You can make all of the claims you want to make regarding the quality of your restoration and enhancement products, but the rubber meets the road when you actually hear what the products do. The demos on our Free Demos page will let you see for yourself...on your own audio recordings, but here are some examples of what our techs did to some pretty bad audio. Check out the "Before" and the "After". Your ears will tell you that you've arrived at the right place.
This is a typical old recording of a 78 RPM record. We used a variety of filters to remove the clicks, pops, hiss and other disturbances.
Add a few of our filters...and volia!
If you were worried that our stuff looked too hard to use, have no fear. This file was cleaned using the EZ Clean filter that lives in Mentor, DC SIX and DC SEVEN. While you listen, you simply adjust a few sliders until the results sound perfect. First, let's hear the before:
Now let's hear the cleaned version
If you called the FBI today and asked them which product they recommend for pulling a voice out of a mess of noise, they'd tell you DC LIVE/Forensics...and these guys can afford solutions that cost 100 times more!
Now check out the impressive after...
There's nothing like our DSS filter. In the past, when criminals knew that they were being monitored, they'd go into a noise club or turn up the radio to obscure their voices while they talked. The new DSS filter crushes those plans by letting you remove the song and hear the voice underneath.
Is There Even A Voice In This "Before"?
There is, but only DC LIVE/Forensics could find it for you...
It's easy for the experts to do this sort of thing, but even when you listen, do you ask yourself, "great, but how do I do it with my Diamond Cut product?" How about if we help? The following examples also include a zip file with the presets we used to clean up the example as well as an explanation of what we did. That way, you can pop open the Demo or a fully working copy of Diamond Cut and see for yourself how we approach each noise reduction job. Simply download the following files and then follow along.
Important Note
In order to load these presets into your favorite Diamond Cut product, simply download the Zip file to your Desktop or somewhere you know how to manuever to, Open your Diamond Cut Software, go to the Edit menu, click on Manage Presets and then click on the Open Archive Button. Manuever your way to the file you've downloaded and open it. Now double click on the Multifilter folder on the right side of the Manage presets window. After this opens to reveal all of the presets in your Multifilter, then just click on the Multifilter preset in the left window and tell it to Copy to your Multifilter archive on the right. It will now show up in your Multifilter presets and be ready to view and use.
This Guy Lombardo tune sounds like it should be an easy restoration since the problem appears to be mostly what sounds like hiss. However, it's really not the same as tape hiss and is, in fact, surface noise from the 78 which is otherwise in pretty good shape. Using the Continuous Noise filter in Diamond Cut, you could remove this in a couple of seconds and have a good recording.
But listen again - hear the slight distortion in the attack of the trumpets near the beginning? This makes this file a good one to show off Diamond Cut.
?We used the Continuous Noise Filter on this file and set it to be fairly gentle in order to allow the brass to shine with their crisp sound. Next, we corrected for the RIAA EQ curve imposed by our modern preamp and also applied a 78rpm EQ with one preset. This gave us a really good sounding file and you could easily stop here.
However, we decided to make this sound more like it would have when Guy's band played it. To do this, we used our vacuum tube simulator to add some high frequency punch to the instruments and then used our Punch and Crunch to make the string bass come up front a bit. A tiny bit of reverb was added which provides just a hint of realism to the sound.
This is the "Before"
This is the "After"
Here are the presets:
The result? We think this is a great example of not only noise reduction, but also real restoration of the sound as it done by the musicians.?
This is an example of a difficult restoration. The record itself is not in super great shape with some thumps as well as pretty continuous crackle and a lot of surface noise. In addition, the audio is pretty compressed into a muddle.?Our EZ Impulse removes most of the smaller clicks and the continuous noise does a good job of getting rid of both high and low frequency noise. The Paragraphic EQ brings us back more to what the original audio was like and the Punch and Crunch gives us a more realistic dynamic range. The thumps at the beginning were attacked using the Interpolate function. With this type of record, 10 restorers would end up with 10 different results, but this is quite an improvement.
This is the "Before"
This is the "After"
Here are the presets: