Product Reviews

If you've got your old vinyl and cassette tapes slowly gathering a thick layer of dust in your attic, then Magix's Audio Cleaning Lab is just what you need. It's designed to help you record your music, clean up the hiss and crackles, and burn it to CD with the minimum of hassle.

If you're sitting there scratching your head and wondering how on earth you can connect your antique record player to your modern PC, Magix has the answer. The audio output from a record player is very, very quiet and so you need a Phono preamplifier to bring the low-level signal up to the right level. Even quite cheap phono preamplifiers cost around £30, so it's amazing that Magix has managed to include one in the box.

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Best of all, it's battery-powered, so you don't even need to find a spare mains socket. All you need to do is drag your record player downstairs, connect it to the phono box and then use the supplied leads to connect to the line-in of your sound card.

Once you've recorded the files you want to clean up, you can remove crackle and clicks. And while the program certainly can't totally remove all these audio nasties, it does an great job of making vinyl in awful condition sound quite listenable. Best of all, the 1-Click function saves you from having to tweak each individual setting and instead tailors the sound restoration to the track you're working with.

Once the worst of the clicks and crackles are removed, you can then spruce up the recording with the mastering effects. These can add treble to dull recordings and restore snap and vitality to knackered old tapes and the like. If you end up recording from a stack of records all in varied condition, you can apply effects to each individual recording.

Audio Cleaning Lab is superb. It's versatile too as it's as adept at sprucing up old vinyl as it is removing annoying noises from home video soundtracks or even adding a bit of sparkle to amateur music recordings. And all that for £30 makes it one hell of a bargain.