Brass protection and mised clicks

[Frank Schabel]

I have been recording and cleaning up some very old LPs of some Mahler symphonies. These LPs sound good even though almost 60 years old. I used the vinyl with  in good condition algorithm and when scanning started with the defaults with brass and percussion protection on. The scan found many thousands of clicks but left many thousands of larger, clearly audible clicks, many more than any reasonable person would tackle with individual click removal. If I re-scan with brass protection off almost all of these clicks are found. There is a lot of brass in Mahler and I don't want to damage it more than necessary. My hearing is not that good (hearing aids on music setting) and I was never a super critical listener, but the brass sounds fine to me. I really don't want to spend much effort doing manual correcting since these Mahler recordings are are available on mp3 for pennies or CD for a few dollars. Is there a better technique to try or just continue to use defaults with brass protection off?

[Paul Sanders (AlpineSoft)]

Hi,

I'd just leave it off.  Some brass sounds (sax, trombone, synth sometimes) can be badly damaged by VinylStudio's click scanner, but other instruments tend to be less affected.

You might be losing a little 'brightness', but if you can't hear it then it really doesn't matter.  More of a problem is audible distortion, but, again, if you're not hearing that then there's nothing to worry about.

[Frank Schabel]

I appreciate your input. Out of curiosity I want back and examined a small selection in more detail. I found many instances where there is a click like spike that effects both tracks, which I think is a very good indicator of physical damage, where the spike in one track is treated as a click and the spike in the other track is given brass protection. In the 50 or so brass protections I examined I didn't find any that appeared to represent an attack on a brass instrument. Perhaps you need to implement a sensitivity scale in the brass protection like in clicks and percussion. The default seems to be too sensitive in marking something brass protection.

[Paul Sanders (AlpineSoft)]

Yes, possibly.  Noted, thanks.