Muffled dictaphone recording

lukesmom

Does anyone know how to restore the sound of a dictaphone recording? If someone could point me in the right direction id appreciate it. I recorded a conversation last night of about 30-40 minutes and to my horror it's all muffled you can hear our voices but near impossible to work out what was said. It was recorded on a dictaphone with a little cassette.

Tactical

Dirty heads, damaged or worn tape, damaged dictaphone.

Have you a fresh unused tape to test with? Failing that, do you have a tape that plays well? If so, test with that.

Have a look at the head(s), do they look to have a dirty brown deposit on them? The rollers and pinchers should also be fairly clean, a large deposit of brown would indicate that cleaning would be in order.

I don't know that you'll be able to restore the recording. You might be able to clean it up a little but I wouldn't get too hopeful if it is really badly muffled.

Does the unit have a built in microphone or was it an external one? Did you do anything different to normal? I'm guessing you didn't undertake a short sound check before recording?

lukesmom

Tactical wrote: »

Dirty heads, damaged or worn tape, damaged dictaphone.

Have you a fresh unused tape to test with? Failing that, do you have a tape that plays well? If so, test with that.

Have a look at the head(s), do they look to have a dirty brown deposit on them? The rollers and pinchers should also be fairly clean, a large deposit of brown would indicate that cleaning would be in order.

I don't know that you'll be able to restore the recording. You might be able to clean it up a little but I wouldn't get too hopeful if it is really badly muffled.

Does the unit have a built in microphone or was it an external one? Did you do anything different to normal? I'm guessing you didn't undertake a short sound check before recording?

Hi it was a built in microphone. It's my dads dictaphone I got a loan of. Yes did a test just before and a bit muffled but not as bad. The fact that I had to hide the dictaphone from the person I was recording. I had it in my pocket, an open pocket with dictaphone upright speaker on top.

Tactical

It may very well be the positioning that may be at fault.

A Lavalier mic would have been ideal in the situation you have described, discrete and sensitive.

lukesmom

Are there people who can try and make it even a bit clearer I know I won't get it great but even an improvement would do


Edited to say its an olympusS500

Fuzzy Clam

If you can copy it to your PC, use the EQ settings in Winamp. Boost the midrange frequencies, say around 1 Khz and/or 3 Khz to amplify the vocals, and reduce the lower and higher frequencies to cut down on background noise and tape hiss.
Other than that , there's little that can be done.