Restoration and Preservation of Analog Recordings
The scope of each restoration project varies widely based on the condition and quality of the source material. Contact me for a custom quote if you have a project in mind. A simple noise reduction might cost $10 per song, while manually removing extensive pops, clicks and dropouts might cost $50 per song.
I am willing to attempt the most challenging of projects. I have extensive experience in tape handling, repair, splicing, and machine playback calibration. I am also an expert with iZotope RX restoration software.
When the audio is sufficiently restored, we can proceed with mastering.
Flat transfers of tapes and records to digital are billed at $1.00 per minute of runtime. Tape repair, baking, splicing, record cleaning etc, is an additional charge, and is quoted on a per-case basis.
1/4” and 1/2” reel to reel tapes at 15 or 30 IPS are handled with a Studer A80 MK1 tape machine. I have a complete set of rollers, heads, and repro cards for each tape size. 7” and 10” diameter reels are both accepted.
Cassette tapes are handled with a Sony TC-K700ES cassette deck. This cassette deck is among the finest designs ever manufactured. I will adjust the playback head azimuth to match your source tape in order to ensure the best possible result (see photo). This is a critical and often overlooked step that should be taken with every important cassette transfer.
Vinyl transfers are done with a Technics SL-1300MK2 turntable fitted with a Denon DL103 cartridge into a Hafler PH60 MC phono preamp. For 78 RPM records a Stanton 500 series cartridge equipped with a 78-specific stylus is fed into a MM preamp. 16” records are transferred with the lathe turntable.
"The only thing that rivals the technical skillset of Gus Elg is the care and consideration he puts into his work. As a label, we have worked with Gus exclusively on each release. His capacity to bring a scuzzy track out of its depths and transform it into something that is exciting to listen to is remarkable. His strengths go beyond just mastering but also tape preservation, lacquer cutting, mixing, and more. After over a decade of working with Gus, it is easy to be his cheerleader as he leads with kindness, and with a reverence for the music and those who made it."
-Bobby Smith, Archivist, Producer & co-founder, Albina Music Trust
Slickaphonic - Audio Restoration and Mastering
This is an example where good sounding and well preserved reel to reel tapes from 1975 were released on vinyl - a best case scenario. Tape transfers to digital were nicely handled by Dave Fulton, and I was given digital files to work from. The songs barely required any restoration, but they sounded thin and needed full mastering.
Transport - Disco Fantasy Land - Cassette rescue
This record’s source material was a cassette with broken, crumpled and heat damaged tape. I removed the tape from its shell, physically flattened the crumples, spliced it in several places and placed it in a new shell. Then I transferred it to digital and fixed several hundreds of dropouts with extensive spectral editing. The result is not hi-fi (the treble still wavers) but the songs come through, and it was worth the effort. The “before” sample chosen here is a particularly extreme example - at first I didn’t think this would be usable at all.
Youthsound - Cassette restoration and remix
The source cassettes for this release were soundboard recordings from a live concert in 1982. The tapes were physically fine, but the mix was quite unusual - most of the instruments were panned left and most of the vocals panned right. I created a 4-track mix by extracting the mono left and right channels and layering them on top of the original stereo mix. This allowed me to make the stereo image more conventional without simply folding towards mono.