How do you get that Pitch-Black Background when transferring vinyl to digital?

My favourite trick is the following:

Using RX3 you can select the lower frequency range for the parts you want to clean up (silence between tracks, quiet parts) and combine the channels 50/50 (fold down). That will very effectively clean up the groove noise during those sections.

What you are doing is folding the bass frequencies, which eliminates the mostly out-of-phase groove noise. Try it out, it works like a charm.

The only thing you need to be aware of is to not select too high a range in case there are bass frequencies in the music that are not centred.

The good thing is this method doesn't leave any artefacts as noise reduction would do.

Have fun!

 

I haven't needledropped anything in a long while and I usually don't anymore. That said, when I do - I never use any sort of noise reduction and I never alter levels/alter the silence in between tracks. As is, you would likely never tell it was sourced from vinyl unless I told you.

The most I might do is clickrepair on very worn discs or discarding out of phase information on mono LPs.

Start with clean well pressed records, and good equipment, and the problems involved with needledropping take care of themself.

 

One exception to the above was when I got my parlophone copy of Rubber Soul ages ago, it was the first time I had heard the album on vinyl - I only had CD to go by before that. And I kept getting this weird thunk in the middle of "Run For Your Life" - I thought it was a defect in my otherwise perfect record. I tried re-recording it, processing the spot with NR, manual declicking, bass cut, you name it... I had no idea that was actually a part of the original mix which was removed for the remix present on the '87 CDs.

 

Which modules are you utilizing for this process?

 

Since the mid-1970s I've recorded about 400 albums to cassette, about 200 to CDR, and a handful just to digits.
Post-processing might include cleaning up the clicks, and now days, normalizing the recording.
I'm always pleased when one is really quiet.
I attribute it to dumb luck (and a clean album).

 

I've found that a fine line style stylus works much better at reducing background noise than an eliptical. And as someone has mentioned, setting proper recording levels is very important.

I agree with your original statement that declicking/denoising removes some of the musical elements.

Also, it's possible to overclean records.

 

Ok, home now so I can post some images.

Here's my preset in the RX4 channel Ops module. The RX3 version looks basically the same.


Here's the same thing in Adobe Audition 3:


And in Adobe Audition CS6 (IIRC, CS5.5 was the same as this):

Note how in this one there is a separate tab for each channel and how for the S channel (in the R) there is no -71% but instead you set it to 71% then invert it.


I use RX most of the time for editing and have my preset assigned to a keyboard shortcut (Ctrl+Shift+M). This allows me to toggle back and forth easily. In fact, when I'm working on MS mode, I use the Channel Ops Preview button to listen to the audio in regular LR mode.

Two other points to remember:

1. Never save a file in MS mode like this unless it's in 32-bit floating point format. Otherwise peaks that go above 0dBFS will get chopped off. When you're in an editor in 32-bit mode, you can indeed have peaks above 0dB without problem. Once you toggle back to LR mode, you can save as you normally do.
2. Listening to audio in MS mode will sound weird. The top channel onscreen (which is now the Mid or centered info) is very dry sounding usually because it's basically the equivalent of mono. The bottom channel onscreen (which is now the Side or stereo info) often sounds very echoey or full of reverb and without bass. That's normal (in fact if you research it a bit, you'll discover the original Dolby Surround used in theatres was basically this information filtered and sent to surround channels).

MS editing is not just for noise reduction but I find it's often great for pinpointing those really difficult thumps and other audio glitches that you just can't seem to find when editing in regular LR mode. Somewhere around here I have a really good example of this I saved with the intention of posting it to the needledrop tips thread. I must try and dig it out soon.

Practice, enjoy. It's fun!

 

Crispy, what are your settings for this?

 

One thing you could do is apply the toggle to MS mode I described above. Then do an EQ cut to the low frequencies on the bottom channel (the "S channel" only. That's the equivalent of folding them towards mono once the file is toggle back to LR mode. If you remove all audio information at a certain frequency in the S channel, once the file is back in LR mode, it would be completed in mono at that frequency.

The most natural sounding approach would probably be to so a gradual EQ cut towards a drastic drop at the bottom of the range. Start the slop at around 500Hz.

 

You want that pitch black background from vinyl to digital. Very simple use a very good well set up turntable , arm , cartridge to begin with.

 

Hi guys,

For selecting the frequency range I use the Time-Frequency Selection Tool. The selected range really depends on the music itself. Usually you can select and fold anything below 20 Hz (subsonic) without altering the sound at all, but that will not solve our problem. Selecting up to 130 Hz or even higher does the trick, but as I mentioned before, you have to be aware of the fact that you may be folding bass frequencies that might otherwise not be in the centre. Since most vinyl has lower bass frequencies folded anyway during the cutting process, this is a case-by-case basis. (Just to be clear, we are still talking about folding the lower frequencies only during quiet passages, fade-outs and during silence, so it's very probable that you won't fold any musical content anyway.) If you are only cleaning up the silence between tracks, the selected frequency range depends on the quality of the vinyl used — some pressings are quieter than others, those may require less range.

For the folding itself I use the Channel Operations Module with built-in preset "Mix to mono", which sets all channels to 50.

One other nifty trick is to go to Preferences/Misc and set up Selection Feathering to 1000 ms, which will give your selection a smooth start and stop of 1 second. Feel free to experiment with this, but make sure you set it back to the default of 20 ms when you're done. (I don't recommend using 0 ms, as it will leave artefacts when declicking for example.)