Q. What’s the best way to add a subtle vinyl effect?

Via SOS web site

SOS contributor Mike Senior replies: There’s no need to break the bank for this, because there are actually a few different freeware plug-ins that provide the kind of thing you’re after. One of the best known is Izotope’s freeware Vinyl plug-in, which is available for both Mac and PC. The advantage of this one is that you get a lot of control over the exact character of the vinyl noise you’re creating: not only can you balance various different mechanical and electrical noises, but you can also choose the decade you want your virtual vinyl to hail from and how your processed audio is affected by disc wear. The downside of this plug-in for me, though, is that it doesn’t seem to output some of its added noises in stereo, irrespective of how I set up the controls, and a lot of the character of vinyl noise, to me, lies in its stereo width. To be fair, though, the ‘dust’ and ‘crackle’ components seem to be stereo, and stereo was, of course, only really in its infancy in the ’60s, so this might not matter to you. Indeed, collapsing the whole signal to mono might be a useful way to ‘date’ the string sound itself. If you’re running Steinberg’s Cubase, the built-in Grungelizer plug-in provides a similar paradigm to the Izotope plug-in, albeit with a simpler control set. However, all the added noises from this plug-in appear to be in mono too.