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Test run of the OB a success!

Restoration

Audio Restoration is the most important part of the record/tape-to-CD transfer. All work at LE VALLEY STUDIOS is performed by experienced, qualified and accredited A.B.C Engineers.

What is audio restoration? Audio restoration is the removal of unwanted noise which results when playing a record or tape. Scratched records result in audible clicks, airborne dust particles result in audible pops, and the needle in the groove of record results in surface noise. All this noise needs to be carefully removed, without degrading the sound signal, to produce a quality CD.

Reel to Reel tapes, cassettes basically require the hiss to be removed and tracks allocated when transferring to CD.

To date, a successful noise reduction rate of 80%-90% is accomplished on each record without loss of high fidelity. This means your CD will never be muffled or distant sounding. Great care is taken not to alter the original recording, and special effects are never added to mask unwanted noise or to make an older record sound more 21st century. We do not alter the bass, treble, or original recording in any way unless the customer requests this of us. Our task is to remove noise. Did you know that:

Recording a brand new record using audiophile equipment will still result in a noisy recording? It's the nature of the beast, and one of the reasons we have evolved from vinyl records to cassette and then CD. We are constantly striving for the cleanest sounding music.

Often, when a company offers different levels of restoration as part of their services they are simply running an additional set of preset filters with no guarantee.

If the software picks it up, then great, otherwise they are not going to take the time to manually go in and fix the noise WE WILL. At LE VALLEY STUDIOS you'll see right away that our approach is different. Here are a few major ways that we differ, because each record has a unique condition, a combination of manual editing and software filters specifically set to the condition of your record are used to restore the audio. Our experience in reading waveforms and performing spectral analysis allows us to manually isolate and remove noise with a high success rate. A minimum of 5 hours is spent on each LP from start to finish. Here's an example: the recording time alone for an LP is approximately one hour. The audio restoration, artwork, and burning the CD is a minimum three hours. Finally, a last QA (Quality Assurance) listening of the CD is another hour. It is not uncommon to spend an hour restoring a single song from a damaged record. Our audio restoration process is done when we say "that's the best we can get the recording".