Restoring a poor recording

[grigorisa76958934]

Hi guys!

I was asked if I could improve a recording of a choir concert by a friend recently. To my dismay, when I played it back

it sounded like crap. I checked the specs and it was what I was afraid of: 22KHz, 64Kbps recording. It sounds as if played through

a metal tube, thin, lacks dynamic range, very compressed etc.

Is there anything I could try and do in audition, to improve the quality a little bit? I want to try and give it some "volume, presence".
Any suggestions?

[ryclark · Accepted solution]

Not a lot I'm unfortunately. A bit of EQ is about all you can do to it. At that level of compression a huge amount of the audio will have been lost never to be heard again. And, of course, we don't know anything about the recording method and how good it might have sounded before being compressed into a low grade .mp3.

[grigorisa76958934]

That's the bad, stupid thing: it was recorded that way! I came into contact with the guy that did it, asking him for the original

files, thinking he might have done something idiotic along the way, and when he sent them, they were the same quality mp3 files.
I was told he had "a good recorder", but what good does that do, if the user has no idea what they're doing...

[SteveG_AudioMasters_]

grigorisa76958934  wrote

I was told he had "a good recorder", but what good does that do, if the user has no idea what they're doing...

Oh, how true this is - and I get to see quite a bit of it. I don't particularly mind, as it makes my recordings seem quite good!

The truth of the matter is, though, quite simple; No recording can actually be 'improved' over the state of its master. Yes you can get rid of hiss, hum, extraneous noises, etc and it will appear to be 'better' - but you won't have improved the original, as such - just removed a few artifacts from it. If it's as you describe, and recorded at a 22k sample rate and as an MP3, then there's absolutely no hope for it whatsoever.

[Rick0725]

I use har-bal 3.7 eq software and perform a simple eq match to either a pro recording or a decent sounding audience recording in my library of the artist. I use the entire performance instead of eq ing  individual songs which created an average of the audio spectrum.

match the volumes for both sources so the frequency spectrum lies on top of each other. then match the crappy sounding spectrum to the reference using the different curser movements. eq the mid channel which automatically eqs left right and sides improving stereo image. many doubt the use of eq match. but you need to know what you are doing as always.

Rick

[SteveG_AudioMasters_]

There are occasions on which HarBal is useful, but this is not one of them. My previous reply stands, for the reasons given.