Does restoration fix everything ?

Tapes

• Tape Hiss:  Most cassette tapes and reel tapes will have varying degrees of tape "hiss" that can be very annoying. We can reduce or completely elimnate it depending on the severity. DATs generally are fine.

• Tape baking:  A lot of tape manufactured in the mid 1970's to early 1980's is starting to come out of storage now for re-mixing and re-issue, and engineers are finding that it won't play. The surface of the tape has become gummy and it sticks to the heads and fixed guides of the tape transport, squealing, jerking, and, in extreme cases, slowing down or stopping the tape transport. This problem has cropped up on all brands of tape, but is nearly always fixable, at least temporarily by baking the tape.

Trade-offs

• Intense computer processing of very degraded signals may result in music that sounds somewhat muted.  It is a much more enjoyable experience to listen to a clean sounding recording, but somewhat muted, as opposed to a recording with severe hiss, crackles and pops. 

• There are cases when a recording sounds clean for the most part, and needs a less drastic approach in restoration in order to preserve the "liveliness" of the original recording.   In this case it is more desirable to apply less processing, which may leave some occasional imperfections more audible.  We would like our customers to be aware of these trade-offs.

• Inferior quality home or commercial recording: Some customers prefer to record their records onto a cassette, and send us the cassette for processing.   Please be aware that if the cassette is recorded with inferior equipment (noisy turntable or cassette recorder) the resulting CD will also be of inferior quality.   It is impossible to make a perfect CD out of a technically inferior recording.   This also applies to inferior commercial recordings with metallic, thin sound, recordings with bad sibilants, recordings badly mixed.  We can not create frequencies that have never been recorded and can not re-mix a recording. 

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