True Audiophile

[Thad E Ginathom]

Your opinions would be highly appreciated.

Cleaner than most of my vinyl :sad:.

I'd be ever so interested to compare FLACs, if you had the time. To my ear, and also to my unpracticed use of a graphic equaliser (blunt tool in my hand: move the sliders and see what doesn't have an effect) they seem a little thin; lacking in bass. Increasing the higher frequencies brings out details in the music that I couldn't hear otherwise, but I also brings out noise.

Trying to make something out of spectrum plots, and I do wonder if lossless FLACs would show a wider frequency response? I'm taking early steps in the learning process on this stuff.

The big question (leaving aside that it has been digitised and You-tubed) is: Was it immediately obvious that these are 78s? More practiced ears might say yes; maybe the slightly thin vocal might be a clue, but the biggest 78 give away is Sccccrwrrrrrrrwrrrrrrscrrrrrr... and that was just not there!

What did you do for equalisation? The curve applied to vinyl was different to that applied to shellac, and, go back far enough and there wasn't even a standard, I'm told!

If I had these records ...I'd play them, and with pleasure

 

[Hiten]

Thanks Thad,
only editing I did was...
I let the record play to the end till stylus reaches run-out groove. This runout groove is reference sample to remove hiss. In Adobe Audition there is an option to remove noise as well as one can keep the noise and remove actual song material. I apply noise removing filter to small section of music. Removed the music part and kept the noise. Turned the speaker volume up and played the noise. I listened to the noise to see if any music material I can hear. By this I exactly knew how much noise I can remove. you can 'undo' and repeat all these steps to be more precise.
on the hindsight...
I think I removed a little more than necessary noise as I can hear little sibilance on high frequency part of music. I guess removing noise compresses digital data in high fq. region. Not sure. And I think I should have taken reference sample at the start of the record as needle was repeatedly moving almost quarter inch sideways on run-out grooves, which resulted in as you may have noticed repeated variation on sound level.
Now the fun part.
Records were not cleaned (but were not dusty either), player was Philips idler wheel, Cartridge was ceramic, output was taken straight from ceramic cartridge to PC line in of mother board, no sound card, there was no equilization as I didn't feel like modifying it. to upload the bit rate was reduced from 320 to 128kbps.
Regards

 

[Thad E Ginathom]

If Adobe Audition still looked/felt like Cool Edit Pro (which it used to be) I'd buy it, even though it is 'a' Windows software and 'b' seriously expensive. But that's another story! Even just to get a demo copy is an involved process and a big download, but I did once, and really missed the simple elegance of C E Pro. Now I find that my (borrowed ) copy of CE Pro is unstable in WinXP (let alone Wine), even though it has worked for years. Can't really be bothered to troubleshoot that; it was the only thing that I booted Windows for anyway. I guess I have to get used to Audacity now.

The hear-the-noise preview (as per CE Pro) does indeed allow you to get a good idea of how much music you are going to loose with the noise when using the noise removal function. Coincidently, this seems to be the function that crashes my CE Pro ... but, quite often, when I have played with it in the past, I have decided not to use it, except perhaps in very quiet sections, when digitising vinyl. Usually I rely on the fact that masking makes much of the noise inaudible for most of the music. So I concentrate on scratches and crackles, in so far as I have the patience to deal individually with the ones left behind by the automatic function. This is one thing that Cool Edit Pro (so probably Audition too) does much better than Audacity. I have not played a 78rpm disk since my childhood: maybe as much as fifty years ago! but, I guess that dealing with that hf hiss is going to affect hf sounds in the music.

No equalisation? No pre-amp? Goodness, the 78s were a lot more untampered-with than vinyl, then, which is not even listenable without eq! Of course, there was no way of applying eq on a wind-up gramophone with a horn. I think it was used on later shellac, though, but I haven't much of a clue, having just seen, but skipped over, such references when browsing for vinyl eq info.

 

[Hiten]

It is always a good thing to remove noise even if one may not hear it. The fun is once digitized you can play around as much as you like keeping a backup copy. Once digitized one can also apply equalisation as one want, but I didn't bothered. Will do so soon.
Ceramic cartridges have good enough out put so can be used directly.
Regards

 

[Thad E Ginathom]

The fun is once digitized you can play around as much as you like keeping a backup copy.

Oh yes, indeed!

 

[jls001]

A You Tube presentation of an Abbey Road/EMI project for remastering the historic recordings of conducter Wilhelm Furtwangler. Hotly debated by Furtwangler fans and societies, most of whom don't seem to be very impressed with Abbey Road/EMI. The general consensus seems to be that remastering efforts such as these, not only filter out the 'noise' of live ambience and ancient master tapes, but they also filter out the 'essence' of music. I have been surfing extensively for many weeks trying to decide which recordings of Furtwangler to buy. EMI and DG originally recorded most Furtwangler performances, but his fans seem to prefer remastered CD's issued by smaller labels like Tahra, Audite and SWF. Only an extensive and expensive :sad: audition of Furtwangler's recordings would clear up the muddle of contrasting opinions.

A bit late in the day, but here's a (rather lengthy) article of how EMI engineers re-mastered the above recordings. I find it a compelling read.

 

[Staxxx]

Ajay, I did not see your earlier post on Furtwangler. I am a big fan or call it a fanatic. Have several versions of the same recordings on different labels. I have digitized a lot of them. Do you have a way of playing high quality rips?