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At Malone Digital, we seamlessly blend authenticity with precision.
We produce sound that is faithful to its analog heritage yet leverages the exactness of digital technology. In doing so, our audio archaeologists reveal the rich qualities that made historical recordings special and combine them with 21st century reproduction. In short, it's the best that both worlds offer.
If this sounds like what you are striving for, you have come to the right place.
Perhaps counter-intuitively, it is probably more about what we don't do rather than what we could do. We don't use anything particularly fancy to achieve our goals. Instead, the most powerful instruments in our toolbox are our ears and respect of history. Starting with those, everything else neatly locks into place. The result is plush, warm, and dynamic sound freed from blemishes and ready for digital consumption.
What Malone Digital can do for you:
- Restoration of degraded audio signal (analog or digital drop-outs, impaired signal, loss of fidelity through wear, etc).
- Careful removal of musicians' bumps, clicks, pops, and other non-musical sounds.
- Declicking and decrackling of audio sourced from vinyl, acetate (lacquer) discs, or wax cylinders.
- ‘Unpotting’ of audio derived from dialogue, music, and effects (D/M/E) elements to undo and reverse up-and-down volume changes built into source material.
- Pitch adjustments (for audio recorded or reproduced at an incorrect speed).
- Correction of azimuth (group delay time alignment) errors.
- Minimisation of 'wow' and 'flutter' (speed irregularities manifesting as pitch oscillations caused by uneven media shrinkage, eccentricity, or mechanical error).
- Mix-down of multi-track material to two-track stereo for CD, vinyl LP record, or digital (iTunes, Spotify, etc.) release.
- Recreation of historical commercial stereo (or mono) mixes from multi-track material by respecting original engineering intentions.
- Editing and sequencing of programme material.
- Mastering activities inclusive of equalisation, leveling, dynamics processing, and track spacing. Preparation of DDPs for CD plant replication or file-sets for vinyl LP record pressing. (DDPs are fully manufacturing ready and can include ISRC System and UPC codes as well as CD text.)
Several of the latest tools from trusted companies—including iZotope, CEDAR, Sony, and DMG Audio—together with proprietary hand-crafted techniques and software are used to perform this exacting work.
Malone Digital has a particular focus on working with mono, two, three, and four-track source materials from the 1940s through the 1970s.
What Malone Digital will not do for you:
- Heavy handed digital noise reduction. We try and avoid it. Sometimes noise reduction will help a recording better connect with its audience, so we may conservatively dial some in. But we're carefully comparing against the original to make sure those minuscule musical moments aren't killed off. Any use of digital noise reduction weighs heavily on our minds.
- Grotesque dynamics processing via peak limiting or compression. We don't smash recordings. We want you to hear dynamics the performers and engineers worked hard to reproduce. And your volume knob is yours. Squashing things is work for steamrollers.
- Pierce your eardrums with overbearing treble. You don't watch TV with the brightness turned to the max so why let someone do this to your music? You don't need to be deafened and fooled by all that fake sizzly high-end. We want instruments to sound real. We want your ears (and ours!) to last a lifetime appreciating that realism.
- Jack up the bass to make something sound 'modern.' We know that bass wasn't necessarily captured properly with old equipment. So, we want a rock solid foundation, but not everything is meant to register on the Richter Scale.
We work with Customers around the world. We don’t mind if you’re as far north as Anchorage in Alaska or as far south as Alto Río Senguer in Argentina, the magic of the Internet allows us to collaborate no matter where you are!
Now, let's talk about what Malone Digital will bring to your exciting project!
You can also view our general availability (subject to some potential variations) by viewing our Shared Calendar.