"dave" wrote in message
...
Hello,
I am not sure if this is a good forum for this inquiry, or if one exists,
but here goes:
I am trying to play back a very old open-reel tape recording for a friend
of
mine. It has some home recordings of deceased family members, etc. So
basically I am trying to do audio archiving for him. I own several old
open
reel machines which generally have not seen much use to this point and I
am
certainly no expert on the format.
The problem I am having is that the audio in the track/tracks where the
voices are recorded has a severe 60 Hz hum over top of it. The hum is
very
even in amplitude and is so strong that it sounds like it is modulating
the
fairly faint voices underneath. I am recording to my computer and have
tried filtering the hum out with software but the audio is still garbled
from the strong 60 Hz signal. I am thinking that the head on the machine
that was used to record these voice tracks was aligned a little off to one
side or something like that and that I might be able to get a much cleaner
take if I were able to move the head on one of my machines to align better
with the track. I am not talking about azimuth angle but actual side to
side alignment. I am not sure if this even makes sense but it is the only
thing I could think of. If anybody has a better idea on this topic, I
would
be most appreciative hearing from you.
thanks,
Dave
The first thing to do is verify if the hum is actually part of the
recording. It might be coming from the playback. If there is no way to get a
cleaner take into your computer, then you might want to consider using a
more progressive noise reduction technique. There are some programs out
there that can analyze a section of the unwanted noise, from a part of the
recording that has no wanted signal. It can then use this noise signature to
remove the noise from the rest of the recording. This is not the same as
filtering out the hum.
James.
)