Sun.com Customer Experience and Stuff: Notes from the Sun.com customer experience team.

"A voice can cut through the hazy fog of time..." says famed CBS broadcaster Edward R. Murrow in the opening recording of his three-record historical compilation, I Can Hear It Now, which debuted in 1948. Indeed, I can tell you a thing or two about the fog of time and recorded sound:  For days over the holiday break, I labored to extract those very words above from 50-year-old vinyl. Here is probably more than you will ever want to know about remastering an old recorded disk.

It all started with a Christmas present. My kids are studying history, so one of the presents they got for Christmas this year was Murrow's comprehensive three-record set. (Don't worry, they got some cool stuff too!) The albums are an immersive audio history of the US from 1919 - 1949, based on transcrpitions from dozens of famous radio broadcasts. If you want to hear snippets of Churchill's "we shall fight on the beaches" or "blood, sweat" speeches, or Major LaGuardia reading the funny papers to New York children during the newspaper strike, or Roosevelt's Rendezvous with Destiny, or the Hindenberg crash, or Iron Man Lou Gehrig retiring, or the end of World War II or scores of other historical recordings, these are the recordings for you. Murrow and producer Fred Friendly* did a masterful job. 

But there is a catch.  Unfortunately, these wonderful pressings are long out of print, and have for some reason never been released on CD.  My kids got them in the only form available -- vinyl. And that's where the adventure began that consumed much of my holidays...

Remastering 101...

Technology has changed a lot in the 20 years since the heyday of phonographs, and I found that even all of the modern audio componentry I have isn't up to the job of turning vinyl LPs into mylar CDs.  There is quite a check list to sort through: Do you even have a turntable? If you do, has the rubber transport belt rotted by now?  Do you have a way to re-equalize for the RIAA response curve on the way to dubbing ino your computer (i.e. do you have a "phono-preamp")?  The right kinds of cables? And, will your modern listeners endure the crackle and clicks of scratchy old LPs?

In my case, the answer to all of the above questions was "no," and so what I thought would be a quiet afternoon of dubbing turned into a multi-day project. There were no good check lists for this sort of thing on the net, and if I'd known the number of setup steps, I probably would have sent the LPs to a dubbing service (see end note). But, in case you're ever in a similar situation and like to do things yourself, here are the steps I followed to transform scratchy old LPs into remastered CDs:

1. Acquire the old record.

It's actually pretty easy to find old recordings online. I got mine through one of Amazon's zshops (Balcony Books in Eugene, Oregon). You can also find old records through auction sites such as eBay. If an LP isn't rare, you can get it for $15, $20 or $30 US.

2. Find a turntable somewhere. This may take a while.

I thought I had a turntable, but we must have sold it 10 years ago at a garage sale. When I borrowed one from a friend, the transport belt from the motor to the turntable was stretch and rotting. Then, one of the folks in my group brought in his classic Bang & Olufsen turntable, which uses different technology and will probably outlast the doomsday clock. This finally worked.

3. Find a suitable amplifier.

At first I thought I could just dub the recording directly into the microphone output of my computer. Oh, then I remembered about something called the "RIAA curve": To allow for longer recording time and less distortion, LPs are actually recorded with much reduced base levels and accentuated treble, so if you plug directly into a microphone pre-amp, the sound will sound tinny.  So, you'll need to find an amp or receiver that has a phono input... which sends the signal into a phono pre-amp that adjusts for the steep RIAA curve.  Unfortunately, consumer amps and receivers sold in the last several years generally don't have a phono input -- I finally found one in the house that did, and set it up.

4. Clean the LP.

The LP probably has all kinds of hidden dirt and grime on it. This gunk creates a lot of extra crackles and other noise, so you need to clean it out. I couldn't find any local stores that still carry cleaning kits, so I mixed my own concoction of 50% isopropyl alcohol and 50% distilled water, and washed down the LPs with a soft cloth.  There are also other cleaning recipies on the net; choose to taste. (The best way to clean LPs is actually a vaccum-driven device such as the Keith Monks professional record cleaning system, which swamps the LP with an alcohol-based cleaner and then vaccums the liquid and gunk directly off of the LP... but who has time to chase one down? )

5. Make all of the connections to your computer.

OK, now get the amp plugged into your line-in input.  (In my case, it wasn't this simple, since I was starting with my laptop, which has only a mic-in.  I tried an attenuating patch chord from the amp into the laptop, but as you can imagine the sound levels weren't good. Moving all of the equipment to another suitable computer in the house wasn't practical, so I ended up dubbing to tape and then playing back onto that computer. But pretend I didn't.)

6. Dub the LP.

I used Audacity to control the recording on my system, which also set me up for the next editing steps. Audacity is a great little free multitrack audio editing and processing program, and runs on Windows, OS X and Linux.

7. Edit the sides together.

Remember, LPs have two sides (usually 20-25 minutes each) so I used audacity to recombine these into one file for convenience.

8. Remaster: Clean up the old sound.

Now for the pops, crackles, and clicks. There's a great little program called Groove Mechanic from Coyote Electronics in Canada that will clean up the clicks and pops. Basically, it looks for sound spikes and replaces them with short segments of adjacent audio.  I did an amazing job de-noising my crackly old Murrow records. (Groove Mechanic in Windows only, unfortunately, but has a free 15-day trial, and then it's $39US... I got all my work done within a couple of days, but should probably send them the $39 anyhow since it was such a handy tool.)

9. Break bands into tracks.

Obviously, one big file will become one big track on the CD.  Groove Mechanic also has a feature to sense the dead space between bands on the LP and thus break the bands on the record into separate files that will then become tracks on the CD. You can then put these files in order into your playlist.

10. Rip the CD.

Ah... finally!  Once I got the audio transferred, edited, and cleaned up, I burned the LP audio onto CD. 

11. Wonder if alternatives that might have been easier...

There are services that will sell you the LP and do the dubbing for a service charge, but the price can get to be pretty expensive if you have a few LPs to dub. There are other services like DLP that you can send the LP to and have them to the dub for you. Of course, you have to wait.

And, DAK makes a whole kit including a preamp and cleanup software, but I haven't tried this. If it works as advertized it might take some time out of steps 2, 3, and 8 above.

* P.S. Java Trivia: Fred Friendly was dad of long-time Java publications manager Lisa Friendly. Seems like there's a Java tie-in to almost everything!