Episode 429 – Restoration Engineer Michael Graves, A New Spotify Scam, And New Netflix Spatial Audio

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My guest this week is audio restoration and mastering engineer Michael Graves, who’s a four time Grammy award winner and 12 time nominee. Michael’s main focus is saving historical audio that was recorded on deteriorating or obsolete grooved media, as well as more recent recordings where the sound is obscured for various reasons.

Michael uses a combination of physical and electronic specialty techniques designed to rescue rare, one of a kind recordings or deteriorating media. This includes old 78 rpm records clouded by surfaces noise and years of neglect, right up to digital recordings that were done on some of the earliest pioneering formats.

During the interview we talked about how his hobby became a career, why a high-end turntable is his secret weapon, the surprising styli that he uses to avoid record surface noise, why a stereo needle is preferred even for a mono record, and much more.

I spoke with Michael via zoom from his studio in Hollywood.

On the intro I’ll take a look at the latest Spotify scam using the “track linking” feature, and Netflix embraces Sennheiser’s AMBEO so you can hear spatial audio from a pair of stereo speakers.

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