Audio Restoration – Studio109

Do you have audio that needs cleaning up?

We have the software and experience to restore old recordings - from 100 year old records to much newer audio. Restoration can't make your audio sound pristine but it can often vastly improve it to be much easier to listen to.

Maybe you have cassettes of your band's demos or concerts recorded many years ago. As well as removing noise and re-balancing the tone we can sometimes go further using AI to separate out the instruments (unmix) and remix, then reassemble with more control over the overall sound. Sometimes it is even possible to replace instruments, or parts such as snare or bass drums using the same timing as originally played to improve the mix. We can even isolate vocals or instruments to fix tuning issues.

Audio Restoration is not just for music ...

We can clean sound tracks to digitised VHS home-movies & films. We also offer forensic audio to clarify or extract clearer transcripts from damaged recordings.

Audio clean-up from a 100 year old recording

This is from a collection of monophonic songs recorded in the early 20th century and released on 78 rpm shellac records. The original recordings were made by a relative and so have a strong personal and nostalgic connection.

The recording was further degraded by using an iphone to capture the record from speakers in mp3 format years ago.

Although there is very little left to save, we could remove the worst of the scratches, dust and noise to leave a recording that, although far from perfect, is much easier to listen to. A little equalisation and compression also helped to soften the sound.

Salvaging a song from an old 8 track tape

This song was recorded on an old Fostex 8 track with a worn out head in the mid 1990s. The rest of the recording gear was poor to say the least.

For this we used the original stems - bass, acoustic guitar (particularly badly recorded on the most worn part of the head), live violin, mono string synth vocals. As the drums were a simple 808 pattern they were easy to replace in our studio once the track parts were loaded and the precise tempo calculated.

The original version is a very poor 12 bit Digital Compact Cassette mix. The new mix retains the charm and character of the original but adds clarity.