Hiss. Rumble. Crackle. Pop.
When you listen to old recordings, you will often find that many of them have not survived the passage of time unscathed. We provide audio restoration services to museums, libraries, archives and collectors to help recordings become more listenable and enjoyable.
Magnetic tapes degrade through time, wax cylinders, gramophone records and vinyl can degrade through wear and tear by a stylus, and even digital recordings can suffer from audio problems like mobile phone interference. Any recording can also suffer from poor microphone placement, bad acoustics, background noise and a whole raft of other problems.
We can help to make your historic recordings sound better and more enjoyable to listen to.
Whilst it is always essential to preserve a recording as-is, sometimes the need arises to ‘clean up’ the sound quality for an access copy. This could be to simply make transcriptions easier, or make them nicer to listen to for public consumption on the web, in apps, or in-gallery.
We can help you with audio restoration in a number of ways. This could be working remotely with existing digitised recordings, or advising you on how to make a digital copy for us to work with.
Sensitive audio restoration
We will discuss with you how you would like the restored audio to sound like. Sometimes it’s important to preserve some of the original ‘noise’ from the original recording method – think crackles, pops and hiss – but improve the legibility of some dialogue. It may be that you will require a rather clinical restoration with no noise at all, making the recording sound more modern.
An important interview may have some other form of sound captured at the time, such as shouting, banging and clattering, or music, which detract from the subject. It may be possible to isolate the dialogue and remove unwanted sounds completely, or improve it in some way.
Using industry standard tools, high quality audio hardware, and our nuanced approach to working with archival materials of all types, the chances are that we can help you.
Audio restoration case study
Read our blog post Click, crackle and hum – the wonders of audio restoration to read more about the techniques that we use and to hear some sample sounds from a restoration of a 1967 tape recording of an organ recital in Beverley Minster, UK.
Contact Us
Contact us to discuss any audio restoration needs that you might have.