Cleaning Up Those Old Q8 Recordings

[berninahusq]

Sometime in the 80s I was getting very nervous of a few of my "treasured" Q8s totally degenerating and being unplayable. So I took my TEAC A3340S 4-channel deck and and all the 10 1/2" and 7" reels I had and recorded as many tapes as I could as dbxII encoded recordings. If the Q8s were Dolby-B encoded, I first decoded them with my TEAC AN-300 4-channel Dolby-B encoder before the dbxII processing. I found that these new "masters" sounded much better than the original 8-Track because somehow with the dbxII and the TEAC 3340S recording setup, they sounded more dynamic. And this was without a DBX1, 2 or 3 dynamic range expander which I found suspect at the time. These reel to reel tapes were more durable than those 8 tracks anyway!

As you well know, the tape hiss on those Q8s are noisy, Dolby-B or not, and some are just downright unbearable during non-program segments. Nevertheless, technology (nor the money) wasn't there yet to retain these recordings in a digital format (the CD came many years later) but was convinced that one day both the money (well let's say an obsession) and the technology would be.

I was listening to one of these recordings that I transferred onto CD recently the other day and was very annoyed by the tape hiss. So I pulled up the wave files in CEP and experimented with Noise Reduction. I captured a "1 second noise print" of the loudest hiss from a silent track and removed the noise from all the tracks. The results were "JUST" phenomenal! It was SO QUIET that you wouldn't even know that this recording came from a tape, let alone an 8-Track! There was no audibly detectable degradation of the program content either. The highs were still bright, the cymbals still rang and the bass still tight. I thought I died and went to heaven, again! Can you imagine a quiet segment from an 8-Track actually being "dead quiet"?

Now I'll have to go back and take the noise out of all my other recordings. What fun to listen to these recordings better than I ever had before! Thanks for listening guys...only you can understand this elation!

Ed

 

[The Quadfather]

Hey Berninahusq:
One thing about an eight track is that the tape moves across the head in one direction only. This is very conducive to magnetism buildup on the head. Once the head is magnetized, it will have more hiss. If it gets bad enough, it will start to "record" the hiss to the tape, and reduce the highs.

You might want to demagnetize the head and redub the eight tracks if you still have them, and you can start with a lower noise threshold to begin with. This will require an eight track demagnetizer, which is built long enough to reach the head through the tape door.

The Quadfather

 

[JonUrban]

I used to use SF NR 2.0 until I tries the NR in CEP2.0. CEP seems to do a much better job. I think I have changed for good (although I have not done any conversions in a while).

:-jon

 

[AllAroundSurround]

Yes ! Jon I told you that the n.r. in CEP was excellent ! It does take some time to get the hang of it but once you get the hang of it it's great- I've done many q8's and as I got better at it I went back and re-did several of my older ones. I'm Looking at Cedar Audio tech now for some dehiss /denoise
Used in forensic work! It's even better than CEP!

Rob 8o