About Us

We are dedicated to restoring, archiving and caring for Hi-Resolution Audio, including the damage caused by errant mastering.

 

Years ago, Hi-Fi was rather simple, you got yourself a good record deck/cartridge/amplifier/speaker combination; got yourself some good vinyl records out and just listened.

 

If you were like me, the shortness of vinyl infuriated, and because of this I often recorded my albums onto reel to reel (R2R) tape. There, my fondness for R2R grew, as I always felt that the medium, showed a tightness and control, that, frankly just was not there to be found on the cheaper record deck.

 

Then along came digital. Some early digital recordings sound incredible and the odd coding of the early systems by Mitsubishi (X80), the 3M Digital Mastering System and of course the Sony PCM-F1, often added a flavour to the recording.

 

After that then came CD, which to me never sounded quite right and I must have bought at least a dozen players, trying to improve that sound.

 

My best results, perhaps, were obtained when I transferred some albums on CD to tape, which gave a more involved sound.

 

Now time for the birth of DVD-Audio (DVD-A) and in parallel SACD, which gave us genuine high quality sound, pushing the tentative boundary of the Redbook (CD) 44KHz sampling rate and 16 bit coding.

​

Here Comes the Loudness Noise Wars

​

In the decade ending 2010 we witnessed the gradual use of dynamic compression, getting to the point that music was unlistenable, unless it was played back on a mini speaker. Dynamic Compression basically makes the difference between the quietest and the loudest parts of the music reduced to as low as possible.

 

Now many people are very pleased with pure uncompressed CD. However, some of us are not - I started to notice severe limitations when I transferred R2R tapes and without a debate (because I have had a few) the biggest compromise in sound is the flat harmonics and plain boring sound. This, I feel may be due to the audio frequencies modulated by out of band frequencies that are basically filtered out.

It is this concept that made me want to develop a way that could make my abundant CD collection listenable once again.

 

So here's the crux of why we are here:

 

We have found a way to take out some of the dynamic compression caused by Look Ahead Compressor limiters. Coupled with this I was steered in a direction to upsample and upscale Redbook CDs which appears to rebuild in the harmonics lost by the original filters.

I will show the results in the following sections.

Lokkerman 2022