[ARSCLIST] Fw: Analog: A Race Against Time - Billboard August 28, 2004

[Dick Spottswood <dick@xxxxxxxx>]

more fuel for the alarmists among us--thank goodness for 78rpm shelf life!
Dick

----- Forwarded by Dick Spottswood/dick/AmericanU on 01/06/2005 11:28 PM 
-----


OldHatRecords1@xxxxxxx
01/06/2005 03:39 PM
 
        To:     jeff@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, pete@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, 
smweiss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
        cc:     Harriswray1@xxxxxxx
        Subject:        Analog: A Race Against Time - Billboard  August 
28, 2004


UPFRONT: Last issue, senior writer Bill Holland began a five-year update 
on the state of the music industry's vaults. He found that all companies 
face new challenges in preserving digital-era recordings that were 
captured on equipment and in formats that are now obsolete. This issue, he 
revisits the problems still encountered with analog tape.

The problem with analog tape preservation is simple: The music is embedded 
on a ferric oxide layer stripped onto plastic tape. 

Unfortunately, such tapes were not built to last.

Nearly 1 million analog studio tapes from the '70s and '80s, both masters 
and session reels, are now in perilous condition because, as engineers 
discovered to their horror nearly a decade ago, they were manufactured 
with a flawed binder that absorbs moisture over time.

Problem tapes include Ampex 406 and 456 and Scotch 3M 206/207 and 250/251. 
Several Agfa formulations also show the symptoms. None of those tapes are 
still manufactured.

If the tape is played without treatment, the sticky binder, taking bits of 
the oxide "playing" surface with it, pulls away from the tape.

The binder residue also clogs the machine's transport system. The friction 
caused as a tape is played can stop a machine in its tracks.

And it can destroy a master recording.

These analog tape assets, which represent some of the most lucrative 
catalog for companies to exploit, cannot be played without destroying the 
music content—unless they are individually "baked" in a convection oven 
for many hours to dehydrate them.

Other tapes of this type also have a "shed" problem, where the tape oxide 
surface containing the music material simply peels away from the defective 
binder. Sticky shed syndrome is the diagnostic term for the "disease" 
affecting such tapes.

Experts say that about 85% of tapes manufactured between 1971 and 1991 
exhibit sticky shed syndrome.

But the good news is that five years after Billboard's articles initially 
appeared, most studios have ovens on hand to dry out problem tapes.

A remaining obstacle is that at all the majors, such problem tapes are 
baked only when a reissue project is scheduled. Most sit soggy and 
unattended on the shelves.

"They're now in controlled, dry rooms," says Glenn Korman, head of BMG 
Music's vault. "They won't get any stickier. We pull them when we need 
them and then bake them."

But even tapes that seem safe right now may have decreased shelf life. 

"There's a lot of educated people out there who believe that you can bake 
a tape over and over," says Frank Bowen, director of EMI's North American 
archives. "[But] common sense tells you that every time you bake a tape 
for eight hours, something is diminished on it."

Warner Music librarian Steve Lang is not as pessimistic: "If a tape is 
sticky, we bake it, so maybe they last another 20 or 30 years. Maybe by 
that time we'll have a better idea."

After baking a tape, it is racked and played before it can rehydrate. The 
music information is transferred to more stable "safety" copies, usually 
both in analog and high-resolution digital formats. 

There are no programs at any of the four major record companies to 
initiate a full-time effort to save these masters and session reels. The 
reason is the sheer scope of the problem.

In 1999, vault and catalog veterans estimated that it would take 17 years 
for a crew of six engineers working daily eight-hour shifts to stabilize 
and transfer every one of the industry's at-risk tapes now stored in the 
vaults of the four companies.

MANY TAPES, FEW RESOURCES

The sheer volume of the major labels' holdings also often leads to lost, 
mismarked or mystery tapes sitting on shelves. The surviving companies 
have acquired so many labels—and their catalogs of hundreds and even 
thousands of master and session tapes—that in some instances they have not 
completely inventoried their holdings. 

A prominent producer told Billboard that recently he was led to an 
un-air-conditioned, underground parking lot in Los Angeles that contained 
a security cage. Inside the cage were stacks of apparently uncataloged 
tapes belonging to a major label.

Prior to EMI's purchase of Capitol Records in the United States, many of 
Capitol's masters were haphazardly stored in un-air-conditioned dressing 
rooms of the Pantages Theater in Los Angeles until the building was torn 
down in the '90s (Billboard, July 12, 1997).

EMI's Bowen says that even this year, his staff has had to search for 
material on Capitol and labels that EMI has acquired through the years 
that weren't in the vault.

"We spent nearly four months cold-calling basically every studio in the 
U.S., asking if [they] have any of our tapes or those with the labels that 
go back 50 years."

Staffers at all the major labels' vaults say they've had to do the same.

In one of the most famous examples, BMG had to hunt down lost Elvis 
Presley recordings. Veteran engineer Bones Howe had saved them from the 
dumpster 20 years before. 

Howe told Billboard he found "a dumpster filled with tapes" when Los 
Angeles' legendary Radio Recorders was going out of business in 1960. Howe 
said the studio owners had pleaded in vain for then-RCA label officials to 
pick up their masters.

Even today, the majors regularly hire consultants to listen to "mystery 
tapes" they own, often housed in tape boxes without any information on 
them.

A MASTER IS MANY MASTERS

In the old pre-tape days, when a record company A&R staffer or outside 
producer handed in a master to a company, it usually meant one cut on an 
acetate-cut disc that embodied the best performance of a recording.

In decades to follow, this common procedure from the '20s to the '40s of 
only saving "the best of the best" continued. Luckily, some non-master 
performances were saved, usually the result of bad recordkeeping. 

Without these extra takes, companies would have no "alternate master" disc 
recordings of such musical giants as Robert Johnson and Duke Ellington.

By the '50s, a master was an artist's best performance of a session tape 
recording. It was usually edited from a reel of tape embodying several 
other performances, usually considered lower quality. 

Some takes were magnificent but just too long to be included on vinyl 
albums. Those throwaways later became valuable to companies and music 
fans.

The poster boy for this phenomenon is Miles Davis' 1959 album, "Kind of 
Blue," on Columbia (Legacy), owned by Sony. The main tape recorder in the 
session ran slightly slow, so in playback the performances were a 
half-step sharp in pitch, which has puzzled generations of jazz-studies 
students and workaday players.

The jazz masterpiece found itself on the jazz charts again in recent years 
after Sony's engineers found an alternate take of one of its compositions 
as well as a "B reel" of the album—taped on a backup tape recorder running 
at the correct speed.

Because Sony held onto the original analog masters, its latest incarnation 
is a version in high-resolution Super Audio CD.

>From the '60s to the introduction of digital recordings in the '80s, 
in-house or outside producers handed companies a "production master" 
equalized for vinyl (boosted bass, hot upper-end sizzle) so that 
recordings would jump out of radios.

Producers also usually gave companies a "flat," unequalized master and the 
multitrack session tapes.

At some companies, some of these tapes have not survived. That means the 
company's only asset of the recording is the version that became the hit 
in whatever year it was released. Updated reissues are impossible.

INCREASED VIGILANCE

The increased concern over the possibility of more masters being destroyed 
has led to greater awareness and vigilance by many in the industry.

In January, song stylist Michael Feinstein sent an alarming e-mail to 
dozens of music historians, archivists, industry officials and musicians 
who are on the board of the federally created National Registry of 
Recordings.

Congress created the board in 2000 to preserve the most important and 
significant sound recordings in the culture.

Feinstein said that he had been told that a new top executive at Sony 
suggested that original master recordings be jettisoned since digital 
copies of some sort existed. Therefore, the exec reasoned, the originals 
were no longer needed.

Of course, those originals included works by such artists as Louis 
Armstrong, Billie Holiday, Bob Dylan, Miles Davis, Leonard Bernstein, 
Bruno Walter, Barbra Streisand and Bruce Springsteen.

Feinstein said the problem of new execs not understanding the importance 
of keeping and preserving original source material was not just at Sony, 
but with all the majors.

He suggested to the registry's members that they write letters "to the 
various recording concerns outlining the importance of preserving original 
masters."

The letter touched off inquiries to Sony by such board members as veteran 
engineer George Massenburg. Sony brass assured him that the comment was 
made offhand by a person who has no jurisdiction over vault assets, and 
that there is no plan to throw out original source material masters.

Although in this case the news that Feinstein received was a false alarm, 
the bigger point is that there is now a network of industry professionals 
who can blow the whistle should masters be in peril.

Furthermore, Feinstein's call to action underscores the concerns voiced by 
many that a combination of a major industry downturn, consolidation, 
cost-cutting and newcomer execs unfamiliar with the recording process 
could result in a tragedy of mammoth proportions—the self-destruction of 
their companies' prime assets.

"We're in our infancy as far as understanding the scope of preservation in 
the digital age," says preservationist Bill Ivey, who paraphrases Defense 
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld: "There are things you know, things you know you 
don't know and there are things you don't even know you don't know."