colin richardson dolby trick

[Fragle]

hey guys,

i just stumbled upon this thread over at GS:

http://www.gearslutz.com/board/so-much-gear-so-little-time/59849-colin-richardson.html

well, to be honest i know next to nothing about surround stuff. anyone care to explain what they might be talking about here?

 

[Sinister Mephisto]

Dolby SR is not surround related. They're talking about using the noise reduction (made for tape) which is supposed to obviously, give you less noise. It works by encoding and decoding and when you encode it you add high frequency content, and when it's decoded it's taken away. The trick is to not decode it, leaving the extra high end "air" on your track. It's actually an old trick. As people were saying in the GS thread, it was used on background vocals etc.

By the way, my explanation of Dolby SR is pretty over simplified and I wouldn't try to understand it based on that. There's an in depth description here

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolby_noise_reduction_system

Cool trick! A little hard to really make sense of if you're not used to working with tape at all though.

 

[Fragle]

thanks, that was pretty clarifying

so, in order to replicate/try this, what kinda equipment would one need? are there any vst plugs that can do this, or is it an outboard only thing?

 

[beechstudio]

I remember reading where Mutt Lange used the dolby a units on Def Leppard vocals. Cool little trick...

 

[greyskull]

"it was mixed all wrong"
"you don't do heavy metal in Dubly do you?"