Fwd: Audio Engineering Society Melbourne Section "Acetate record transfer"
Secretary AES Melbourne Section Inc
Peter Smerdon.
Secretary
AES Melbourne Section
Ph 0437-422-458
Website http://www.aesmelbourne.org.au/
Facebook https://www.facebook.com/MelbAES
Twitter https://twitter.com/AESMelbourne
Message Body:
Dear AES, I would be grateful for your recommendation. I have a series
of acetate records which need to be transferred (raw transfer only, no
editing/declicking/filtering etc). I was going to ask Bill Armstrong,
who has immense experience in this field, but his recent health
setback means that he can't undertake the work. I would like to know
if there is a member of the society with more or less equal experience
who might be interested in taking on the task.
Thank you for your help.
Mark Edwards
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Peter Smerdon
Dex Audio?
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Mark Edwards
Dex Audio?
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Gerald Stewart
Thanks
Graeme Huon
david briggs
Peter Smerdon
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david briggs
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Rodney Staples
Hi Folks,
A couple of years ago I had to digitise some 78 disks for my mother. I used this process.
- Play the disk on a standard stereo turntable at 45RPM with a normal stereo microgroove cartridge and capture analogue signal into a .wav file in a DAW.
- Pitch-shift the digitised recording up by seven or eight semitones in a DAW.
- Check the region below 50Hz for important sounds. I found this region was mostly rumble that could be filtered out.
- Listen to the pitch shifted recording to identify a tone or pitch and identify this on a spectral display. You can then perform a fine pitch adjustment to match the speed of the original recording.
- Appropriately adjust levels and ADD left and right signals. This increases the noise by 3dB and the coherent signal by 6dB, improving the S/N
I found the first two steps sufficient for my purposes, with the resulting copies sounding better than I remember the originals on the old 78RPM player. The microgroove stylus seemed to fit into the bottom of the groove that hadn’t been damaged by older styli and the noise in the two channels seemed to be largely uncorrelated so the theoretical improvement of the S/N seemed to be fairly closely achieved. The playing times of the digitised recordings closely matched the time on the label so I didn’t need to use the fine pitch-shift. I was surprised at how much fidelity was retained in these old recordings from the early 1950s. Ok, the record/replay EQ was probably not matched, but it seemed to act like a pre-emphasis improving the apparent fidelity. The resulting digitised sound files sounded at least as good as the 45RPM records I purchased when I started collecting records.
The attached sound file is Victor Sylvestor and his Ballroom Orchestra recorded on Parlaphone in about 1947. The label playing time is about 2:40, this recording is 2:59. Victor Sylvestor is famous for his strict ballroom tempo of 72 BPM. The 7 semitone shift gives a bet rate of 75, but this sounds a bit slow when compared to the YouTube reconstruction of this record so the attached file is shifted up to 8 semitones (120BPM). It needs NR of course, but you can hear the uncorrelated noise, and the correlated signal.
Regards,
Rod.
_________________________________________________________________________________
Dr. Rodney Staples.
e-mail: rodst...@ozemail.com.au
Telephone: +61 3 9770 2484
Mobile: +61 4 1935 9082
David Webb
<Exhibition Swing 8semitones 120bpm.mp3>
Graeme Huon
<Exhibition Swing 8semitones 120bpm.mp3>
Secretary AES Melbourne Section Inc
Peter Smerdon.
Secretary
AES Melbourne Section
Ph 0437-422-458
Website http://www.aesmelbourne.org.au/
Facebook https://www.facebook.com/MelbAES
Twitter https://twitter.com/AESMelbourne
Hi Folks,
A couple of years ago I had to digitise some 78 disks for my mother. I used this process.
- Play the disk on a standard stereo turntable at 45RPM with a normal stereo microgroove cartridge and capture analogue signal into a .wav file in a DAW.
- Pitch-shift the digitised recording up by seven or eight semitones in a DAW.
- Check the region below 50Hz for important sounds. I found this region was mostly rumble that could be filtered out.
- Listen to the pitch shifted recording to identify a tone or pitch and identify this on a spectral display. You can then perform a fine pitch adjustment to match the speed of the original recording.
- Appropriately adjust levels and ADD left and right signals. This increases the noise by 3dB and the coherent signal by 6dB, improving the S/N
I found the first two steps sufficient for my purposes, with the resulting copies sounding better than I remember the originals on the old 78RPM player. The microgroove stylus seemed to fit into the bottom of the groove that hadn’t been damaged by older styli and the noise in the two channels seemed to be largely uncorrelated so the theoretical improvement of the S/N seemed to be fairly closely achieved. The playing times of the digitised recordings closely matched the time on the label so I didn’t need to use the fine pitch-shift. I was surprised at how much fidelity was retained in these old recordings from the early 1950s. Ok, the record/replay EQ was probably not matched, but it seemed to act like a pre-emphasis improving the apparent fidelity. The resulting digitised sound files sounded at least as good as the 45RPM records I purchased when I started collecting records.
The attached sound file is Victor Sylvestor and his Ballroom Orchestra recorded on Parlaphone in about 1947. The label playing time is about 2:40, this recording is 2:59. Victor Sylvestor is famous for his strict ballroom tempo of 72 BPM. The 7 semitone shift gives a bet rate of 75, but this sounds a bit slow when compared to the YouTube reconstruction of this record so the attached file is shifted up to 8 semitones (120BPM). It needs NR of course, but you can hear the uncorrelated noise, and the correlated signal.
Regards,
Rod.
_________________________________________________________________________________
Dr. Rodney Staples.
e-mail: rodst...@ozemail.com.au
Telephone: +61 3 9770 2484
Mobile: +61 4 1935 9082
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Secretary AES Melbourne Section Inc
Peter Smerdon.
Secretary
AES Melbourne Section
Ph 0437-422-458
Website http://www.aesmelbourne.org.au/
Facebook https://www.facebook.com/MelbAES
Twitter https://twitter.com/AESMelbourne
Graeme
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Graeme Huon
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Mick Carrick
It's worth considering the use of the "Click Repair" software of
Brian Davies. Its algorithms go well beyond filters and work extremely
well. Some old samples are on his website and demonstrate the
effectiveness of his apps. Check them out on click repair
www.clickrepair.net/software_info/clickrepair.html.
It is also possible to listen to the noise that has been removed in order to be reassured that no music is being removed.
Good luck with this project.
cheers
-- Mick Carrick
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Rodney Staples
Hi Peter,
The records I was working with were the (shellac) collection that my mother and father had had from just after the war, before I was even a twinkle in my Mother’s eye (they were well over 70 years old)! Growing up I recall these records being played on an old mono radio gram that used a needle/stylus in the cartridge that was steel and about an inch long. The stylus needed to be changed every few tens of records because it was worn down so quickly. With this kind of crude player, the disks were well and truly damaged before they ever saw a diamond stereo stylus (which they did as I reached my teenage years and Mum and Dad purchased a new “stereo” radiogram).
Many years later Mum was living in Queensland at the time when I started the transfer process, so while on holiday there I purchased a new (but still quite inexpensive) turntable with a built-in preamp which I used to transfer the disks at 45RPM into my DAW. I then calculated the pitch difference between 45RPM and 78RPM and started with that amount of pitch shift, and made fine adjustments to the pitch to get the sound closer to what I remembered, or what I could work out by measuring the pitch of tones in the music and relating that to the musical scale and adjusting the recorded tone to sit on the equal-tempered scale.
Graeme is correct. One should use the microscope to find the undamaged part of the groove, and use a stylus with the correct shape and size. Preferably one should also play the disks at 78RPM, but that option wasn’t available to me at the time. Because recordings of this vintage also had slightly variable speeds and somewhat unpredictable equalisation both the pitch and the frequency spectrum was also difficult to be precise about. And the rumble in these old recordings is horrendous.
I had tried this transfer many years earlier when I gave some disks to a colleague who had a broadcast turntable with a 78RPM speed, varispeed, and a cartridge and stylus suitable for the transfer. He took the records to make the transfer, but I never saw them again, and Mum was very upset that I had lost her precious memories of earlier times. It took me years of searching and access to the internet (and Amazon) to find suitable replacements (mostly transfers to CD). Neither Mum nor I had a suitable 78RPM turntable, so when I came to recover her remaining 78s I had to try the trick of playing the records at the slower speed, which incidentally preserved some of the high frequencies that we had not heard before, and try to recover the pitch with the DAW. The purpose was not archival quality recovery, just a transfer that helped an elderly person recover memories of an earlier time. It didn’t matter to her that the results were noisy – that was how she remembered them anyway – so the recording I shared was fine when replayed through her domestic HiFi system.
The material I was working with was pretty poor! The records had been played for years with a steel toothpick with tens of grams of stylus pressure, so the surface of the grooves was already severely distorted, particularly in the mid to upper part of the track. By using a smaller diamond stylus my hope was that it would get lower in the groove and miss much of the damage, but at the same time, it would be more sensitive to the obvious surface noise of very large particles in the old shellac binder. It was also highly probable as Graeme suggests that the stylus was “drag[ing] and bump[ing] along the bottom of the groove” but this was probably no worse than if the stylus had rested in the higher highly worn areas of the grove – at least in the bottom of the groove most of the noise was from surface noise of the shellac recording material which is relatively easier to remove from the music than correlated distortion. Besides, the noise in the recording I attached to my previous post was only about 30dB below the peak signal, so trying to remove it completely is very difficult – and such removal leaves “musical noise” unless one reinserts some broadband noise. Mick Carrick’s post about the application “Click Repair” seems to offer a good solution to reducing the noise, but I think that my example is just so bad that even this application would have trouble. If one wanted archival quality, then one should go to a much better source, as the two examples of this recording on YouTube have done. The examples on the Click Repair site are all starting from a much better condition than my crude attempts. I have though heard early models of Cedar doing an excellent job of recovering audio from just such poor original material. Perhaps if you are looking for archival quality restoration one should seek those organisations which have this technology.
For these transfers I did wash the dust off with lightly soaped water, but that made little difference, and I made the transfer from dry disks. I have used the alcohol and water to clean vinyl but again on any transfers I have let the disk dry first. I wouldn’t try either solution on acetate.
Regards,
Rod
_________________________________________________________________________________
Dr. Rodney Staples.
e-mail: rodst...@ozemail.com.au
Telephone: +61 3 9770 2484
Mobile: +61 4 1935 9082
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