Concert Audio Distortion- reduce to better than average

June 28, 2006 6:41 PM

Live Concert footage recorded w/Casio exilim 7.2 meg. Audio is on a scale(1-10) 7-8 distorted. I can extract from source. I have roxio 8 and demo of sony-vegas. Is it possible to reduce distortion at least enough to be decent. 3-4 (or better ) on the same scale? Any suggestions or comments would be greatly appreciated. Will trade for said footage. The band is Mutemath, and Vedera.
posted by proph8 to Computers & Internet (3 answers total)

Best answer: Distortion introduces loss into an audio signal, I kind of doubt you're going to have a lot of luck cleaning it up. Most kinds of distortion you'll get in cases like these is "clipping", where the signal is higher in some places than the recording device can handle. Say the recording device can record from 0 to 10 "units" and not worry too much right now what those units are. Anything that is greater than a "10" will get recorded as a 10. So imagine a signal you're recording that goes
0 4 8 12 16 12 8 4 0
by the time it's recorded it's going to be
0 4 8 10 10 10 8 4 0
There is no way, looking at the recorded version, to know what the tens "should" be.

This is sort of a gross simplification, but I think probably accurate enough.
posted by RustyBrooks at 7:50 PM on June 28, 2006

you may be able to have some limited success at making the recording at least a little bit more palatable with the tools you describe above. that can be a fun pursuit in and of itself, and you'd be no worse off for trying.

my advice however, would be to learn to love the noise, if at all possible.
posted by puddles at 8:18 PM on June 28, 2006

I'd make friends with the kids carrying minidisks with pole-mounted capsule antennas... I had a friend that spent every summer during college following Phish around with $3000+ equipment... He'd upload recordings to web sites twice a week from whatever university was nearby and he could find people to bribe with a copy of the concert...

Anyways, they got the hook ups, and most of their equipment will have a pass-through, so you can even plug into their system and record through their mics.
posted by hatsix at 10:09 PM on June 28, 2006