Re: arsclist Digital knowledge preservation

["Steven Smolian" <smolians@xxxxxxxxx>]

This is all good and well, and I certainly encourage it as a stopgap.

My response was to the suggestion that the Association for Recorded Sound
Collections be involved in compromise solutions, however well intentioned.

In my opinion, this rush to preservation in various fomats with incomplete
sound should NOT be endorsed by ARSC.

Steven Smolian

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Steven Smolian    301-694-5134
Smolian Sound Studios
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CDs made from old recordings,
Five or one or lifetime hoardings,
Made at home or concert hall,
Text and pics explain it all.
at www.soundsaver.com
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----- Original Message -----
From: "Richard L. Hess" <arclists@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <ARSCLIST@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Tuesday, June 18, 2002 12:33 PM
Subject: Re: arsclist Digital knowledge preservation


> We are having this precise discussion in the AMIA (Association of Moving
> Image Archivists) mailing list where it is heretical to suggest any form
of
> lossy compression. On the other hand, we've had many analog systems that
> provide lossy storage to the original signal.
>
> We have also had the discussion here that the CD Audio Red Book standard
> isn't good enough for archival purposes and we need higher resolution,
> although many of us are happily transferring sound to uncompressed,
44.1/16
> CDs.
>
> One thing to consider in selecting a format to store to is that it is
truly
> as lossless as possible for the vast majority of material contained in the
> archive. On the other hand, the format has to be well-supported with the
> anticipation that players will be available long into the future.
>
> In the video world, for example, if you have a holding on VHS tape it
> doesn't make sense to bump it up to 270Mb/s for storage in the digital
> domain. On the other hand, converting it to a 2Mb/s MPEG file and putting
> on a DVD isn't the right option, either, as the preservation format.
> Something considered essentially lossless, like 50Mb/s MPEG or DV is
> considered (at least by some) to be a good compromise.
>
> I do not know the bitrates that are being coded to for the MP3 audio files
> mentioned in this post, but the difference between 192Mb/s MP3s and mono
> WAV files at 44.1/16 is about 1:3.7. I'm wondering if the savings of $7.00
> and seven discs is worth the additional compression. These figures relate
> to making Red-Book audio CDs. The difference would be $3.00 and three
discs
> if there were mono WAV files on the CDROM.
>
> One important item to consider for audio transfers is that the cost of the
> final media is only a very small percentage of the final transfer cost.
The
> biggest single cost is the staff to do the transfer as that staff needs to
> be skilled in making the transfer and in all of the arcane optimizations
> that must be done to (and the mechanical pre-processing that must be done
> before) the analog reproduction chain.
>
> The good news,  however, is that a large collection of items are being
made
> accessible and being preserved in at least one form for future
generations.
> I believe that our grandchildren will be happier if more is saved, albeit
> at SLIGHTLY lower quality than if only the pinnacle of quality is saved
and
> many things were lost.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Richard
>
> At 09:11 AM 6/18/2002 +0000, you wrote:
> >On 17-Jun-02, Mike Richter wrote:
> >
> > > Having suffered the problems of recovering aged data, I recommend that
> > > ARSC establish a set of digital formats for its records in order to
> > > minimize the risk of obsolescence. I limit my own attempts at
> > > preservation to self-contained CD-ROMs in strict ISO 9660 format and
> > > include Windows retrieval capability. The language is HTML 2. Audio
> > > files are in MP3, which is not as well-defined as I would prefer.
> > > Unfortunately, the alternatives (WAV, AIFF) are inefficient in use of
> > > space and would not serve my purposes as well.
> >
> >It seems unwise to me to use lossy compression for any form of archival
> >storage. Once that information is thrown out, you can't get it back.
> >
> >Regards
> >--
> >Don Cox
> >doncox@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> >
> >-
> >For subscription instructions, see the ARSC home page
> >http://www.arsc-audio.org/arsclist.html
> >Copyright of individual posting is owned by the author of the posting and
> >permission to re-transmit or publish a post must be secured
> >from the author of the post.
>
> -
> For subscription instructions, see the ARSC home page
> http://www.arsc-audio.org/arsclist.html
> Copyright of individual posting is owned by the author of the posting and
> permission to re-transmit or publish a post must be secured
> from the author of the post.
>

-
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