Creating Lo-Fi from digital recordings.

The first segment of our 14minute radio broadcast is intended to be distinctly low fidelity. I had the perfect device to achieve this – my Tascam Portastudio. Slamming onto tape would both create saturation and also compress the audio to remove peaks. I also had a trick up my sleeve; the 414 MKII Portastudio comes with in-build dynamic DBX noise reduction. Recording with this turned on encodes your audio with the features of the noise reduction – notably, a dynamic boost of the high frequencies onto tape, which, when played back with the exact opposite settings, results in the same clean recording with distinctly less noise. However, if played back without the noise reduction turned on, the audio is audibly thinner, brighter and weaker, with strange compression artifacts. Cutting the high frequencies as well as all of this gives a weird, hollow sound that I utilised along with the distortion to create the low fidelity effect for section A.

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