is the steps I took in recording this tape.

#1 - Used a brand new Sony Tape deck , with preamp mixer and got the sound quality as close to 0 DB as I could (as reccomended by many audio recording sites I have read). I recorded at 44.1 hz, 16 bit through my SBLIVE card. I saw no loss in quality from tape to digital.

#2 - I then loaded Wavlab and watched the spectrum analyser and saw the highs and some mids were very low. I tried to raise this up in value but it just made the sound even more distorted than it already was.

I have many tapes like this I would like to restore, re-master (or whatever the term is). I have attached this file (in original .wav format) and uploaded it to the alt.binaries.sound.mp3 newsgroup. The topic is called:

"Sound Pro's can you give tips on how to fix this Audio File? Email - Trick@lvcm.com"

You can also download the .wav file clip at - http://www.lvcm.com/trick/badwav/badwav.wav

Any help on cleanup (what software/settings to use), examples , web links on fixing this sorta of stuff is GREATLY appreciated!!!! Heck if someone wants to clean it up themselves and email it back with the steps you used to do it, that would even be better.

This advice would be Pricessless, thanks again in advance to anyone who can help this audio newbie.

Email - trick@lvcm.com

Thanks,

Trick

PS - I have read about the CEDAR system, is this hardware based only???

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Re: Cassette to Digital (Poor Quality Sound Fix? Help.Me)

Posted by Rimmer on Fri, 05/02/2003 - 20:53.

I listened to a little bit of the clip and it sounds pretty ropey. I would suspect you would have a job to pull much out of it. The highs and lows are fluttering and hardly there. Boosting those frequencies would probably result in a load of hiss and noise as there doesn't seem to be much information there. The tape noise is awful..

Best of luck..

:(

Rimmer