Lo-fi

[Little BabyDoll Christine]

If you every heard a "lo-fi" mp3 or video, so often there is a ton of noise and crackle. This is erroneous. Whether it was a radio or a new record played on a machine in decent order, or even a tape. Noise was a minimum and usually indicaded a problem in the player, its calibration or the medium, particularly the disk. I have tried the "vinyl" simulators and I have not been entirely happy. Noise would occur in radio signals that were either not quite aligned right or from distant stations. Records would get a kind of white noise from wear or dust and crackle and pop were from improper cuing that would cause damage and tape had a certain amount of hiss, but it it were recorded well, all noise would be unnoticeable in the playback

There are certain times when you want lo-fi: Doo wop is key among them as well as any Brill Building genre https://www.google.com/search?source=hp&ei=C88LW-K3E86B5wL7x6_ABg&q=brill+building+genre&oq=brill+building+ge&gs_l=psy-ab.1.0.0.4362.21105.0.29468.18.17.0.0.0.0.175.1808.5j12.17.0....0...1.1.64.psy-ab..1.17.1803.0..35i39k1j0i131k1j0i131i20i264k1j0i20i264k1j0i22i30k1j0i22i10i30k1.0.Qeepn_f_Bgw  style material. To understand lo-fi it is advisable to understand the times. It was 1950 to 1965. I lived through them and we had the radio going or the TV or the record machine. I cut my first disk at the age of 6 on a "Recordio"  https://www.google.com/search?ei=3m0LW4rDB-WN5wKm2orwDw&q=recordio+record+player&oq=recordio&gs_l=psy-ab.1.6.0i71k1l8.0.0.0.112352.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0..0.0....0...1..64.psy-ab..0.0.0....0.Fz_d7yVm1T8 The key medium was a 39 to 69 cent 45 rpm record played on an inexpensive player with a 4 or 5 inch, or 5x3 inch full-range wannabe speaker with a 5-watt somewhat full-range wannabe amplifier or the dreaded transister radio with a 3-1/2" speaker and a small amplifier. 90% of the sound quality comes from two stages of the process. the playback system and the speaker system. You could take the output from a transistor radio at the earphone and plug it into a high-efficiency speaker system and it would sound fine. But we are talking about 1959, not 1969

The medium was usually a record that cost under 75 cents or an AM, sometimes FM, radio signal, which applied some compression to the sound, which cut down on the fidelity, with AM being vastly inferior to FM

So what about the amplifier. usually a 3-5 watt rms amp. which we would invariably shove up to the max. This would introduce distortion

How about the speakers? Well if you looked at a 1965 'bookshelf" two-way speaker system cabinet you would find a "frequency response" of something like 100-16,000 cps ("cycles per second", this was before "Hertz" or hz came into vogue). There were some 20-20,000's out there but they cost a fortune. Now this hretz range is for the optimum or "flat" frequency response, the spakers could usually transmit lower and higher frequncies but just not as loudly. Now the speakers you would be listening through would be 3-1/2 to 5" or a 3x5 oval speaker which tried to get as much out of it as it could, but these were far from premium, since the whol player, either radio or phonograph cost under $45 USD. Hi-fi did exist but it was a piece of furnature that cost over $200 or a component system owned by a sound geek called an "audiophile" that cost upwards of a grand with huge speaker columns -- up to 6' and an amplifier that put out 50-100 watts. that he rarely ran the volume up on over 1/4 of the way

So the big items in lo-fi were compression in the sense of "lossy" with respect to fidelity, not in the sense of evening out the signal strength,  range, Q. The earliest records sound like the sound is in a glass and "saturation" distortion. All forms of nioise were external and not screaming. When I played some 1959 records on a modern system in 1988, I was appalled. I had full range, but it sounded nothing like I was used to. The key stages of production here are EQ and saturation. This is  where the engineers who do the work for the modern doo wop groups like Spain's Earth Angels https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=earth+angels+doo+wop+

Germany's Crystalaires https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=the+crystalairs

and UK's The Roommates (not to be confused with Kathy Jean's 1960-61 backing group)  https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=the+roommates+doo+wop+ their rendition of BELIEVE ME is a twin to the Elegant's original https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=believe+me+doo+wop+the+elegants

have it nailed. Unlike other modern doo wop groups, they don't use the modern full-range sound

The question is "how?"
Im Audacity, set up the file. At this point you can try the Vynil or other vinyl or static noise plugin if that is what you want to do, but remember, noise is extraneous and not a necessary part of "lo-fi". This usually starts with normalizing. then you select a multimode filter, or if you have it and added it to audacity, go with the TDR/VOS Slick EQ. I use the Soviet mode, you can do the whole thing at once but the filter is better. First you use the high pass mode and start at about 150 hz and roll off to just about nothing. Then you switch to the lowpass mode and roll off to about -12 db setting at about  10k. These are you starting values, you may want to experiment further with each of these settings until it sounds right. Your bass will be little more than a soft, pitched "bmp", I did this with a modern recording of a song by Larry Chance and the Earls and it sounded right out of 1959. . Then add some tube saturation until it sounds like you're pushing a 5 watt tube radio as loud as it will go, then a touch of reverb for room effects. After that, you may want to go to the graphic EQ and boost the tones from 500 hz to 8k hz between 2 and 3 db for different bands. I would not try to do this all in once sitting. prolonged exposure to sound affects your hearing, so save the project (.aup) and come back to it after a while and see how it sounds to you and work on it some more) At the end, you may want to Amplify, Allowing a TINY amount of clipping won't hurt and adds to the distortion. when you have it where you want it. save or export as an mp3 at 128 kbps

The point is that lo-fi, in not necessarily the noise, but the audio dynamics (filtering, saturation, EQ and compression)