On 2014-09-11 4:30 PM, Tom Fine wrote:
> In theory, a great analog recording should need no processing if it's
> been played back correctly into a "transparent" high-resolution ADC.

Hi, Tom,

There is one point it seems I need to emphasize. Most of the work I do
with RX is not on the great recordings, but rather on the ones that are
so far from great that they would be unusable for their intended purpose
without some cleanup.

As you and I both know, there is a good deal of money out there to
support preserving all sorts of spoken word recordings, both "oral
history" and also "motivational" recordings (sermons et al fall into
"motivational" for the sake of this discussion).

Often, the original recordists were ignorant of recording practices and
were given no budget nor incentive to do it anywhere close to correctly.
Ignorance is not a sin. The possible sin is realizing your ignorance you
do not seek to improve but go ahead anyway and make poor recordings.
Often the person ignorant in recording technique may be very well versed
in the subject s/he is discussing, so it's a very complex pathway to the
poor recording.

I think many of us are addressing these types of recordings and yes, one
can overdo Cedar, NoNoise, iZotope, Algorithmix, and whatever else, just
one can overdo compression, limiting, equalization, and Aphex Aural
Excitation.

I don't know if iZotope is being hyped, but I am excited due to the last
month's work looking at the new release and seeing the subtle and useful
improvements in it as well as the new features.

Prior to this release, I had been attempting to move my oral history
post production completely into Izotope (from Samplitude). I would
ingest in Samplitude and then move to Izotope for all the post work.

This caused me to write several long letters to iZotope and I was
rewarded with the invitation to beta test. I do not have a large oral
history project in house at the moment, so I won't be seeing how this
works in real-life production for a while, but there are many
improvements that allow us to better and quicker repair things in
technically poor-from-the-start recordings that contain content of interest.

Cheers,

Richard

--
Richard L. Hess email: [log in to unmask]
Aurora, Ontario, Canada 647 479 2800
http://www.richardhess.com/tape/contact.htm
Quality tape transfers -- even from hard-to-play tapes.