Distorted cascading chimes

[dewytakm]

I am trying to restore Chad & Jeremy Zanzibar Sunset, and at two points in the song there is a very loud cascade of chimes. Unfortunately, on my copy of the vinyl, these passages are extremely distorted. I have used the Continuous Noise Flat Line filter with some moderate success - applying the filter only to the section with the chimes. In the resulting file, there is a bit of a transition as the filter kicks in, but it is not too obvious. Most people won't here it, although it annoys me.

I have tried pretty well every other filter with no joy.

Anyone else encountered this type of problem? Any suggestions?

Update: After reading some other posts, I decided to look at the spectrum more closely. The unfiltered recording had a slight but noticable 60 Hz hum which the harmonic filter took out. But there were a couple of spikes, one at aprox 6500 Hz, one at aprox 6000 Hz and a third at 540 Hz. I have no idea where they came from, could be the turntable, or the sound card or they might be on the vinyl recording. But notch filters took them out quite nicely, and after that the cleanup process went much smoother. I did not need to do anything special with the chimes, just the regular impulse and continuous noise filters.

I have not noticed this problem on other recordings, but I am going to go back and look at some of them just to be sure.

[Craig Maier]

Try applying a heavy dose of the De-Esser found in the Dynamics Processor.

[dewytakm]

Using De-esser

Thanks for the reply, Craig. I did try the de-esser, with no success. The result was even worse distortion.

However, I have since done quite a bit of work on the background noise from my system (see other post), and by taking out a nasty bit of noise at about 6 Khz, the problem was drastically reduced.

I can only devote time to this project on an occasional basis, so I forget sometimes what I have tried/not tried. But the lastest status of this problem is that it was definately hardware related. I have re-recorded the track using another turntable and the results are 1000% better.

Cheers.

[Craig Maier]

Quoting Dewy: "The result was even worse distortion."


I suspect that the Expander / Gate function was also turned on in the Dynamics Processor when you tried it. That would account for an increase in distortion. Always uncheck that function when using the De-Esser to reduce High Frequency distortion. Of course, the best situation is to avoid the distortion to begin with, which it appears was your ultimate solution.

[dewytakm]

De-Esser Distortion

I have done too much since then to be sure of the settings, but I did try the presets. Anyway, the final solution was to go back to the vinyl and make a new recording, with very low record volume. I was then able to clean up most of the noise without distorting the chimes.

Thanks again.