First, alternative sources are available for a lot of vintage stuff. I have three or four CD versions of the exact same recording of Ellington's "Jack the Bear." Each of them were mastered differently and sound noticeably different. Incidentally, the "cleanest" version (Dreyfus) is not the most common and mass-marketed one; it is the least-common one.Haydn wrote:But if every available CD release of a track has too much background noise, where do you find a better source?Lawrence wrote:I would default to finding a better source in lieu of fixing a poor quality source.
Second, if you cannot find another source, then find another song. I have several awesome bootleg recordings that I would never play. It is not as if there is a shortage of good music that is recorded well. All the filters I have heard or used that siphon out hiss within the frequency range of the recording end up compromising sound quality and losing even more of the material. Unless you are a sound engineer with the expensive tools and time to manually remaster the recording, you just are not going to get the result you want with an automatic-setting software program.
So as to not be a complete Debbie Downer, there are two possibilities for how the hiss got there that might allow you to simply use a graphic equalizer to eliminate them.
First, most vintage music gurus advise that you play 78s using a cartridge (needle and its housing) with a more limited frequency response than the current industry standard. We have discussed the reason elsewhere: because the only thing in those higher and lower ranges of 78 vintage recordings is hiss and noise. Playing 78s on a modern turntable designed to play stereo hi-fi LPs often results in hiss and static noise in the upper and lower frequencies beyond the range of the vintage recording. (Ironically, playing a 78 on a "worse" record player will sound better.) There thus is a possibility that the CD recording came from a 78 that had a limited frequency range but was played back with a needle/cartridge that had a broader frequency range, resulting in the hiss.
Second, the source for the CD might not be a 78, directly, but an analog tape of a 78 that added "tape hiss." This hiss is normally in higher frequency ranges: "Dolby" sound mostly reduces the high frequency ranges to reduce the tape hiss. (It is more complicated than that, but that is the gist). Tape hiss is not just isolated in the upper frequencies and probably carry over into the frequencies of the vintage recording, but they are primarily in the upper range.
Thus, the hiss might be in a frequency range beyond that of the recorded music. You might be able to just isolate and eliminate the hiss by simply using a graphic equalizer. A treble adjustment would not be fine-tuned enough because it reduces all frequencies in the high range instead of isolated specific ranges; you need an equalizer with as many channels (knobs) as possible.
That said, any editing of the frequency within which the music is recorded will compromise the sound quality.