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???

[2Bdecided]

I think the same name has been applied to different tapes in different countries, and at different times. I can also remember three different brands going from good to poor over the years, without changing the name of the tape.


Re: Dolby B. You can be sure, especially if it's a pre-recorded cassette, that there's less high frequency information coming from the tape than the Dolby circuits are expecting. There was a tape deck a few yers ago which allowed you to tweak the frequency reponse before the Dolby circuits to compensate for this. Very useful in theory, but it never worked as well as I hoped in practice.

IIRC there have been various discussions Re: digitally simulating dolby de-emphasis over at the Cool Edit forums, and none of them got anywhere.

I usually have Dolby on, but boost the high frequencies afterwards. Depends on the tape really.

Getting the azimuth right is 100x more important than everything else, as has already been mentioned.

Cheers,
David.