Making Old Sound Recordings Audible Again

orgelspieler writes "NPR is running a story on a safe way to reproduce sound from ancient phonographs that would otherwise be unplayable. The system, called IRENE, was installed in the Library of Congress last year. It can be used to replay records that are scratched, worn, broken, or just too fragile to play with a needle. It scans the groves optically and processes them into a sound file at speeds approaching real time. IRENE is great at removing pops and skips, but can add some hiss. Researchers are also working on a 3D model that is better at removing hiss."

Not your grandfather's Hi-Fi

[Nuffsaid]

IRENE is great at removing pops and skips, but can add some hiss

Can add some hiss to what? To the perfect Hi-Fi quality you are expected to get out of a century old phonograph?

NPR on /., again?

[aethera]

Now I know that my local NPR station [wuky.org] is skewing towards a younger market. Heck, they dropped the classical years ago and play a decent mix of non-mainstream, non-corporate, though I wouldn't go so far as to say indie rock during the day. But when I started reading on slashdot regularly ten ( 10!) years ago I would have never expected the relatively common recurrence of NPR articles making the front page. Are we all getting that old, or am I just getting old enough to notice it?

No offense to some of the bright high school students and undergrads who comment here...you're appreciated, sometimes for you're youthful naivety, but appreciated nonetheless.

Re:Yawn

[semiotec]

and some guy also tried it years ago with just commercial scanners (http://www.cs.huji.ac.il/~springer/), although the results weren't that great, but at least it's a proof of the concept.

Re:NPR on /., again?

[Planesdragon]

It just sticks with liberals, and leaves the majority of Americans out in the cold.

You do realize that the majority of Americans identify the speaker as a right-wing nut whenever they hear someone called a "liberal", right?

"Conservatives" -- that is, the vocal right -- are as much a minority as "liberals" -- that is, the vocal left. Most Americans just wish we'd all shut up and spend half as much time improving the country as we do fighting with each other.

(It's really, REALLY easy to get a majority when you make the other minority look crazy.)

Re:NPR on /., again?

[bdjacobson]

Dude, I was enjoying some Chemical Brothers on NPR last sunday. I though I tuned to the MSU student radio station but noticed that I was on the Statewide NPR station (they transmit on 4 different frequencies at incredibly high power to cover almost all of lower michigan).

They also played some newer Information Society and then finished with some DonJuan Dracula before they broke.

I was freaked to hear some really progressive music played on NPR. They either must be desperate to attract new listeners or don't care they will turn off the old farts who grimace at hearing that "pounding hippy music"

I applaud them for this.

There's a time when you stop listening to music to feel and start listening for entertainment. At this same point, you realize most of the MTV music sucks.

When your motivation for listening to the music is entertainment, I would define that as simply searching for something new...a new outlook on the old chord progressions, if you will. Or out of the ordinary chord progressions, etc.

Hence again NPR caters to the intellectual type. First they did it with Classical music, now they do it with anything different that they think will catch an inquisitive listener (and therefor thinker).