ampage Tube Amps / Music Electronics	For current discussions, please visit Music Electronics Forum.

ampage archive

Vintage threads from the first ten years

dolby argh...!

:

5/26/1999 8:43 AM
nic	dolby argh...! All this time I had been recording with the noise reduction on, no wonder I haven't liked the sound of my recordings! I tried recording with it off and loved the naturalness. Someone brought this tip up in the 'micing bass' string, I am very thankful!!! Now I feel like recording again. nic

5/26/1999 9:28 AM
Carlo	I feel the same way about dbx. Carlo

5/26/1999 1:21 PM
GFR	The best you can do to reduce noise is record the hotter you can and MUTE the channels that are "silent" when mixing. Noise reduction such as dolby can do much worse things to your music than noise. Unless if you have a pretty expensive system like Dolby spectral recording or the like.

6/4/1999 7:10 PM

nic:

    I think Dolby was almost a necessity with 4-track cassette decks mastered to another cassette to make 3rd (plus!) generation distribution tapes. By that time if you weren't using Dolby, there would be so much hiss multiplied together that it would sound like frying eggs between the tracks!

    But if you are mastering your 4-track cassettes digitally (DAT, MD or via computer) there is much less tape hiss to worry about and at least on a computer you can easily edit out the tape hiss between tracks (or use software to "de-hiss" the WAV file).

    As for all of your tapes that you have already recorded using Dolby, you might check out a BBE Sonic Maximizer (prices on some of the models have dropped below $100!) These little boxes will add back the sparkle to recordings that have been dulled by Dolby. They are handy to have around (some guitarists even run them in the FX loop of their amp!)

Steve Ahola

6/6/1999 3:24 AM

Re: notes on digital noise reduction

I just tried out the Noise Reduction feature in Cool Edit 96 and ran into a problem I thought I better warn everybody about. At least with CE96, the NR works on the principle of subtracting the hiss and noise from a blank section of tape. Only I had already zeroed out the sections between tracks so there was no blank space for the NR to analyze. Argh! In mastering to analog tape, you try to eliminate the noise between songs however you can, but in the digital realms that noise is what is used to fine-tune the noise reduction... After processing the WAV files with NR you can then trim off the extra time before and after a track.

Steve Ahola

6/7/1999 7:39 AM

The hiss is not really subtracted - the program does a statistics analysis of the noise and uses a complicated non-linear filter to remove portions of the signal that match these statistics.

You can get around this problem by recording a sample of a "typical" hiss noise from one of your tapes and saving the noise analysis as a "template".

If you're doing heavy noise reduction, this will not sound good, but for moderate noise reduction it must be OK.

6/7/1999 5:23 PM
SpeedRacer	It is kind of wild that it works at all, I mean noise being random and all. It will certainly get rid of amp hum and any other periodic "noise", but I don't expect much hiss reduction. I don't bother with it at all really, bc I don't want something "randomly" messing with my tracks based on a 3rd party statistical analysis of my random noise.. am I all wet or ?

Page 1 of 2