Ted Kendall rescues The Goons using CEDAR Declip
8 February 2016
BBC Worldwide, now in partnership with Penguin Random House, has for some years been issuing boxed sets of the pioneering radio comedy, The Goon Show, restored by long-time CEDAR user, Ted Kendall.
Alongside the original shows, meticulously remastered by Kendall, The Goon Show Compendium also includes incidental material including a 1975 edition of Robbie Vincent's phone-in programme, Late Night London. This is of considerable value because it was one of the last times that the Goons were heard together. The programme didn't exist in the BBC archives, nor did Vincent keep a tape of it, so Kendall scoured the collector community for amateur recordings and eventually found enough material to reconstruct it. Inevitably, much of the found material was of poor audio quality, with heavy over-modulation (clipping) of many of the tapes. It was here that CEDAR DeClip came to the rescue.
"It was a strain to listen to much of this material", says Kendall, "and it would have been intolerable to try to listen to it for the duration of a whole CD. However, having used DeClip in the past on a forensic case (where it made a dreadfully overloaded voice recording intelligible) I had every confidence that it would improve matters considerably. I wasn't disappointed."
Discarding the unusable audio (which often proved to be most of the original signal) the Declip process reconstructed the waveform from what was left, and Kendall was able to obtain a substantial improvement in both intelligibililty and listenability. "It made the difference between a signal where all you heard was the distortion, and one where the programme material was enjoyable and any residual problems were sometimes noticeable but not annoying. This was a remarkable result, one which would have been difficult or more likely impossible to achieve without CEDAR DeClip."
For further information:
CEDAR Audio Limited, 20 Home End, Fulbourn, Cambridge, CB21 5BS, United Kingdom.
t: +44 1223 881771
f: +44 1223 881778
e: info@cedaraudio.com