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???

[Mac]

I want to have a go with your file, but I also recieve a not found error. I want to have a go at improving the quality and find some good practices as I have a bunch of excellent drum'n'bass live tapes... most new, but some are 2nd and 3rd generation tapes, so the quality goes downhill.

If you could get some more info from the unnamed source, for example some clarification as to what settings he used and why, that would be a great help When you get the file back up, I'll take a little crack at it.

Btw - my tape deck doesn't have these B/C/S Dolby settings you speak of... it just has Dolby NR on or off.. I'm not sure which is best - on reduced the noise a lot, but seems to do so by slapping a smooth highpass filter on it, which takes out some of the high freqs...


At a guess, your first method of increasing the high frequencies will sound nasty because... if they are originally cut down to the point there is little information left, all you are doing is amplifying rubbish, giving louder sounding rubbish in the end