New method for old vinyl digitization

[Claude]

From Top Quarks to the Blues

Berkeley Lab physicists develop way to digitally restore and preserve audio recordings

The 1995 discovery of the top quark and singer Marian Anderson's 1947 rendition of Nobody Knows the Trouble I?ve Seen may seem unrelated. But through an interagency agreement with the Library of Congress, the same technology used to study subatomic particles is helping to restore and preserve the sounds of yesteryear.

"We developed a way to image the grooves in a recording that is similar to measuring tracks in a particle detector," says Carl Haber, a senior scientist in Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's Physics Division who developed the technology along with fellow Physics Division scientist Vitaliy Fadeyev.

Their work could ultimately enable the Library of Congress to digitize the thousands of blues, classical, Dixie, jazz, and spoken word recordings in its archives. The mass digitization of these aging discs and cylinders will both preserve the nation's musical history and make it accessible to a wide audience.

complete article (check the audio samples)

Edited April 21, 2004 by Claude

[rockefeller center]

Cool. Thanks for posting this.

[JSngry]

Scratches reduced, but what's up w/that swishing sound?

[Stefan Wood]

That's a guy with a little hand broom swishing the 78 as it is being played.

[JSngry]

Didn't those used to come with every stylus?

[couw]

it's the turtly sighing...