How to Clean up Cassette to Digital, Need Help Options

[cupelix]

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???

[TwoJ]

Sorry Pio2001 - I didn't mean to imply that switching to a 96/24 would improve the quality for the extra bits - I meant that the SBLive is not a great card for encoding since it produces a lot of noise - there is a documented problem with my old motherboard (an ASUS A7V133) where the SBLive produced so much noise that it was causing interference with the VIA chipset and resulted in data corruption. So I think not many people would say its a great choice for encoding if it adds significant noise to whatever your recording. I believe the newer SBs (Audigy2 - ie 96/24) have significantly better S/N characterisics than the SBLive.

@ cupelix - As I said you probably won't be able to replace all your cassettes that way, but most of the time its a lot faster to download some songs then then to do a Cassette-->mp3, mpc, etc
As for the mixes, i presume they are just a collection of songs, is it not possible to download the songs and re-mix them? You can even pop them into wavlab to cut it at the same spot where it runs out of magnetic media on the cassette (Some songs I can only remember that way

This post has been edited by TwoJ: May 3 2003, 03:19