Restoring old records.. the HARD way!

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yymca6
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Re: Restoring old records.. the HARD way!

Post by yymca6 »

paul62 wrote: Mon Oct 04, 2021 9:05 pm A stylus can move dust and other shit in the grooves: next time the record is played, there is a chance that the muck has been dislodged enough to be cleaned out better. With a laser turntable, the laser beam will read the crap without moving it aside.

True story: about forty years ago I'd found mono LPs of "Their Satanic Majesties Request" and "Axis: Bold As Love" being sold for $1 (or something like that) in a second-hand store. "TSMR" was covered with muck and so I had a mad idea of painting each side with PVA glue (except for the label!) and then peeling the film off. That worked very well, as it turned out. A few years ago, I read a few posts at SH Music Forums where people reported doing the same thing to their records!!
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Re: Restoring old records.. the HARD way!

Post by Bazilnerk »

The guy in the film is the late John RT Davies who continued to transfer and restore 78's for the rest of his life. (He was also a member of the Temperance Seven) he would later use a Packburn noise suppressor which had the ability to take a stereo from a mono source signal and swap channels to whichever was click free, but would also smooth out transients as previously detailed in this thread. He was of course one of the first to use digital restoration (CEDAR) and his digital restorations are Excellent (although he still preferred cutting out clicks from tape!). His name appears as engineer and compiler of thousand of albums from the 70s onward.

In the days before digital restoration became cheap, I too occasionally cut a click from a tape this way from vinyl transfers I was using as music pleys in productions at a theatre I worked at (Makes me sound ancient, but this was only 35 years ago, and I was a teenager. I was still editing on 1/4" until the early 90's (It was still a skill taught at audio engineering college until around 93/94)
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Johnny Kidd Fan Club
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Re: Restoring old records.. the HARD way!

Post by Johnny Kidd Fan Club »

Some very interesting points in this thread. Of course it's important to make sure that your vinyl isn't warped before you try and clean it up and at the Johnny Kidd Fan Club HQ we like to follow Atticus Martin's cleaning and restoration techniques, especially when a rare Kidd acetate turns up.
This is a superb lesson on de-warping. Atticus later uses the Vinylflat which I suspect a few here may use. Remember to always try this on a copy of the Frog Song or Ringo the 4th before attempting anything like this with a Please Please Me gold label.

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