Your Vinyl Transfer Workflow (sharing best needledrop practices)*

I am interested in what processes you are able to do in M/S. I know little about M/S only what you posted years ago and I tried it on that set. Every other track sounded very bad like a big ball of dust was on the needle, something the DJs often let happen. I think I made it 60-70% better still not perfect but I can listen to it without cringing.

I have been pretty happy with my needle drops I think nailing my alignment made a big difference. I know I was trying to fix thing that were cause my bad tracking and now the same part sound fine.

 

Here is a small sample of the mix I'm working on the 1st part is raw and the 2nd is after running declick at level 7.8 m-band in M/S. Any ideas how to make it better?
https://www.sendspace.com/file/8tlfk5It was a 44.1 DAT upconverted to 88.2

 

I'm just heading out on vacation for a week so no time to answer in detail right now, but I will when I can.

 

Have a great vacation no worries

 

I begin by cleaning LPs and 45s using a Nitty Gritty with fluid made from alcohol and distilled water. I use an SP10 turntable with SME-III arm and Shure V15V. I've got a PS Audio phono stage which drives a Behringer SRC2496 connected via AES/EBU to a Fostex UR2 recorder recording at 24-bit 96 kHz. I use USB to transfer recordings from the UR2 to my laptop running CoolEdit 2000. Monitor via a Benchmark DAC1 connected by USB into a pair of Outlaw M2200 mono blocks driving MMGs.

 

I would want if I were you to get the original A to D conversion up as high as it needs to be the first time, and not reset later. -12 level (but use your ears of course to make sure that level is correct and right for your setup), seems a good bet.

Don't short change yourself with low levels when you don't need to.

 

You should not be arbitary about how much declick you apply, particularly when working with the M/S bands. I edit my needledrops in sections, some sections need more declicking than others. In Izotope RX4 I can listen to a sample whilst adjusting declick, I start with declick set at 1 and listen. I then adjust until I cannot hear any clicks. Once applied, I listen to the section of music & manually remove any clicks or pops left over.

When working in M/S I have on most occasions found that the M band needed significantly less declicking than the S band.

 

-12db and -9db peaks are fine particularly when working at 24-96 or 192. If you overshoot -6db, that's bad. Once your editing is completed you can normalise to -0.3 or -0.7 db with no impact. Don't capture anywhere near -6db.

 

My actions were not to remove clicks but filter out noise from a bad needle. Listen to the sample it worked pretty well.

 

Sorry about that, didn't properly read your post.

Listened to your sample, its pretty clean. There are still some clicks 1 on the left then 1 on the right from about 1.30, so they'd be in the S Band. They're hardly noticeable, if you do want to get rid of them, a slightly higher declick of the S Band should do the trick.

 

T

Thanks I will try S band in the future.

 

How are you working with Sum and Difference in RX? Can't see a way to do it easily natively, are you using a plugin like Voxengo MSED to do it?

 

No plugins, in RX4 its:

Channel Ops > Mixing (the preset is MS encoder) or L[%] 50 R[%] 50 L[%] 50 R[%] -50.

What you will end up with is the M band in the left channel & the S band in the right channel.

After cleaning, you then switch it back by using (the MS decoder preset) or L[%] 100 R[%] 100 L[%] 100 R[%] -100

 

Could you (or anyone) expand on how (and why) sibilants can be fixed in the S channel?

 

It can be fixed in most cases because the sibiliant part (mistracking) is mostly present in the S-channel. You can either sum the channels or attenuate the s-channel and the sibilance is either reduced or gone. If the sibilance is present in the M-channel, there is not much you can do about it without damaging the sound too much, IME.

 

Trust me when when Stefan can he will.

 

I'm no expert in using M/S editing, but I just choose it in Audition and go to work. If I need to get at the other end of it, I revert back to stereo, swap channels, and choose mid-side again. I did a needledrop of a somewhat worn 45 the other day, and was able to remove some of the distortion. Now I think I understand how they cleaned up the distortion in John Lennon's voice on "I Want You (She's So Heavy)". M/S editing is also a nice way to EQ.

 

Thanks, I have never looked at the Channel Ops section! (I have RX5 Advanced, use every day in mastering). Will check it out. Am usually using Audiomulch with Voxengo MSED for Sum & Difference work.

Regarding "why normally the S channel?", I'd say "It depends where the sibilance is, doesn't it?" If it's on both channels, you need to process just the Sum (Mid) (I use Sum and Difference terms, as it makes far more sense than Mid and Side, which is a mic recording technique, but admittedly, it's just semantics), where if it's just on one side, or feels "way out" in the stereo, then process just the Difference (Side).

 

Ah, I've been using M/S for cleaning, but it had never occurred to me to use it for EQ. How are you using it for EQ? To remedy problems or enhance? Are the results significantly better?

 

Enhance. The results I get are very subtle.

 

I also use Sum & Difference quite a bit in mastering, but usually only to fix specific problems.

 

As promised, I'm posting a sample to demo how M/S editing can be effective at fixing sibilants in needledrops. I can't explain why this is necessarily so. I think it has something to do with how the vertical movements of the stylus/cantilever form the S channel.

In any case, I prefer this method to de-essing for fixing sibilant distortion as it seems to clean it up while preserving the original sibilant sound. De-essing seems to subdue or muffle the sibilants in many cases. Also, while my approach is in fact the equivalent of summing the sibilant sound to mono, by using iZotope RX's spectral repair tool in spectral view for the editing, I manage to fix the offending sibilant sound without summing the entire frequency range to mono, which can sound weird sometimes as the soundstage momentarily collapses then appears again. I do this by selecting the vertical section of the sibilant in the S channel only then using the RX spectral tool in attenuate mode. For those using Adobe Audition, the healing brush should be able to do the same thing. If you're not using either RX or Audition, if you have an EQ that allows you to affect just one channel, you can achieve roughly the same result as well by reducing the band from about 500- or 600Hz up to about 9-10kHz. try reducing by about 6-9dB and then check the result. Practice makes perfect!

The following sample is the first minute or so from the Hall and Oates song "Missed Opportunities" from their 1988 album "Oh Yeah!" None of my cartridges track this perfectly as it seems to be cut right into the album, which had quite a boost to the treble to start with. Id di this with an Ortofon OM40 I just picked up from William Thakker in Germany. I find it tracks as well as my AT cartridges but has a nicer tonal balance.

The first sample is the before in regular stereo L-R mode: https://db.tt/PyQInltP

Here's the same before sample in M/S mode. Listen to how clearly the sibilant distortion can be heard in the right channel. This makes it easy to target the sections to fix: https://db.tt/LxCiGm8d

Here's the after sample in M/S mode. Listen to how the sibilants are now clean and in the M chanbnel only: https://db.tt/5uWIxJd7

Here's the after sample in L-R mode: https://db.tt/EpfDSupK

This approach works for me about 90% of the time. If a sibilant is badly ground into the vinyl, it's sometimes impossible to completely fix, but this cleans up the worst of it. I also find that running a strong declick on an offending section in just the S channel works nearly as well as attenuating.

 

Here's another M/S example I recall mentioning on here but I don't believe I got around to posting it. It's from the song Promises Promises on the group Naked Eyes' self-titled album. As you can see in this screen grab from RX in waveform view, it's easy to see the big offending clicks in the S channel. I often switch to M/S mode editing to target big clicks like this that can sometimes be buried in a regular L-R view. Once they're fixed, I can work on the more subtle stuff.


Here's the view after I went in with RX and used its Interpolate tool in the (declick module) to fix the clicks.


The following are before and after, 1-minute samples taken from the middle section of the song starting right before the big clicks you can see in the first picture above.

Here's a before sample in L-R: https://db.tt/T9wdQ0Bz

Here's how it sounds after the repairs: https://db.tt/GWK1CG6H

 

Nice! BTW. I use M/S editing in Audition new, but before that, I also found that de-clicking in regular stereo L/R mode for sibilants works with fair results.

But, I used M/S for trying to track down a problematic click last week, and I couldn't do it because it was too mixed with the bass drum thwack.

 

Yes, I've had cases like that and it's really like the proverbial needle in the haystack!