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???

[cupelix]

I dont know if any of you bothered to download the .wav from the originalpost I made, you would tell it was HORRIBLE. Well someone actually took a crack at it and sent me back a sweet sounding file. He also listed the steps he did (although when trying to duplicate them I had no success, need more in depth/hold my hand info). Anyhow here is what he wrote. His name is left out to protect privacy.

Here's what I did with the file.

1. I used Waves LMB (a multiband compressor/expander) as an expander to tame down the noise.  It basically works like a multiband noise gate, but without a gate!

2.  It still wasn't quite clean enough, so I then processed it with Waves X-noise.

3.  I then used Waves LMB again, but this time as a multiband compressor to get the basic balance between the instruments where I wanted to hear them.

4.  I set up an auxillary bus with a VERY short reverb with a 30ms predelay to open up the sound just a bit.

5.  I used the Waves L2 limiter at the end (on the master bus) to get the sound as "in-your-face" as possible.

Let me know what you think of the results.

That said, the original transfer isn't that great.  I've done some amazing things from cassette masters.