Testing Dseq3 and Soothe2 on some old masters...

[davexnet]

HI All,
let me start by saying, I'm just a hobbyist, I'm not in the business in anyway,
nor do I have any connections to anybody in the business.
But I'm fascinated by the rapid advancements in the technology and I''ve
been playing around with these two filters.
I've chosen a couple of songs from the past to experiment with, they are
"Go Now!" by the Moody Blues, and "The Deadwood Stage" by Doris Day.
They both sound harsh and grungy, the Moody Blues song was sourced from an
Acetate since the master tape was lost, and Doris Day's song was a capture from the
movie "Calamity Jane"- the optical sound track.

It occurred to me that if these tools could help, somebody in the business,
perhaps during a remastering, would have used them - unless somebody tried,
and it didn't really help; perhaps it's beyond the scope of these tools.

Appreciate any thoughts on this.

[Frankie.T]

This tools are used to tame resonances, i don't see why should improve your old masters if they don't have this kind of issues.

Anyway generally speaking, a mb compressor sounds more natural on master than these kind of tools and so that's my suggestion if that's the issue.

If you just wanna improve the old masters, you need to do it in the old way, remaster them manually.
There isn't any good automate solution, and tbh i think never will for various reasons.

[yellowmix]

It occurred to me that if these tools could help, somebody in the business,
perhaps during a remastering, would have used them - unless somebody tried,
and it didn't really help; perhaps it's beyond the scope of these tools.

I listened to your two examples on YouTube and they were recorded non-optimally or were damaged. Rescuing such recordings is the domain of audio restoration. There are existing automatic tools for this, like denoisers, declickers, Zynaptiq Unfilter, etc.. There are some problems that must still be manually addressed. Some can't be truly resolved, like clipping. There are tools that try to reconstruct clipped audio, but it's making a guess at best since data lost is gone forever.

As previously stated, DSEQ and Soothe are meant to reduce resonances, not fix damage or reconstruct clipped data. It's understandable to think they can since the marketing material talks about "taming harshness".

[davexnet]

Thanks for responding; I only have the 44.1 KHz Wav ripped from the CD's, I don't have
any privileged assets.
You're right, it's the claim to harshness taming I was interested in.
Would you even hear "resonance" in such poor quality mixed and mastered recordings?

Denny Laine's vocal in Go Now!, while he sings it well, is distorted in certain phrases.
It's not digitally clipped but possibly (I'm guessing) was overloaded while
still analog.
Pretty much all of Doris Day's songs from that movie sound like that, supposedly
the master tape was scrapped after the soundtrack was added to the movie;
so the movie optical soundtrack became the source for all 78's, other vinyl
and the CD's.
This is info I've picked up on the internet in various fan/enthusiast forums, articles etc.

I've used "deconstruct" in RX to lower the "non-musical" noise; it helps a little, that's about best I can say
regarding these kind of recordings.