Remastering music's past: Audiophonic's Bill Cook fine-tunes music history.

• Author: Peterson, Eric
• Position: Recordings

Audiophonic's sound lab, a cluttered basement in Woodland Park, is like a museum of state-of-the-art sound playback gear. Company President Bill Cook, a still-active 75-year-old executive, points to one vintage analog mixing rack. It was used on TV's "Star Trek" in the 1960s, he says. Cook also bought his recording console, a vintage 1940 model made by Western Electronics, from Lawrence Welk nearly half a century ago.

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But Audiophonic Corp. and Cook are not strictly about vintage gear--he also has a few cutting-edge digital gadgets that he uses to remove noise from old recordings, which he essentially remasters for distribution on CDs. "I can get the clicks and ticks out with my Cedar system," he says, "but sometimes you get thunks. In order to get the thunks out, you have to go to Sound Forge on the computer.

"This process of de-noising," says the experienced audiophile, "it's marvelous. The technology is absolutely incredible."

The old recordings that Cook de-noises come from his "vault," shelves and shelves (and stacks and boxes) of records and tapes of all descriptions. Of the approximately 50,000 items, about half are 16-inch transcription discs, the first true high-fidelity medium.

From the late 1920s until the early 1960s, radio stations played these records on the air, broadcasting everything from news to comedy to music.

Cook is now mining the impressive collection of transcription discs and releasing CD sets of meticulously restored big band and Western recordings through Audiophonic, his...