Editorial - Three Little Wishes


It's now 9 years since I made the breakthrough which resulted in Pristine Audio coming into being. I'd been working on the restoration of some Lyrita LPs from the 1970s and come across a very useful technique for dealing with the minute surface crackles which could still be heard in the background after declicking. The problem with this method was the time it took to carry out - my PC at the time would typically grind away for eight hours over a single LP, which meant I usually ran the procedure overnight.

Clearly one LP a day was not a viable business plan, but a very generous gift of a brand new, bang-up-to-date computer from my father saw that time drop to under an hour. Now I had one PC to capture sound and another to process it, and the essential pieces had started to fall into place.

How distant that seems today! A couple of years later that rather laborious routine proved insufficient to deal with British 78s and was replaced, at great cost, with a new piece of software. Today that same decrackle software can zap an album's worth of music free of crackle in forty-five seconds.

Other progress has been equally incredible, and would have been impossible to believe back at the turning of the year 2001-2002. I recall reading a review in Gramophone about five years ago which mentioned a DGG CD in which sparrows could be heard twittering in the hall in which the music had been recorded. This was a couple of days after a new innovation in music software meant I could have delved into that recording and excised the sparrows without touching the musical content in any way. I seriously contemplating calling Deutsche Grammophon to offer my services at the time - today it seems a routine sort of procedure.

All sorts of other repairs have become possible and all sorts of problems can now be alleviated. Swish, the constant companion to so many records, be they 78s or LPs, can now be (somewhat laboriously) consigned to history; tape dropouts can be restored or repaired; a dry recording can be 'placed' in the acoustic of another building to be replayed as would be heard from a specific seat in a specific row of a named concert hall; a 1928 recording made in a hotel room with a battery-powered disc cutter can be heard at constant and correct tempo for the first time in over 70 years (the battery was improperly charged and the pitch varied throughout); two separate recordings of the same concert, with very different frequency and dynamic responses, can be joined together to create a convincing stereo recording 69 years after the concert itself; a modern recording can be artificially 'aged' and dropped into a 1930s recording suffering from a gap to create seamless and undetectable continuity of sound; a pianist and her husband can fool legions of critics and music-lovers to disguise other recordings and issue them as her own before being unmasked by the same technology used to manipulate those recordings in the first place. Then there's XR remastering and Ambient Stereo to consider, both of which have served to make historic recordings so much more accessible to so many more people, as well as bringing enormous pleasure to those who have known recordings for decades yet never heard them with such clarity and believability of sound.

These are but a handful of what has become possible and passed through this studio since Pristine Audio began. But that leaves us with a number of wishes for the future - problems yet to be solved, perhaps yet to be addressed, and for which the endless march of technology may yet provide innovative and unexpected relief. So if there happen to be any unbottled genies reading this, here are my personal three wishes for 2011:

1. Automated de-swishing. I've already mentioned how swish can be a thing of the past using current methods. There is a downside: each swish has to be individually selected by drawing a box around it on the screen, then selecting and applying a tool appropriate to that particular swish, making sure that no damage is done to the music it shares time and frequencies with. This takes time - an hour's worth of 78rpm recording amounts to 4680 individual swishes if every disc is affected - and that's if there's only one swish per turn! Furthermore, the defect stems from the original disc cutting process, so there's no value in seeking out an alternative pressing. You just sit and look at a screen full of swishes, knowing there's a mountain of work ahead of you, and get started, a movement at a time. One day I hope for a single-button solution that'll take a couple of minutes.

2. Wow and flutter. We all have our methods for trying to get as smooth a transfer as possible from records. Mark Obert-Thorn has a record player without a centre spindle and a system for holding the record by its rim in an exactly centred position to make sure his playback suffers little or no wow. Myself, I use a small circular file to enlarge off-centre holes when required, then spend a lot of time ensuring no swinging of the tonearm during playback. These help, but when my colleague Peter Harrison came across a perfectly centred LP which suffered a wow which originated on the master tapes, the only solution was to pitch-bend every single wow back into shape in order to get a smooth, evenly-pitched playback, over the duration of two sides of an LP. Flutter is almost impossible to cure, and both wow and flutter are inherent in any analogue recording and replay system, however good the equipment. Can it be cured whilst preserving deliberate vibrato in an automated way? I like to hope so.

3. Real stereo from mono recordings. We're starting to hear of movies being remade into 3D, why not old recordings remade into stereo? Well the movie way is a bit of a cheat, and much easier to do. Take a frame of film and cut out the various component parts - actors, scenery, objects etc. - on a computer screen, then manually assign each a 'depth' value, a number which describes roughly how far from the viewer that object or person is supposed to be. The computer than uses this to create depth information which can fool the eye when wearing 3D glasses into an illusion of space. The downside is that, for many, this simply looks appallingly fake - like a toy theatre with cut-out cardboard characters passing in front of and behind each other, and a very flat background. All to squeeze a few extra million dollars out of Star Wars - I wonder why they'd do that?!!

In music this would be very difficult - right now we don't have the technology to separate instruments from a recording in the same way - even in a stereo recording where each has its own place on the sound stage. So would it be possible to analyse a mono recording to achieve stereo placement? Two ways might be found - if a computer can be taught to understand "violin" as opposed to "flute" or "piano" in a sound-wave, it may be possible to isolate each and then move it around. Even better would be a way to figure out from the spatial information each instrument supplies in its reverberation some degree of positioning and from that derive genuine two- or three-dimensional sound from a flat, mono original. This certainly seems very distant, but I know it would be very popular if it became possible. I suspect that before it happens, a method of deriving genuine colour information directly from black and white film would appear, and that's not happened yet.

Happy New Year!


Andrew Rose, December 31st, 2010