What is Audio Restoration?

Audio restoration could be simply put as the removal of unwanted noises from vintage recordings, but of course things are never that simple and there are various pieces of equipment and processess that go into a successful restoration job along with the engineers skill and expertise. No restoration job is the same and each will require slightly different applications of our skills. A typical vinyl restoration / re-master would include: transfer from vinyl to hard disc (A/D conversion), de-click, de-crackle (if needed), re-mastering and, if required, extensive editing to fix further clicks, pops, mains hum, drop outs, hiss etc. The aim of our restoration approach is to remove or greatly reduce unwanted noises from recordings without sacrificing the original sound. It is possible to go over the top with processes such as de-click and introduce distortion, or de-noise and introduce strange high frequency artifacts. At SRT we feel it's always preferable to leave a small amount of hiss in rather than damage what's left. It is not always the best option to use a processor to remove noises and sometimes an engineer will use EQ or manual editing to get the best result, a decision made based on years of experience in this area.