Mercury Remastered

[Terry]

One of the constants of Old Time Radio shows is that the sound quality can best be described utilizing those illegal sounds one may not emit on television (though the FCC apparently never told Comedy Central about that restriction.) Between wild volume fluctuations, tape hiss, surface noise, scratches, speed variations, profound EQ imbalances, and ultra low-quality mp3 encoding, what one winds up with is something no casual listener would ever want to hear.

Even a fanatical listener can get fed up with those defects, so I've been playing with several audio programs to determine what I can do to minimize them and come up with something enjoyable.

Remastered radio shows are commonly available these days, and while I appreciate the intent, the execution always leaves much to be desired, since the trend is to overuse noise reduction software as though any vestige of tape hiss or surface noise is an outright obscenity and somehow replacing it with the musical whoosh of metallic "space monkey" noise is preferable, though I find that instantly and utterly intolerable.

In light of all that, here's tonight's home-remastering of Algiers, ending with Welles becoming unglued either because guest Paulette Goddard just inadvertently revealed the classified name of Charlie Chaplin's new film production or because Welles had to suddenly cut five minutes from the show to make room for a breaking network news bulletin.

Algiers (remastered)


Terry

[Glenn Anders]

Thank you for embarking upon this new project of enhancing existing copies of Welles Radio broadcasts, and for your first selection, since "Algiers" was the program which got the sponsors of the Campbell Playhouse up in the air for the extravagant sound stage Welles created to suggest the atmosphere of that Moroccan city.

I must confess though that in a format I am not familiar with, I have been unable to listen to the download of the program, something I am eager to do.

Any suggestions, Terry?

Glenn

[Terry]

I chose flac, Glenn, because it's a lossless format, and the lossiness of mp3s, even at their highest quality, is something I'm steering away from.

Flac files play on Winamp, which is my player of choice anyway (since it can handle every audio file type and has many digital processing plugins available, most of them free.)

Download it here and let me know if you have any difficulty.

Thanks for the interest,

Terry

[Glenn Anders]

terry . . . Terry . . . TERRY!

I think I did it, at last. Turns out my server/browser, Yahoo/Safari, was going through some transition.

Now, my hope is that I downloaded the right one. The sound quality sounds good to me, except for a little hiss and a disk change, near the end.

Thank you again.

Glenn

[Terry]

In my continuing struggles to improve the sound of OTR shows and have a result I'm still happy with a day later, I've tried and rejected Noise Removal (due to the resultant Space Monkey artifacts,) various DSP modules (as there's no need for reverb or stereo enhancement on old mono acetates,) and Notch Filtering (which removes tape hiss nicely but also results in tinniness and foreshortened dynamics.)

My latest attempts involve EQ Matching, which adjusts the equalization of the offending recording to match that of an audio file with a sound balance of which one approves.

Here then is the first episode of The Lives of Harry Lime, with EQ forced to match that of episode one of Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, as produced fairly recently by the very excellent Dirk Maggs for BBC Radio. I made additional adjustments to attenuate the spectrum below 100 Hz (where only the recurrent bassy thrum of a defect in the record resided) and above 8,000 Hz (to reduce tape hiss.) I also removed the silent gaps affording space for Station IDs (since there weren't any.) It still sounds like the audio cassette recording of an old record, and I'm enough of an Analog Druid to think that's a good thing. It just shouldn't sound like the shrill and headache-inducing recording of a scratched LP.

Original mp3:

http://www.mediafire.com/?nmtjmndzefl

Re-equalized mp3:

http://www.mediafire.com/?rh2ozytrzjw

Any feedback would be most helpful.



Thanks,

Terry

[bord]

Kudos on your choice to not over-clean. Tape hiss is a normal part of the equation, just like film grain. Providing these in lossless is another sign of great care and consideration. I hope you continue to work on these. Might I suggest the Ambersons episode?

[Terry]

I found I'm not able to duplicate the results. When I tried matching the EQ of the second episode of Harry Lime, it turned out completely differently from the first episode, even though I was matching it to the same EQ spectrum. Without being able to get the same sound across the entire series, it's a lost cause, and I won't be doing any more restorations until some new software turns up.

The EQ is bad on Ambersons, as I recall, along with quite a bit of surface wear on the record. I'll try working on that one when I feel like messing with bad audio quality again.

[Glenn Anders]

Terry, let me add my kudos to those of bord for your excellent efforts at preserving and restoring Welles' audio works.

Thinking about variation you find in results from one episode to another of The Lives of Harry Lime (or The Adventures of Harry Lime, as they were known in the United States) -- and again, if you attempted a similar restoration of The Magnificent Ambersons -- I am prompted to recall the differences, some of which were initiated by Welles, in the area of Radio Transmission, transcriptions, Spoken Word recordings, etc., over a period of nearly twenty years.

In the decade of the 1930's, as you indicate, most recordings, if made at all, were on coated glass discs. In America, these "air checks" were made at the order of the FCC, and once filed, were often forgotten, just as frequently poorly stored. Each disc contained only part of the program's airtime. It is the luck of the draw, how well recorded, how often played, how kindly treated in the passing of time the quality of a given program might be.

By 1951. the technology was much more as we know it today. Many radio stations still used transmission discs, but they were large affairs, much more faithful in sound quality. By that time, magnetic tape, 45 r.p.m.'s, and 33 long play records were in the field.

In the case of the Harry Lime stories and other Harry Alan Towers' extravaganzas with Welles, unlike trans-national exchanges of the past which had to depend upon short wave transmission, the programs were technically designed for Worldwide distribution. Towers' Harry Lime work, though often shabby in terms of art or even state of the art, were among the first of these. They benefited from the good reviews and mass commercial audience reception THE THIRD MAN had received. [One of the first .45 r.p.m.'s which I purchased to play on our new RCA radio-phono console was the zither music of Anton Karas for Carol Reed's film; it was an international sensation, no matter what some of the producers had thought of it at the time.] And so, though radio sound had generally improved greatly, differences in reproduction, equipment, and use of given transcriptions in various English speaking countries may explain some of your difficulties in bringing your online work up to the snuff you desire.

Please, press on.

Glenn