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"Rosetta Tone"-A Technical Quality Fingerprint for Audio Recordings

In the process of (repeated) re-recording of historical sound recordings the alteration of the original sound by various filtering procedures has become common practice. Therefore, historically minded re-recording engineers and archivists have been discussing for some time a so-called "Rosetta Tone", a standardized fingerprint to accompany the original analog recording to detect such alterations and to correct them back to the original sound quality. Such a tone would also facititate detection of sound alterations introduced by damage and deterioration of the sound carrier. The paper proposes such a "Rosetta Tone" in form of a digitally generated sequence of test signals designed to facilitate analysis of any signal transformation that may have occured during the processes of copying of audio recordings that are accompanied by this identification tag of their original sound quality.

Authors: Frank, Helmut; Schüller, Dietrich; Pichler, Heinrich
Affiliations: Phonogrammarchiv, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna, Austria ; Institut fur Allgemeine Elektrotechnik, Technical University of Vienna, Austria(See document for exact affiliation information.)
AES Convention:92 (March 1992) Paper Number:3342 Import into BibTeX
Subject:Audio History, Preservation, and Restoration

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