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WELCOME TO PERSONAL CD
What do you do?
Personal-CD specialises in the transfer of audio material from old or outdated formats (LP's, 78's, cassettes, eight-tracks, etc) to CD. For a complete list of formats we handle, go to our Formats page.
We use modern digital techniques to remove or reduce many of the problems that might exist, such as; tape noise, surface noise, clicks produced by scratches, drop-outs, skipping grooves, motor noise, turntable or cutting lathe rumble, pitch (speed) correction, whistles produced from bias oscillators beating against another frequency, etc, etc.
Why would anyone want your service?
Well, you might have an old LP, no longer available, which you would like to have in CD format. You might want to produce a compilation of a particular artist/s best tracks. You could have a selection of singles, all on the one CD.
On the other hand, you could have a collection of 78rpm records and nothing to play them on! Or a cassette of long lost family or friends. Or old tapes from your teens, complete with all those recordings you made of the top 20 hits of the day. Maybe you had a car with an 8 track player, but both the car and the player have long since departed from this world. Serious record collections often contain rare recordings of high value, which are being devalued by playing them! Up to now, the collector had a choice between listening to the music he loved, or keeping the value of his collection. Using our service, both aims are possible. Particularly, in the case of 78rpm records, no collector could afford the time, expense and trouble to maintain a selection of stylii to suit every disc in the collection. Even less, would they want to fiddle around setting up the playback system to optimum for each record played. We do all this for you, you just play the CD.
Then again, and on a more serious note, we can assist forensic investigations by working on surveillance recordings to improve their intelligibility. Museums and other sound archives have unique or rare recordings transferred, so that the public may hear them and the originals preserved for posterity.
We deal clients from all over Europe and they are as varied as the material we handle.
What would such a service cost?
For full details of our charges, go to our Prices page. As a rough guide, it costs around €55 to noise reduce and transfer an average LP to CD. A CD can hold up to 74 minutes of audio material and the maximum cost (assuming it were full) would be €89.
If there are very serious problems with the original material, then we might be forced to charge extra to cover the additional time required, but for the average transfer, this is highly unlikely. This rarely happens and we would always advise the client in such cases, before we start the work.
That sounds a little expensive?
Not so, check what other studios ask for similar work and then return here. We are sure you will come back.
To the best of our knowledge, we offer the cheapest professional service of this type available - anywhere in the world! We constantly monitor our competitors prices and we have yet to find anyone who can beat us for price. Most studios charge four, or more, times what we ask for the same work. Even amateurs and part-timers charge more than we do - and they rarely have the experience and certainly not the selection of equipment we have available. The time involvement is high. For example, an average LP would be listened to, in its entirety, at least four times throughout the whole process. That's about three hours, just to begin with. On top of that, include some more time for the engineers to sort out specific little problems which invariably come to light and a 'simple' LP transfer can easily run to anywhere between four and six hours work. We have expensive computers (our digital sound converter, alone, is worth the price of a cheap computer) cleaning machines, rare playback equipment, etc., all of which represent a massive investment for your listening pleasure.
Most importantly, our work is of the highest quality and backed by over thirty years of audio engineering experience in the music, film and televison industries.
Some of our competitors don't even provide very good value for money. They rely exclusively on computer software to automatically reduce noises, clicks and the like. We know this is just not possible if the job is to be done properly. Automatic noise reduction systems are useful tools - we use them ourselves - but they are not that good. It always requires a human being to carefully go through the entire source material and sort out the problems which the software couldn't or didn't find. If you want to prove this for yourself, let us do a small job for you and also send it anywhere else you like. Listen to the results - preferably on high quality headphones, which are much more revealing than loudspeakers - and judge for yourself who has done the better work at the better price.
If you are so cheap, why is that?
We appreciate that most people would rather spend their money on the records and, much as they would like to preserve or improve the sound quality, the cost of doing so is beyond the reach of the average collector. We are not in this business to rip our customers off, but to do a good job and have them come back to us. In the long term, this is more important to us than making a 'quick buck'. Our clients become our friends as well.Secondly, we are audio enthusiasts ourselves and seek to provide the sort of service which we would want to use, if we were the customer. We are not getting rich at your expense (unfortunately) but we are getting a lot of job satisfaction in knowing that we are making many people happy with a good job at an affordable price.
Furthermore, this is all we do. We are not in the recording business, we do not produce multiple copies (although we can direct you to people who can, if that is what you need) and we are not in the artist promotion business. Our whole service revolves around the restoration and transfer of audio material.
The only peripheral areas in which we are involved are the Cleaning of records and the Repair of damaged Laserdiscs - both of which came about as a result of our needing to do these things for ourselves as part of the restoration process. We also undertake translation for lyrics, etc.
Anything else I should know?
We handle your recordings with as much care as we handle our own.
Our transcription equipment is of the highest quality and we have a large selection of stylii to ensure the best response from the original recording (particularly necessary in the case of 78 rpm records, as there was a distinct lack of standards for many years). All records are cleaned, using our Keith Monks RCM, and returned to you with a new inner sleeve to keep them that way.
We have high-quality tape machines which can handle all 1/4" domestic and professional formats. Tapes are always played out, not fast wound, to ensure the best possible wind tension for future storage.
We take similar, professional, precautions with whatever format we are asked to handle.
How do I contact you?
If you go to our Contacts page, you will find full details of the various methods you can use to get your original material to us, how we get it back to you and methods of payment.
