National Park Service, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

We don’t get to highlight the work of Merter Yildirim, one of our best engineers, often enough. Unlike many of our other engineers, who may specialize in recording live audio from performers and voice actors, mixing music and television/movies, or recording on film sets and productions, Merter’s speciality is recording sounds that have already been recorded, but have outlasted the medium they were imprinted on. Merter is a transfer engineer, someone who can take your old damaged tape, vinyl, ADAT reels, or almost any other recording medium, and carefully restore and convert it into a high-quality digital transfer, able to stand the test of time.

That’s why, when cool, delicate projects like restoring and transferring a copy of a Martin Luther King Jr. speech comes around, we call Merter. This project was completed for Lisa Berman, who needed an old copy of the speech carefully transferred from a crumbling record to a fresh, digital file. These past few months alone, Merter has transferred recordings for Salman Rushdie, RZA of Wu-Tang, and Philippe Halsman’s son Oliver Halsman Rosenberg, who trust his careful ear and skilled use of processing units – noise reduction, compression, EQ, filtering – to bring out the best possible elements of the original recordings.

If you ever decide those old memories ought to be preserved forever and need a practiced, steady hand to get the job done, give us a call. We’ll call Merter!