What's So Special About "Special"?

If you have a particular need for digitisation of audio or photography content that isn't covered by our standard service descriptions, then this is the place for you!

Our specialist services are designed to assist with specific audio recording enhancements, such as editing of particularly old or damaged recordings. We are also able to provide very specialised graphical editing facilities, including photo restoration (tears and holes).

The results can be provided in almost any computer-readable format (CD or DVD filesystem). If you have a specific requirement for linear analogue presentation, please get in touch with us.

Special means OLD!

We can usually assist in recovering audio recorded on almost any type of media. We can help to recover material from wax cylinder, wire spool, and other recordings, but in most cases, we will need to work with an accredited authority, as recordings made on these types of equipment are incredibly rare and of significant cultural importance. And we don't want to  risk such recordings, even with our equipment and expertise.

Special means BROKEN!

We offer the most sophisticated and detailed recovery and conversion of all types of damaged recordings.

Specifically, LPs that are cracked, flaked, smashed, melted, warped, buckled, stretched, covered in mould or fungus, pitted or worn, tapes with splitting substrates, broken, stuck together, mouldy, mildewed, burned, or cut can usually be recovered without too much difficulty.

Although we can easily handle these kinds of damaged recordings, the work involved is extremely labour-intensive and needs a very delicate touch, so these types of recordings will incur a minimum handling charge of $75.00. This covers examination, any mechanical work (reheating/annealing, leveling, stretching, straightening, re-rounding, or tensioning), and recording (digitisation) of the material.

At that point, we will work with you to identify which tracks you require to be recovered. Any tracks that are damaged will be recovered and repaired to the very best of our ability, for a per-track cost of $35.00. This charge is necessary to cover our time and expertise, as even mildly damaged tracks can take up to a day to repair, and badly damaged recordings can take even longer.

However : we do not, and will not, charge any additional fee for tracks on the recording that are in more or less playable condition. So if only 2 tracks on either side of a melted LP are damaged, but all the rest of the tracks are playable and require only minimal work, we will only charge a maximum of $215.00 for the entire LP.

Naturally, there are some abuses that we can't recover anything legible from, and in those cases, we will only charge the basic fee for the recording, and will provide all the audio material that we can at the stated rates - and if the remaining tracks are essentially undamaged, that means we'll only ever charge $75.00

While we can and often do work magic on such recordings, we don't ever guarantee that all material will be in any legible condition. In most cases, we can extract recordings that sound like a radio tuned off-station, but it's rare (especially with heat damage) that legible audio is left on the album. But rest assured we will do everything in our power to recover as much material as we can, with as little manipulation of the recording as possible.

Since we use contact reproduction (not laser-tracked turntables, which can't track badly warped or stretched recordings anyway!), this is the main limitation on what we can successfully recover for you.

Special means pretty much "Anything"!

For better quality recordings, we can significantly reduce or eliminate background noise from ANY such recording - traffic noise, white noise, music, voices, pure tones or complex noises. This can be broad-spectrum, frequency-limited (any number of bandwidths and start/end frequencies), or simple or complex Butterworth/Bessel filtered (any Q factor). We can discard the noise or provide it to you for further processing.

We can extract and enhance foreground audio, background audio, and frequency- and/or channel-specific bands.

Recordings can be manually and/or statistically analysed for pattern repetition, frequency usage, noise occurrence, and ambient (directional) locus.

Samples can be rearranged, inverted, zero-balanced, compressed (both dynamic range and spatial compression are available, and spatial compression can preserve the frequency (pitch) or tempo (beat ) or neither), swapped, and spatially moved around in 3 dimensions.

All the usual chamber and reverb options are available, with full definition of individual reverb and spatial positioning to millimetre echo  accuracy if needed.

Channels can be swapped, subtracted, or added as new material or preferentially replacing existing audio.

We can even take monaural recordings of any type and "spatialise" them to sound like broadcast-quality stereo! In some cases (depending on the audio material, of course), we can "move" individual instruments around in the stereo field. So nothing is impossible!

Manual Editing

We can manipulate recordings to sub-millisecond (or micro-second) accuracy. Of course, this level of expertise requires significant time and effort, so it is not covered by our more general services. As an example, a typical 3 minute recording that's badly damaged can take upwards of 10-15 hours to restore, and this can cost up to $75 per minute of resulting recording.

Formats Supported

Please refer to our Supported Hardware and Software section for a description of the more usual recording media and audio encoding formats we handle. However, we are able to cater to any specific codec if you can supply the Intel binary codec. Alternatively, we can 'bit-bang' any binary format (big- or little-endian), including floating-point and specific integral formats.

Enquiries

Please use the form below to describe your needs as specifically as possible, and we'll get in touch with you to discuss your options. (We understand that for legal and other reasons, you may be unable or unwilling to describe specifics in this form. That's not a problem, just tell us what you can, and we'll discuss the rest person-to-person)

All enquiries are kept in the strictest confidence. However, note that we do require a valid name and email address before we will consider your request. If you don't have an email address that you can give out, please use "engineering@audiography.com.au" and indicate your preferred contact method and time, and our support staff will take the appropriate action to get in touch with you.

Send mail to Webmaster@audiography.com.au with questions or comments about this web site, or use our Contact form to report any issues.

Our street (postal) address is:

20 Churinga Avenue,

Mitcham.

Victoria.         3132

Phone Details:

Copyright © 2005-2008 Audiography
Last modified: 01-Nov-2008

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