Audio Recording Digitization Service

You may have a shelf full of vinyl LPs you have long been missing since converting your home system to CDs. Perhaps you have vintage 78s you have not heard in decades. Maybe a box of open reel or cassette tapes of long forgotten live recordings. These old recordings can be digitized and written to CDs, bringing them back into your active recording collections.

We can copy your LPs, 78s and tapes to CDs using high quality audio equipment and professional recording software. We can either copy “as is”, or apply filters and equalization to improve your sound.

Our pricing is primarily by the hour, at a base rate of $50 per hour, charged in 1/6th hour (10 minute) increments. See details on “time”, below. There is also a charge of $5 for each CD created. You can choose either standard audio CDs or MP3 data files.

LPs

A typical 12” LP can contain 30 minutes per side, but are more typically less than 20 minutes per side. In good condition, an LP can be digitized without any restorations needed, yielding a good quality playback. Pops and cracks from surface scratches can be eliminated with automated tools.

Where deep scratches result in skips, we can often edit around these. This may result in a short dropout. As this is a manual effort, the time involved and the results are quite variable.

Vintage Records

We can work with albums of 78s in addition to older 10” 33s and 45s. Typically, 78s require a bit more work for audio restoration, due to higher noise levels and possibly poorer record condition. It is your choice whether to have us apply the additional work to do this restoration, or to provide a copy “as is”.

As with LPs, deep scratches can require significant manual efforts to repair.

Open Reel and Cassette Tapes

We can work with standard ¼” quarter-track stereo open reel tape, at 3¾” or 7½” IPS.

Restorations

We can apply multiple restoration techniques to yield the most listenable results. These restorations include:

• Pop and click reduction
• Equalization to reduce rumple and hum
• Audio level balancing
• Compression
• Scratch and Skip resolutions

Each technique can add additional time to the copy process. EQ can be applied to the whole recording, to individual tracks, or actively varied through the recording to target specific issue. Audio level balancing can be applied to each track as a whole or actively varied to balance passages throughout a track.

The finer granularity of the restorations applied can increase the time involved significantly. For example, audio leveling each track as a whole will take a few minutes. Leveling each track manually make take as much as twice the actual playback time.

Compression may achieve results that are similar to manual audio leveling, but this uses a software program to achieve the results. It can result in higher noise during silent passages.

Time

The time involved in restoring an audio recording varies based on the amount of restoration effort involved. For an “as is” copy without restoration, the time involved will be typically the actual playback time, plus some additional time to assign track markers for the CD and to copy out the CD. For a typical 35 minute LP, about 45-50 minutes can be expected.

Equipment and Software

Turntables

• Technics SLB-20
• Empire Scientific 298

Open Reel Tape

• AKAI GX-4000D

Cassette Tape

• Yamaha Natural Sound K-1020

Computer Hardware

• AMD Athlon™ II X4 645 Quad Core Processor, 3.1 GHz
• 12 GB RAM
• Windows-7 64-bit
• Taxcam US-1800 Audio Interface

Software

• Cakewalk SONAR 8.5
• Cakewalk SONAR X1
• Adobe Audition CC
• Sony CD Architect

Audio Hardware

• Allen & Heath ZED12FX Mixer
• Alesis M-EQ-230 Dual 1/3 Octave Precision Equalizer
• Alesis MicroVerb 4 16-bit Signal Processor
• Alesis RA-100 Reference Amplifier
• JBL Control 1 Pro Monitor Speakers