Late Acoustical/Early Electrical Recordings

[Doug]

I've been going through my record collection and found a few enjoyable late Acoustics/early electrics with a bandwidth of around 6kHz at best. The main 2 labels appear to be "Victor/Victorola" and "Angelus". The songs are great, but it doesn't seem to matter what needle size I choose (2.5, 2.8 or 3.7 mil) the sound is always quiet. As such, I'm having great trouble retrieving the musical content from the background surface noise.

Can anyone through me some suggestions/methods to try on these records. I would love nothing more than to restore them but have failed with every attempt to date. The records appear in good condition, the surface looks clean and not badly scratched, but the surface noise is excessive.

[Craig Maier]

Hi Doug,

You say that the labels appear to be Victor, etc. Are you sure? Because the symptom that you describe is that produced by hill and dale records when they are not reproduced correctly. If this is so, transfer them just like a stereo LP, and then use the file conversion selector set for Stereo to L-R. See if that helps.

[Dan McDonald]

I am pretty sure there are hill-and-dale Victor records also. Victor started up about 1901 I think.

Dan

[Doug]

My 1st reaction was to also try L-R but that failed. They're deffinately laterals, one of them is dated around 1908. I have a feeling they are poor/bad recordings to start with. I guess once the background noise exceeds or meets that of the musical content then the record is likely to be a loss

[Craig Maier]

Try running the brick wall filter on them with the low freq set for 250 and the high freq set for 3000 and a length of around 1000. That may improve things. Do that directly on the transfer before doing any other processing.