[78-L] Remastering

[DAVID BURNHAM]

I'd pretty well given up that anyone was going to respond to this one but I figured if anyone would, it would be you.  In fact I have a couple of engineers in mind and you're not one of them.  In fact there's one such person here in Toronto and he has used such extreme poor judgement when applying his CEDAR that I won't go near any project when his name is attached to it.  I'm fully aware of the limitations of noise reduction systems and the price to be paid for too much processing.  If your producers trust you, you should have no problem having them respect your judgement when you tell them when you have reached the best compromise between noise reduction and program quality.

db



________________________________
From: Graham Newton <gn at audio-restoration.com>
To: 78-L Mail List <78-l at klickitat.78online.com>
Cc: DAVID BURNHAM <burnhamd at rogers.com>
Sent: Wednesday, August 12, 2009 6:32:37 PM
Subject: Re: Remastering

DAVID BURNHAM wrote to the 78-L list:

> I don't know who in the business earns a six figure salary, but it is true
> that many remastering engineers don't recognize when to stop.  Obviously, if you have a CEDAR system with all the bells and whistles, you sometimes feel that the only way to justify having it is to ring every bell and blow
> every whistle.

Being one restoration person who has a CEDAR Cambridge system with most of the major conventional audio processes, I disagree.

For those who have spent the significant sums of money on CEDAR's flagship Cambridge processes, we have also spent a great deal of time to know where to stop to prevent over processing which introduces undesirable artifacts to the result.  This usually leaves some remnants of the noise we sought to remove, because you often CAN'T remove it all without generating undesirable artifacts!

The major problem is the producer who the ultimate work is being done for... they often repeatedly complain "there's too much hiss" and "take out more hiss" and other requests which are incompatible with doing the best job with the source material at hand.  There is simply no magic wand to be waved!

Another problem is the older CEDAR processes are not able to do what the new ones can.  The old CEDAR for Windows and the original stand alone series 2 rack mounted CEDAR equipment use algorithms that have been superseded by the new Cambridge processes which are updated on a continuing basis by CEDAR.

Unfortunately the old processes and equipment CAN'T be updated due to hardware limitations, and if you use the old equipment, you must settle for their limitations.  They were exceptional for their time, but progress has considerably outstripped what they could do successfully.




... Graham Newton

-- Audio Restoration by Graham Newton, http://www.audio-restoration.com
World class professional services applied to tape or phonograph records for
consumers and re-releases, featuring CEDAR's CAMBRIDGE processes.