Topic: Drop-Outs On LH Channel - Best Way Forward?

[jamroom]

As documented elsewhere, my R09 has succumbed to the input jack lifting from the board. My Sabbath Assembly and Earth recordings have generally turned out well, with relatively limited, but still really obvious noise and silent drop-outs throughout the recording, though mainly interference noise. On the Sabbath Assembly recording, it happens in about a dozen places for relatively short bursts. The Earth recording is roughly the same - i.e. there are whole songs not affected by the noise. So...

What is the best way of dealing with this? If it had been a complete disaster on the LH channel, the easy answer would be to copy the RH channel and paste it over the LH channel to make a mono recording. Would copying very short passages from the RH channel just to repair the damaged sections be worth doing? In your experience, does this become too obvious during playback, over just making the whole thing a mono recording?

Obviously I can experiment myself, but I value the experience on this forum.

[yousef]

My first thought would be to copy chunks of the good right channel and then patch them into the left using nice long crossfades going in and out so that the transition from stereo to mono (and back again) is more subtle and less jarring.

I think a song with, say, a minute of smoothly incorporated mono would be preferable to hearing the whole song in mono or having lots of very short patches.

I have had a lot of success with long crossfades (ie 10s or more) hiding the transition between different sources - not sure if it would work as well in this context but I'd definitely give it a try.

You've got me worrying about my R09 now... I thought I was safe given how long it's lasted but perhaps I should crack it open and fill it with epoxy...

[jamroom]

Ha - yeah, I thought mine was bulletproof and I take care of it too... I think anyone with an R09 should epoxy them now - before the worst happens. At least I can recover this due to the RH channel being unaffected.

Having had another listen to some of it, not all the noise is spiking to 0db, so I'll need to carefully listen through and note where all the problems are. I did have a look at the files and noticed that in one case there are three or four together within a six minute section, so that would need a more lengthy crossfade. Some are only momentary (less than 0.05 seconds). I'm going to need to take some time on this one, so will probably shelve it for a little while until I can pay close attention to it. Thanks for the tip.