Retreading the Motown Sound: Best Restoration Software Tools?

[oltos]

I have loads of Motown favorites, such as this gem which has been playing in my head all week.

Tony Thompson well describes here the causes and reasons for, shall we say, the less than ideal sound quality of many otherwise wonderfully arranged Motown recordings.
https://www.quora.com/Why-does-it-s...her-recordings-from-the-era-well-into-the-70s

Thanks to Mr. Gordy's aggressive techniques for marketing his music products, there's presumably nothing than can be done to "decompress" many of these tracks. But besides removal of some overload (clipping) distortion, where it may arise, https://www.izotope.com/en/learn/repairing-a-distorted-audio-track.html and flipping stereo channels to be in-phase with each other, which if any other sonic damage might Izotope Rx or other software tools be able to reduce?

 

[ianrt]

Audacity has a plug-in called Clip Fix, which allows you select a threshold (above which peaks will be treated for expansion) and gain reduction, to give room for the expansion.
It seems to work except for extremely clipped material.

Ian

 

[jjasniew]

I'm surprised more of this isnt available. I've used a "Reaper" plug-in that - intended as a multiband compressor - the author left in the ability to enter fractional compression ratios, which resulted in it behaving as a multiband expander.