We are equipped to restore nearly any grooved medium, from early Victrola records to home recordings to dictaphone discs. If it's round and has a hole in the middle - we can restore it. The earliest disc recordings were recorded without electricity, with the musicians in front of a large horn, and the "brute force" of the sound pressure cutting the groove. Electrical recordings were a vast improvement, and began around 1925. Though commonly called "shellacs", commercial 78's are actually made of a material similar to that used for radio knobs. Though the material itself is quite durable, the steel-needle "record eaters" of the day treated the groove brutally.

(Click above to see some acetate disc labels)

Popular in the 1940's and 1950's were the so-called "acetate" discs, replacing the previous method of making records at home, which was cylinders. They look like ordinary 78's, but have names like Recordio, Silvertone, Audiodisc, and so on. Most are aluminum-based, but glass was used during WW II when aluminum was in short supply, and many are even cardboard. They were made to be cheap and disposable, and 60 years later, these discs present many challenges to the restorationist, such as shrinkage, delamination, alligator surface, and so on. While the results may not always be spectacular, we can usually recover the voices from deteriorated acetates.

In this category are also the World War II "Voice Letters From Your Man In Service" put out by companies like Pepsi and Gem Razors. There are still quite a few of these around, and if they have been reasonably cared for over the years, they are usually restorable and the voice quality is fairly good.

Voice-O-Graph - You might have a "Voice-O-Graph" record. These are usually very poor. You had to be practically shouting into the microphone to get a decent recording from them, weak voices simply didn't get picked up. Compounding this problem is the fact that the owners of the machines did very little to maintain them, such as changing tubes or cutting needles. As long as the quarters kept coming in, they didn't care. Voice-O-Graph records are always "hit or miss". Sometimes we can restore the misses... sometimes we can't.

We do not try to achieve a dead-silent background with source material that is inherently poor and noisy, such as paper records. While a silent background can be initially impressive, the cost is too high in terms of digital artifacts and loss of signal. We will always remove as much undesirable noise as is possible with today's technology, but will never push that technology to the point where it will harm the original content of the recording. We feel that a natural-sounding voice with a small amount of background noise is preferable to a quiet background with a voice that sounds like a bad cell phone.

Click here to hear an example of a truly bad restoration. In his mania for total silence, this "restorationist" has completely destroyed the original recording. Note the swirly digital artifacts, the pumping, the overall "canned" sound, and how his "restoration" has completely obscured the softly-spoken passage. Those words are gone forever. And all that's left is that garbled mess.

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