ALBUM: The Man Without A Face (The DC Restoration Series)
COMPOSER: James Horner
SOURCE: Original OST CD (1993) [My Rip]
QUALITY: FLAC (24bit/48kHz)
SIZE: 470 MB (.RAR)

LINK: Click Here (https://mega.co.nz/#!X1lxBKBY!TDtkf_AIfO9-AUHpWGGiax2ji-gV9Dlilrb7e6vFpzI)
PASSWORD: 3JVuwgp92eXn

TRACKLIST
01 - James Horner - A Father's Legacy.flac
02 - James Horner - Chuck's First Lesson.flac
03 - James Horner - Flying.flac
04 - James Horner - McLeod's Secret Life.flac
05 - James Horner - Nightmares And Revelations.flac
06 - James Horner - McLeod's Last Letter.flac
07 - James Horner - Lost Books.flac
08 - James Horner - The Merchant Of Venice.flac
09 - James Horner - The Tutor.flac
10 - James Horner - No Compromise.flac
11 - Giacomo Puccini - Ch'ella Mi Creda.flac
12 - James Horner - Lookout Point - End Credits.flac

ABOUT THE DC RESTORATION SERIES
The DC Restoration Series is a series of scores that have been personally restored by me. This is the culmination of many months of research to find an audio restoration process to help decrease the dynamic range of the music by making the quiet parts louder without making the louder parts even louder.

Some people will disagree with my technique but I find the listening experience to be better since I can now hear the nuances of the orchestra to a greater degree. I watch the spectral frequency display while listening to each track in hopes to clean up all artifacts and remove as much hiss as possible. I've also EQed everything to add clarity to the music.

I can go on and on about process, but in the end, it is the final product that counts.

If people are interested, I will continue to post more restored scores from my collection. I only remaster scores from original CD or true lossless files. In no way is this series trying to compete with other members that do great work remastering scores (ex. SonicAdventure and others...). I simply want to share my love of film scores with others that enjoy not only the music, but the experience of listening to the music.

Hope you all enjoy and any feedback is appreciated.

Thank you.

Great job. Thanks a lot for your sharing.

thanks, nice work, :)

Thanks. Hope you all enjoy the improved sound (and hope you can tell the difference from the original release). Not one of my favorite Horner scores but truly deserved a restoration since the waveforms were so low on this album.

Thanks. Hope you all enjoy the improved sound (and hope you can tell the difference from the original release). Not one of my favorite Horner scores but truly deserved a restoration since the waveforms were so low on this album.

Unfortunately, I don't have the original one to compare with. :)

The sound is excellent!
Thank you very much.

This sounds amazing! Such an improvement!
THANK YOU!!!

The sound is excellent!
Thank you very much.

Parakalo!

Wow, thank you very much! :-)

thanks : will compare to the official version :)

thanks : will compare to the official version :)

Hopefully you will hear that most of the "room noise" (could be Horner himself, musicians turning pages, etc...) has been greatly reduced since I go view each file's spectral frequency and isolate the noise by hand. Takes a while but when you bring up the music, of course that crap comes up with it. So to truly enjoy the music without all those sounds, which happen most often during quiet music periods, I had to take the time to remove as much as I can.

Excellent work. Thank you very much.

Thanks for your hard work!

Excellent work. Thank you very much.

Thanks... and you're welcome. Keep a lookout for some upcoming restoration scores!

---------- Post added at 09:09 PM ---------- Previous post was at 09:08 PM ----------


Thanks for your hard work!

If you can truly enjoy the score much more now, than I have done my job. Like in the previous post, please keep a lookout for upcoming restorations!

I did a volume increase and a few cue splits for my own custom of this album, but I didn't do anything to change the overall sound. I'll have a listen to this and see how it fares since the overall volume for the original was indeed much too low at times. Gorgeous score.

I'm curious about 2 things:

1) why 24bit? 16 should suffice for final product.
The CD is 16, and whatever processing you did, you won't gain so much to keep it as bloated 24.

2) why 48KHz?
The CD is 44.1KHz. Upscaling doesn't improve anything. If you want to upscale for editing, 88.2 would have been better (or anything divisible to 44.1 really).
48KHz would have been better if a bluray was used (for the whole project, not just a snippet or track).

You really won't be able to hear a difference between 24/48 vs. 16/44.1, no matter how German or expensive your equipment is.
Not an attack, just perplexed by the final format.

EDIT: doesn't equal better quality.
It's all the same quality as the source isn't in higher quality.

I did a volume increase and a few cue splits for my own custom of this album, but I didn't do anything to change the overall sound. I'll have a listen to this and see how it fares since the overall volume for the original was indeed much too low at times. Gorgeous score.

Though I did normalize the volume to be louder without "brickwalling" anything, I expanded the lower dynamic sections to be louder without making the louder sections even louder. The benefits I find I did onto this release is that I EQed it and mastered it to be more crisp on flat-sounding speakers (usually studio monitors which I have) and more importantly, tried to remove unwanted hiss from the expansion and cleaned up some room sounds from the recording (certain noise from CD source is not audible in this restoration). I just wanted to explain that I just didn't make things louder, but massaged the sound to be clean and crispier. But I do hope you enjoy...

---------- Post added at 11:05 PM ---------- Previous post was at 10:58 PM ----------


I'm curious about 2 things:

1) why 24bit? 16 should suffice for final product.
The CD is 16, and whatever processing you did, you won't gain so much to keep it as bloated 24.

2) why 48KHz?
The CD is 44.1KHz. Upscaling doesn't improve anything. If you want to upscale for editing, 88.2 would have been better (or anything divisible to 44.1 really).
48KHz would have been better if a bluray was used (for the whole project, not just a snippet or track).

You really won't be able to hear a difference between 24/48 vs. 16/44.1, no matter how German or expensive your equipment is.
Not an attack, just perplexed by the final format.

EDIT: doesn't equal better quality.
It's all the same quality as the source isn't in higher quality.


You are right. This was my first up-rez and I was not blown away with the difference between ripping the CD in 24-bit 48kHz and 16-bit 48kHz. It indeed added unwanted weight. Next time I will stick with the source quality or rip at super high quality (like 24-bit 88.2 or 192kHz) to edit with the best quality possible, deal with slow renders, but then deliver in standard 16-bit 44.1 kHz FLAC format. We'll see. But thanks for input. Good to hear what people are thinking.

I still downloaded it to give it a listen.
(actually resampled and dithered down to 16)

Looking forward to giving it a listen. I love all Horner.
(more than Amanda)

I still downloaded it to give it a listen.
(actually resampled and dithered down to 16)

Looking forward to giving it a listen. I love all Horner.
(more than Amanda)

(But not more than me)

**I can still hear you**

Thank you share!

Thank you for your amazing work. I'm rediscovering this score in its beauty. Please go on.

Thank you so much for your work :)

Thanks a lot!

Thank you so much! I believe that this is one of Horner's finest works. Cannot wait to hear your remaster!

Thank you so much for this, dconline. For many years, I've enjoyed elements of this score, but have more often found the listening experience to be frustrating due to the dynamic range you note in your original post. I end up constantly adjusting the volume rather than getting lost in the music. Your mastering, however, makes the score a significantly more enjoyable listening experience. I've now listened to it a few times, and I am finally able to relax and lose myself in the music :) Absolutely wonderful. Thanks again.

Thanks, dconline, for this labor of love. I'm familiar with many Horner scores and do love a great part of them, but this one is unknown to me. Your edit will be my introduction to this score.

thank you!

Thank you so much for this, dconline. For many years, I've enjoyed elements of this score, but have more often found the listening experience to be frustrating due to the dynamic range you note in your original post. I end up constantly adjusting the volume rather than getting lost in the music. Your mastering, however, makes the score a significantly more enjoyable listening experience. I've now listened to it a few times, and I am finally able to relax and lose myself in the music :) Absolutely wonderful. Thanks again.

You are absolutely welcome. I am so glad you enjoy this score even more now. Some people have commented that all I am doing is just making everything louder. Though it is true that I "fatten up" the waveforms so that we can hear a lot of the subtleties, other processes are done to make it a much more enjoyable listening experience, in my opinion, especially when I clean up as much as possible all that recording room ambient noise (like when someone turns the sheet music page, etc.).

Keep yours eyes open for more restoration scores. I plan on doing many more in the future, as long as there are members, like yourself, that truly enjoy these restoration versions. Thanks again for taking the time to write a comment and hope you feel the same for all upcoming projects. Cheers!

---------- Post added at 03:58 PM ---------- Previous post was at 03:52 PM ----------


Thanks, dconline, for this labor of love. I'm familiar with many Horner scores and do love a great part of them, but this one is unknown to me. Your edit will be my introduction to this score.

Glad I can help soundtrekker. You've helped me out in the past and if this could be my way of thanking you, then great! More restorations on the horizon so i hope you take the time to listen to them and appreciate the music and the score once again. Cheers!

---------- Post added at 03:59 PM ---------- Previous post was at 03:58 PM ----------


thank you!

You're welcome! And to all the members that took the time to comment... THANK YOU!

Thanks :)

You really won't be able to hear a difference between 24/48 vs. 16/44.1, no matter how German or expensive your equipment is.
Not an attack, just perplexed by the final format.

EDIT: doesn't equal better quality.
It's all the same quality as the source isn't in higher quality.

Have to chime in here. It makes perfect sense to upsample and increase bit depth before doing any kind of processing.

When using several processing-heavy DSPs (like denoising) you cannot go 'hydrogenaudio' all the way. Even they recommend doing editing, mixing, processing, etc. within 32/96 or something similar (not DSD). Using high bit-depths/samplerates is perfectly suited for remastering but not for distribution (-> sharing, selling). Reason: many DSPs involve oversampling when processing 44,1 kHz material (if those DSPs are well written). If they wouldn�t employ oversampling, they could introduce audible aliasing artifacts into the passband. Using a high samplerate moves aliasing errors to inaudible frequency areas where they can�t hurt the important frequency band anymore.

And while I give you that resampling by factors of 2 (44,1 to 88,2) or 4 (44,1 to 176,4) would mathematically be easy for the resampler and theoretically yield high quality results, nowadays many resamplers don�t have any problems anymore by going from 44,1 to 96 kHz. This was an issue 10-15 years but not today.

Besides: when denoising you lower the noisefloor and you then might reach the point where on fade-ins or fade-outs quantization artifacts become audible (should you use the original bitdepth of 16 bit).

Remastering is - IMO - never about what�s good enough but about adding something better without hurting the original part of any signal.

Have to chime in here. It makes perfect sense to upsample and increase bit depth before doing any kind of processing.

When using several processing-heavy DSPs (like denoising) you cannot go 'hydrogenaudio' all the way. Even they recommend doing editing, mixing, processing, etc. within 32/96 or something similar (not DSD). Using high bit-depths/samplerates is perfectly suited for remastering but not for distribution (-> sharing, selling). Reason: many DSPs involve oversampling when processing 44,1 kHz material (if those DSPs are well written). If they wouldn�t employ oversampling, they could introduce audible aliasing artifacts into the passband. Using a high samplerate moves aliasing errors to inaudible frequency areas where they can�t hurt the important frequency band anymore.

And while I give you that resampling by factors of 2 (44,1 to 88,2) or 4 (44,1 to 176,4) would mathematically be easy for the resampler and theoretically yield high quality results, nowadays many resamplers don�t have any problems anymore by going from 44,1 to 96 kHz. This was an issue 10-15 years but not today.

Besides: when denoising you lower the noisefloor and you then might reach the point where on fade-ins or fade-outs quantization artifacts become audible (should you use the original bitdepth of 16 bit).

Remastering is - IMO - never about what�s good enough but about adding something better without hurting the original part of any signal.

Excellent explanation. Thanks for your input. Always a treat reading your insight on this subject. Hope you get a chance to download my work on this score and read your comments afterward.

Excellent explanation. Thanks for your input. Always a treat reading your insight on this subject. Hope you get a chance to download my work on this score and read your comments afterward.

I will once I have time again to listen to music. ATM I�m still having trouble 'remastering' our home... I think I might post some photos when we are finished. I have written so much about this, now I feel I have to present some results for something that took far longer than expected.

Thank you so much !!!

Thank you so much !!!

You're welcome. Enjoy.

Thank you so much!

Thank you!!

Thank you so much!

You're welcome. Hope you enjoy...

---------- Post added at 09:38 PM ---------- Previous post was at 09:38 PM ----------


Thank you!!

You're welcome. Hope you enjoy also...

Thanks a lot

Thanks very much!!

Thanks!

Thanks for share!

Thank you! Great effort!

Thanks for your hard work!

Really thanks

Thanks so much. I look forward to this one - it's been a special score for me for a long, long time.

This Series is awesome, please keep it up, and thanks.