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to dehiss or not to dehiss, that is the question
Thursday, November 28th, 2013 01:08 amI have embarked upon converting my audio cassettes into mp3 files.
Found a working cassette player. Check.
Found a spare audio cable. Check.
Decided which program to do the recordings with. Check.
Adjusted my laptop's microphone settings. Check.
Figured out how to apply noise reduction to reduce hiss on the recordings.
Now I can't decide if I actually should apply the noise reduction to the songs, or not. The music sounds much cleaner after the noise reduction. But compared to the noisy versions, it seems to be missing something. I can't figure out if the noise reduction is removing some of the important high frequency sounds of the music along with the noise. Or if it's simply that my cassettes have always had a background hiss, so that I am not used to the songs without that noise being there.
.
I also have a CD version of one of these songs I recorded from this first audio cassette. The quality of the CD version is totally different from the cassette versions. Yet I can't say that the CD version is definitely *better*. They're just *different*. The cassette version is perhaps more nostalgic, as I heard this song on cassette more often than on CD. Yet, when I first heard the song on FM *radio* back in the 1980s, I wonder if the sound quality was more like the CD version than the cassette version? Perhaps the cassette versions even sounded better back then, before they were partially degraded by time and repeat playings.
Found a working cassette player. Check.
Found a spare audio cable. Check.
Decided which program to do the recordings with. Check.
Adjusted my laptop's microphone settings. Check.
Figured out how to apply noise reduction to reduce hiss on the recordings.
Now I can't decide if I actually should apply the noise reduction to the songs, or not. The music sounds much cleaner after the noise reduction. But compared to the noisy versions, it seems to be missing something. I can't figure out if the noise reduction is removing some of the important high frequency sounds of the music along with the noise. Or if it's simply that my cassettes have always had a background hiss, so that I am not used to the songs without that noise being there.
.
I also have a CD version of one of these songs I recorded from this first audio cassette. The quality of the CD version is totally different from the cassette versions. Yet I can't say that the CD version is definitely *better*. They're just *different*. The cassette version is perhaps more nostalgic, as I heard this song on cassette more often than on CD. Yet, when I first heard the song on FM *radio* back in the 1980s, I wonder if the sound quality was more like the CD version than the cassette version? Perhaps the cassette versions even sounded better back then, before they were partially degraded by time and repeat playings.