[Trevor]

On 3/01/2017 7:32 AM, Adrian Tuddenham wrote:
Digital de-clicking is much over-rated. In skilled hands it can
sometimes produce good results if it is used with a light touch, but
more usually the results sound absolutely horrible.

Ted Kendall's "Mousetrap" used some ideas in common with the Packburn,
but worked much better. It was far superior in its engineering and also
offered a much greater range of equalisation curves for records made
before RIAA standardisation. They were made to special order and
secondhand ones still command high prices.

My own design of analogue declicker works in real time and can be
'driven' manually to cope with rapidly-changing damage to archival
discs. This makes digitising a much faster and more accurate process
than continual iteration with clunky menu-driven software.


The Garrard and SAE boxes were never in the same league with the Packburn and
aren't of much use today. However, they were part of that revolution that
happened back in the seventies and there might be some demand from a museum
for the things. You might try contacting the Audio History Library, they are
likely to take it as a donation and get you a tax break.

The Philips/Marrantz de-clicker had a superb algorithm for detecting
damage and noise, far superior to any other digital de-clicker I have
tested. Unfortunately the designer seems to have 'run out of steam'
after that, because having detected the noise, the processor doesn't
seen to have a clue what to do with it and replaces each click with an
audible 'bloop'. This is immensely frustrating because it has the
potential to be a really brilliant de-clicker - but isn't.



Weird post. You dismiss digital de-clicking as much over rated without
considering the myriad of algorithms/software solutions available that
work with a huge range of success depending on operator, yet go into
greater detail of the relatively few analog solutions that were
available, and all being poor compared to the best digital solutions
available now. IME *ANY* real time system is doomed to failure, but a
two or 3 stage digital process has a chance when coupled with an
intelligent operator. The best de-clicking though is manual editing in a
DAW, by far the best method with relatively few clicks IMO.

Frankly I'd never digitise with the output of *any* processor without
saving a non processed file first.

Trevor.