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Old 2005-08-06, 08:14 PM
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guygee guygee is offline
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Join Date: Feb 2005
Location: Astro Intergalactic Infinity
Re: An urgent message about digital noise reduction

I am not sure what the difference is between "amateurs who warezed" and amateurs who buy, but if the term amateur simply means inexperienced, then what better way to train your ears than to buy or otherwise obtain one of these software packages, and try for yourself the different settings and listen to the results. I think it is great if as many people as possible have access to these tools, they will make mistakes, but over time their ears will become trained to hear the artifacts they produce, and we all will benefit. I know that is how it happened with me, going all the way back (don't laugh) to the day I downloaded "wavclean", cranked up the settings, and heard all the weird sounds pouring forth. From the experience of trying different NR and other sound editing tools, now I can easily hear the artifacts in other recordings, including on many of the overly-revered "Silver CDs" that get passed around.

I can also hear them in some of my own struggles to remaster high-gen analog sources, but when I compare to the raw source, it was just a matter of, shall we say, "Polishing the coprolite".

Now when it comes to inexperienced people actually seeding their nifty new "remasters", 1) If the original version is already circulating, who cares? Take a chance on downloading or not. Reputations are built on the quality of the seeds, and bad versions will end up in that proverbial dustbin, 2) If the seeder A/D'ed from an analog source, or from a rare/uncirculating digital source, and applied NR processing, then I think it would be fair if the seeder would offer, upon request, to distribute the raw source in the original form (hopefully 24 bit/high sampling rate) to any person claiming the experience to do a better job, or to anyone offering to archive the files on a publicly accessible site.

Last edited by guygee; 2005-08-06 at 08:20 PM.
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