SF 6 and NR 2 vs. Steinberg Clean! plus 2.0 -Sound Forge - PC

Subject:SF 6 and NR 2 vs. Steinberg Clean! plus 2.0 Posted by: RiRo Date:10/21/2002 11:14:15 PM Having taken on a freebie to restore tons of old vinyl for the heritage foundation of a religious organization I belong to, I have learned a thing or two about vinyl and the process of making it sound good on CD. In the process, I purchased the Clean! plus package on the recommendation of a friend who operates a professional studio. He had never heard of NR2, and had used Sound Forge on a project a long time ago, but did not know Sonic Foundry made other products. Sigh... So I hooked up the little preamp that comes with the product, and instantly hated what I saw. Hooking it up into the SB card had a noise floor at about -20 db. Not workable at all. So I put the input into the Echo Gina, and dropped the noise floor (this is with the turntable not even running) dropped to -48. Wow. What a difference a real sound card makes. Next, I used the Clean! product to record and record. Then I used its automated tools to remove noise.. etc. It took over an hour to do this process. I then listened to the resulting files, and was very disappointed. The file was still quite noisy, and lifeless. The process did no favors for the ancient vinyl. I had not used the NR / SF combo for this because I didn't have a preamp, so since I had the pre, I figured it wouldn't hurt to try NR/SF. Recorded as before. Ran the preset vinyl restoration. Took about 10 minutes. I listened. Sounded way less noisy, and the file had some life to it! I played with the click / pop removal tool, and noise reduction, and had the file quite clean, and alive in less time than the Clean! plus process. After tweaking my process a little, I can record, clean, normalize and burn the CD quicker than just the noise reduction phase of Clean Plus. And the sound is wonderful! I had to whip out a couple CDs to my friend with the studio so he could hear the difference. He was stunned. So he used Sound Forge 6.0 and Noise Reduction to prework the multi-tracks from a live recording gig he did. I think the man is in love with the products. So the other day he says I should be using Wavelab 4.5 to burn my CDs. So I gave him a link to CDA5.0 Beta... RiRo
Subject:RE: SF 6 and NR 2 vs. Steinberg Clean! plus 2.0 Reply by: Jacose Date:10/24/2002 2:27:22 PM The sonic foundry noise reduction is quite good, actually better than most, but I find that using waves restoration bundle, (Although VERY expensive) yeilds best results with the least effort.
Subject:RE: SF 6 and NR 2 vs. Steinberg Clean! plus 2.0 Reply by: Rednroll Date:10/25/2002 10:23:00 AM Yeah, I have a copy of Clean v1.0. Used it once and put it on a shelf in my DX folders and never touched it again. I never used the new waves noise reduction, but I have to say the Sonic Foundry noise reduction is the best I've ever used thus far and I am tending to stick with it. Wavelabs CD montage is not the most user friendly CD application, but I suppose if I spent more time with it, I could achieve the results I wanted.....but I rather just use CD architect or better yet Vegas now. Vegas gives you the multitrack ability which Wavelab does, but is a true multitrack unlike Wavelab.

Having taken on a freebie to restore tons of old vinyl for the heritage foundation of a religious organization I belong to, I have learned a thing or two about vinyl and the process of making it sound good on CD. In the process, I purchased the Clean! plus package on the recommendation of a friend who operates a professional studio. He had never heard of NR2, and had used Sound Forge on a project a long time ago, but did not know Sonic Foundry made other products. Sigh...

So I hooked up the little preamp that comes with the product, and instantly hated what I saw. Hooking it up into the SB card had a noise floor at about -20 db. Not workable at all. So I put the input into the Echo Gina, and dropped the noise floor (this is with the turntable not even running) dropped to -48. Wow. What a difference a real sound card makes.

Next, I used the Clean! product to record and record. Then I used its automated tools to remove noise.. etc. It took over an hour to do this process. I then listened to the resulting files, and was very disappointed. The file was still quite noisy, and lifeless. The process did no favors for the ancient vinyl.

I had not used the NR / SF combo for this because I didn't have a preamp, so since I had the pre, I figured it wouldn't hurt to try NR/SF. Recorded as before. Ran the preset vinyl restoration. Took about 10 minutes. I listened. Sounded way less noisy, and the file had some life to it! I played with the click / pop removal tool, and noise reduction, and had the file quite clean, and alive in less time than the Clean! plus process. After tweaking my process a little, I can record, clean, normalize and burn the CD quicker than just the noise reduction phase of Clean Plus. And the sound is wonderful!

I had to whip out a couple CDs to my friend with the studio so he could hear the difference. He was stunned. So he used Sound Forge 6.0 and Noise Reduction to prework the multi-tracks from a live recording gig he did. I think the man is in love with the products.

So the other day he says I should be using Wavelab 4.5 to burn my CDs. So I gave him a link to CDA5.0 Beta...

RiRo