Ask Moondog
A. Audio restoration is a wonderful way to preserve your priceless memories. Here are some ideas to inspire you:
- Preserve vintage recordings
- Create an historical perspective
- Contribute to the preservation of cultural rarities
- Preserve family history recordings (i.e. old reel to reels and cassettes)
- Immortalize "special occasion" tracks
- Record your son's or daughter's first recital
- Or just about anything!
A. We do a lot of this type of restoration. The first step is to delicately clean and inspect the record's surface. The correct playback needle is selected and the material is transferred to digital audio tape (DAT). The digital tracks are then transferred to the computer. This is where the restoration process begins in earnest and may include speed correction, scratch removal, elimination of clicks and pops, equalization, and "sweetening". Finally the tracks are output to a CD. We can also restore that beat-up old record jacket and create a CD cover and label for your new masterpiece.
A. Most Elvis recordings are already commercially available on CD and have already been cleaned and restored. It would not be cost-effective to reinvent the wheel. The rule of thumb here is: "If it exists on CD, buy it."
A. In most cases, yes. In some cases, cassette tape is so brittle or stretched that it won't play. Tape can be affected by age, storage conditions such as temperature or dust, and the original quality of the tape. But often we can create a master quality CD from an ordinary cassette through our sophisticated restoration techniques.
A. Assuming that you provide the songs, it would be billed at our hourly rate of $50/hour. The final price would depend on how many sources the audio comes from, as well as the number of songs being used.
A. Absolutely! (And congratulations!)
A. The name and logo of Moondog is in loving memory of Tank, our founder's old pet. Tank moved on to the dog park in the sky in 1997, but his love of music lives on!