Re: [ARSCLIST] [78-l] Article on actual recording speeds of 78rpm discs -- comments?

[Jon Noring <jon@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Norman Field wrote to 78-L:

> This being the case, the transfer of *everything* at one standard
> speed - 78.26 rpm - becomes more attractive still, doesn't it?

It is beginning to appear that fixing all raw transfers of nominally
78 rpm discs at 78.26 does make sense [for Project Gramophone].


> A couple more points just occurred to me.....
>
> (a) Sorry, you probably covered this one earlier, but presumably a
> "raw digital transfer" would be in stereo. too, right?

Yes. As others have noted, preserving both channels during transfer
will aid in later digital restoration.


> (b) People may offer to donate material to your project that has
> already been transferred, and (i) put down to mono already, &/or (ii)
> knowledge of the speed the disc was played at may be unknown. Would
> such donations be acceptable, or is every side required to conform to
> your definition of an RDT, as we may as well call them? I'm thinking
> of various pre-existing archives where the 78s are no longer available
> for fresh transfers.

My current view is that PrGram will accept all raw transfers, but that
does not necessarily mean it will consider them acceptable for
"representing" the original source material. So I see two areas of the
raw transfer archive: 1) The "approved" area, and 2) The "adjunct" area.

The "approved" area will be transfers, whether done "in house" or
donated from outside, meeting our rigorous technical and metadata
requirements (and must include photographs/scans of the disc's label
and runout area). The "adjunct" area will be a looser collection of
transfers (raw and restored) where the quality of the transfer does
not meet our standards and/or the metadata associated with the
transfer (technical and label/runout information) is insufficient.

Certainly, if the original source material is no longer available and
the only representative sample of it is some transfer, then by all
means PrGram will want it. Hopefully information will exist that the
original source appears to no longer be extant so a flag can be set in
the metadata associated with the transfer, indicating the transfer may
be all that's left of the recording. Even though the full digital
collection will be backed up and mirrored in various ways, those
transfers with certain flags set in metadata will have even extra
effort expended on them to assure their survival (a topic for a future
message.)

This brings up the point of the need to collect a lot of technical
metadata concerning the transfer itself, especially if the transfer is
donated from outside rather than done "in house". The metadata will be
extensive, and include details of the transfer equipment itself
(including calibration). In addition, we really want to make sure we
have photographs/scans of the record label and run out area so as to
preserve that information -- all relevant information found on the
record label and in the runout area (and elsewhere) will also be
transcribed to the metadata.

Jon