On 02/10/2012, Jon Samuels wrote:

> Tom,
> Different transfer engineers have different philosophies. Some believe
> any noise reduction is an unacceptable compromise by definition,
> others denoise aggressively, in the belief that the buying public
> can't stand surface noise, and that the engineer can EQ the denoised
> results to make the final product sound as good as ever. 

Judging from many reviews on Amazon, the customers who complain about
noise are those who have never before heard an old recording. A small
minority of the buying public for CDs made from 78s.

> My approach
> is to remove as much noise as I can without audibly affecting the
> signal. 

The big difficuly seems to be, not to avoid affecting the sounds of the
instruments, but to preserve the acoustic of the studio. In the best
transfers from single-microphone jazz recordings, you are aware that the
piano is further away. In a less good transfer, it just sounds quiet.

> No decent engineer/producer should accept digital artifacts.
> That's just a given. You and I are on the same page here. Everything
> should be done for optimal analog playback first. When digital
> deticking is required, I prefer what I call manual deticking (what you
> call re-writing the waveform), to real time or background deticking or
> decrackling, though the time commitment can be huge. When the source
> material is very noisy or in poor condition and can't be upgraded, I
> decide the acceptable level of retained noise on a case-by-case basis,
> erring on the side of leaving a little too much noise, as opposed to a
> little too much signal loss. Other engineers can and do differ in
> their approaches. Jon Samuels

I found when doing some LP material that the "smoothing" function in the
WAV Repair program was a good way to redraw the waveform, especially if
repeated a few times (this can be a script).

http://www.waverepair.com

Regards
-- 
Don Cox
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