The idea is not new. Many companies have experimented with remedies and boxes that promise to remove the crackle from worn vinyl records. Few have succeeded. But Pro-Ject believes that the new Vinyl NRS Box S3, should remove the dust even a platewasker can’t get rid of.
A dishwasher does a fine job of removing dust and dirt from the grooves, but it doesn’t repair the dents in the record, or the wear and tear that inevitably causes noisy records.
The Pro-Ject Vinyl NRS Box S3 is placed between the turntable and the amplifier, and uses an advanced digital sound processing to remove the noise. The signal from the turntable is digitized in the box, with 24-bit quantization and 96 kHz sampling, and then the processor uses dual 54-bit accumulation to dampen the clicks.
As you can see from the picture, you can set how much of the noise reduction you need. Pro-Ject calls it De-Crackling, and it can dampen the crackling by up to 8 decibels. Pressing the VNRS button activates the Vinyl Noise Reduction System, which dampens crackle from worn vinyl records.
The Pro-Ject box can be plugged in all the time, and the noise reduction can be switched off with the bypass button when not needed.
The price is 329 Euro, and it should be in stores in September.
It sounds like an interesting product especially for those who have records that were early heavily played without cleaning and with low quality record players with worn styluses. But I have to wonder what it does to transient sound signals like percussion instruments – does it mute the “attack” of the sound at all?? It would be good if it could offer an option to subtract the noisy sound from the cleaned-up sound so that one can hear what got removed. There used to be a software product by Roxio that allowed one to do just that and the user could adjust the de-crackle parameters until almost no intelligible music sounds were heard in the difference signal.
This is why vinyl stinks. We had scratch filters in the 70s 80s to alleviate the awful background pops Crackle etc that was normal to poor vinyl sound. Now we have convinced people to buy turntables we are again selling products to mask their poor quality. Complete consumer rip off
On YouTube, the gentleman on Techmoan (sic) tried this device in a few configurations on noisy, scratched, etc. old records. He could not hear any differences on any setting, nor could I from the audio that was passed through to my home theater system. A nothingburger.