Digital noise reduction (ick!) in Peak advice please

I hate digital noise reduction when applied to commercial CDs, really I do.

But at home, sometimes the only copy you have of a rare an unobtainable treasure is a vinyl LP with the crunchies.

I'm in that situation now, I have a mono Sgt Peppers in my hot little hands at the moment. After a good clean it looks near mint, but playing it reveals a constant background of crunchies.

I'd like to try cleaning up the digital needledrop in Peak under Mac OSX. Are there any programs or plugins that might do the job. Ticks and pops I can take care of manually, but not this constant crunchies.

For the terminally curious Beatlesholic, this LP comes with the matrix # XEX 637-1. Is this the first pressing?

 

Waves makes a superb plug-in suite for Noise reduction called X-Noise. It is the only program I have ever used that will effectively remove all traces of crackle. Of course, it will alter the sound a bit, but it WORKS!

But, do you have the spare nominal $1000 asking price?

 

How did you clean it? Disk Doctor can be noisy for the first couple of plays.

And summing to mono should also quiet much of the noise.

 

From my experience (and I'm using the Waves Restoration plug-ins), the finer the noise, the more likely you are to affect the music if you try to remove it. Case in point: I have a 45RPM single that had some annoying groove wear. (With trumpet on it, any midrange sound had a burst of noise with it. ) I was able to make it more playable, but at the expense of wiping out some of the high frequencies. Since it wasn't critical I used the Waves EQ plug-in to fix it back up somewhat but the bottom line is, I just need to find a better copy of it. With any of these filters, you can listen in "inverse" mode to hear exactly what the filter is removing. If it's overused, you'll actually hear transients of the music being clipped off, and that's not good.

A constant background of "crunchies" is going to be difficult to wipe out with software. Louder, sharper noises like scratches and individual pops and clicks are removed a lot more easily by software since it only affects the few milliseconds of sound where the noise occurs.

You might even consider finding an alternate method to cleaning the LP than what you're currently using...whatever that might be. I just wonder if a stronger (or different) type of cleaning solution might lift out whatever is deposited in those grooves. If it's not groove damage or a bad pressing.

 

Hiss reduction is far more bothersome than click or crackle removal. If done carefully by hand (highlighting only the area needing treatment) it can be almost inaudible. Just listen to the top end and make sure you're not creating divots in the audio.

Hiss removal, on the other hand, is pure, concentrated evil!

 

With Waves, I was able to restore a few HOPELESS 45s and LPs. Even with it, it took some work!

I do declicking/de-crackling every day. Even though I have Audition.Cool Edit, Sound Forge, and Click-Fix (all for Windows, sorry), Sometimes I still have to go through literally every second of a song to track down tiny clicks and kill crackle.

 

My method of record cleaning these days is water with just a hint of detergent added. This is applied to the record using a sprayer bottle. A cut down shaving brush is gently used around the grooves. The records are thoroughly rinsed, excess water dried off and left to air dry. This method was first shown to me by a former hi-fi writer of mine.

It works well, I've found. Further cleaning on a Keith Monks or Nitty Gritty adds no further improvement.

 

I suspect that a lot of the damage is due to mold. The record was filthy when I got it and I think that ssome of that dirt was in fact mold.

 

If you use Cool Edit, the "ClickFix" plugin might do the job when configured accordingly. Jeffrey Klein, the author of this plugin, describes the proper settings in the FAQ section of his web site. Look for his preset called "final polish". It worked very well for me, the results are almost magical on constant crackle or similar distortions generated from mistracking and/or small groove damage on dynamic peaks or loud violin parts close to the inner groove and things like that. I strongly suggest to give ClickFix a try!

Arne

PS. Here's the link: ClickFix final polish settings.

 

Andrew,
Thanks for the link, this has been more than helpful for me. I downloaded the evaluation version and so far I like how it works.

 

I never tried the final polish settings. I do know that Click-Fix works better on fast computers for some reason, as does Cool Edit/Audition.

 

I've tried Final Polish and it seems like the Sensitivity level may be a bit too high. I honestly didn't notice a whole lot of difference between this one and the modest 33 settings I was using.

Since it is mono, have you tried summing the channels together to get rid of the noise?

 

I downloaded it ages ago and forgot I even had it until I stumbled on it in my plug-ins. I used it a bit and just for efficiency alone, it was worth it. Compared to Cool Edit's declicker - which I am sure is very good if you have a spare 10 years to configure it and to check it over and over again - it is about 10x faster. Probably the best $40 I ever spent.

 

Cool Edit's declicker works very fast on a recent, fast PC.

 

So proportionately, wouldn't ClickFix work even faster?

 

A fast computer let's Cool Edit's declicker run so fast that it doesn't matter. What's ten seconds difference?