Portfolio

On my portfolio pages, I present successes and failures to demonstrate the miracles and limits of audio recovery and enhancement. It's a fascinating journey, come along and follow the links to Read More on a separate detail page for each story.

First, it needs to be said that the best meals start with the best ingredients. A chef can often make common fare come out very good, but will not be embarrassed to throw out bad food. Experience (and good sense) dictates that you cannot make a tender veal cutlet (any more than a silk purse) out of a sow's ear. The analogy here, of course, is that better recordings help assure better results.

Cooking show with one distorted microphone
Frank Abraham produces Cooking Hawaiian Style and sent me an episode to work on. This story has two parts.
    1) The good news is that, overall, there was a lot to love, which cleaned-up very nicely.
    2) The bad news is that the microphone/preamp for one of his folks produced some severely distorted clipping that could be significantly improved, but not to commercial quality. Read more...

The "Orange Juice Symphony" gets a new life
My neighbor brought me a favorite CD to listen to. It turned out to be an old symphony performance that had been transferred, in some unknowable past, from a 78 rpm vinyl record. You could hear the needle hitting dust. The loud parts were distorted by clipping. Ahh, here was a challenge. The disk was simply labeled "Concierto de Aranjuez, Joaquin Rodrigo." It needed my help and I was just the right guy for the job. Read more...

Outsourcing to an off-shore contractor
Several weeks ago, I accepted a job from an instructional media developer in Mumbai, India. He said that he had 2.5 hours of recording that needed to have background noise removed. He even provided a brief sample clip of audio. Easy peasy. I bit. It turned out that the audio was actually embedded in 23 separate video files. Whatcha gonna do? Read more...


Offer new services to existing clients - Instructional media
I have been doing some volunteer transcribing for IntegralLife.com a favorite organization that promotes the work of one of the world's great philosophical theorists. In appreciation, they offered to enroll me in one of their new courses. But, the opening words of the opening module caught my attention. I said to myself: "Self," I said, "You can make this sound better. Why don't you just have a go at it?" And so I did. Read more...

Alternating Samples
This section contains only "alternating samples" with minimum discussion. That is to say that each sample contains a series of phrases and each phrase is repeated once for before-and-after comparison. Read more...