Keygen | Audio Restoration Example: Orson Welles

This audio restoration examples uses tools found in iZotope RX7 (and some Waves and FabFilter plug-ins in Digital Performer). We show extreme examples of the restoration step-by-step—as it's more audible, and also to highlight the artifacts created—as well as the final output and a more moderate example.

Typically when restoring audio that is this damaged with noise, clicks and crackle, we prefer to do a more mild restoration that leaves some of the damage in a reduced (yet audible) state. Extreme reduction of this type of damage can cause a warbling effect in the audio that is typically undesirable. For mission-critical restorations, we would painstakingly go through the audio and manually draw out certain clicks, which is very time consuming, depending on the duration. Restoring audio with lots of noise will typically reduce the clarity and cause a loss in the mids and high end, so we added some post EQ to brighten it up slightly, while rolling off the very high end. As with all things of this nature, it will come down to what the audio is being used for and what the original condition of the recording is in.

There is also some loss in audio quality due to compression. We performed this restoration at 48Khz/32-bit float in WAV format.