One of the simplest and most efficient ways to get rid of the pops, clicks, hums and rumbles found on old or mishandled vinyl recordings, and even audio cassettes that have been played once too many times, is by using a product called Ray Gun, a plug-in from Arboretum Systems. We tested it by processing a track from a 1970's copy of Claude Denjean's LP Moog!, complete with all the pops, clicks, hums and rumbles you could ever wish for)

1. Connected our standard issue turntable to our Mackie 1402VLZ mixer. (If you don't have a mixer, hook it up to you Hi-Fi and send the headphone output to the audio input on your computer).

2. Opened Hyper Engine (a free host application from Arboretum that runs Ray Gun and other plug-in's).

3. Opened a new Play-Thru document and recorded the audio signal coming from the deck (in this case Claude's synth version of Sugar, Sugar by Barry Kim). We could also have opened a pre-existing audio file, or recorded the signal from the deck using BIAS's Peak, but decided to run the whole process within Arboretum's environment.

4. Once the track was recorded we then opened Ray Gun, hit the Play button, and proceeded to mess around with the controls. Within seconds we found out that the Noise Reduction controls really worked, and by keeping the threshold slider on or around the blue line (0 dB), and moving the attenuation slider slowly down from the red line (0 dB), was soon able to slowly but surely start cancelling out the kind of surface noise that made people start looking for alternative recording and playback mediums.

5. After the ideal balance between noise removal and audio clarity was reached the file was saved.

From start to finish the whole process took about four minutes (including the time it took to record the cool synth version of Sugar, Sugar from vinyl).

We also used the Ray Gun plug-in while running Peak after recording a track from a very old Charlie Mingus compact cassette. What was interesting was the fact that the tape was originally made before noise reduction was invented, so they had to really saturate the tape. This meant very little actual high-end noise to get rid of but a lot of low end "rumble", which Ray Gun did a great job of reducing down to minimal levels.

Tip: After your recording is all nice and noise free you can then add neat and tidy digital pops and clicks to it by using SFX Machine from BIAS - if you want to.

For more information about this product visit our Manufacturers department for contact information.

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