Following the series of boxed sets of the pioneering radio comedy, The Goon Show, released by BBC Worldwide in partnership with Penguin Random House, The Goon Show Compendium includes incidental material including a 1975 edition of Robbie Vincent’s phone-in programme, Late Night London.

Alongside the original shows this has been meticulously remastered by Cedar user Ted Kendall, and is of considerable value because it was one of the last times that the Goons were heard together. The programme didn’t exist in the BBC archives, nor did Vincent keep a tape of it, so Kendall scoured the collector community for amateur recordings and eventually found enough material to reconstruct it. Inevitably, much of the found material was of poor audio quality, with heavy over-modulation (clipping) of many of the tapes. Cedar DeClip came to the rescue…

‘It was a strain to listen to much of this material and it would have been intolerable to try to listen to it for the duration of a whole CD’, says Kendall. ‘However, having used DeClip in the past on a forensic case – where it made a dreadfully overloaded voice recording intelligible – I had every confidence that it would improve matters considerably. I wasn’t disappointed.’

Discarding the unusable audio – which often proved to be most of the original signal – the Declip process reconstructed the waveform from what was left, and Kendall was able to obtain a substantial improvement in both intelligibililty and listenability. ‘It made the difference between a signal where all you heard was the distortion, and one where the programme material was enjoyable and any residual problems were sometimes noticeable but not annoying,’ he says. ‘This was a remarkable result, one which would have been difficult or more likely impossible to achieve without Cedar DeClip.’