Re: [ARSCLIST] Preservation policy question

[seva <seva@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 9:42 AM -0500 12/8/05, Ganesh.Irelan@xxxxxxxx wrote:


> My question is whether to keep the 300+ analog tapes we have.




here's an excerpt from this link, to Michael Gerzon's piece on this issue:

http://www.waves.com/german/htmls/service/faq/dont.html


<znip>

1b. Reasons for destroying masters.

The reason why master recordings are destroyed is a combination of 
two factors: 1) The storage of master recordings is often expensive, 
both in terms of cost of space and manpower, and of the cost of 
maintaining optimum storage conditions (temperature, humidity, etc.). 
2) There is a widespread belief, which this article will show to be 
wholly unfounded, that modern digital transcription technology is 
practically perfect, so that it is wrongly believed that the digital 
transcription is virtually as good as the original master.

In fact, as we shall see, there is every reason to believe that 
future technologies will be able to recover a much more accurate 
sound from the original masters than can current transcription 
technologies, and we shall go into some detail about what this 
information in the master is and how it will be used in the future.

1c. An awful warning

This belief that modern transcription technology is practically 
perfect is not a new one, and there are past awful warnings about how 
historical material can be lost. By way of a typical example, during 
the 1960's and 1970's, whenever historical 78 rpm material was 
remastered onto analogue tape for commercial release by some major 
record companies, the original master parts were then destroyed, 
unknown at the time to the remastering engineers involved - who of 
course were aware of how compromised the transcription was with 
available technology. The result is that it is not now possible to 
remaster to digital from the original masters, meaning that this 
material has the extra drop-out, modulation noise, flutter and other 
losses inherent in the analogue tape technology used but not inherent 
in the original 78 rpm medium.

Also, as recent revelations about the chemical self-destructing 
properties of certain master-tape media used around 10 years ago has 
made clear, newer storage media cannot be guaranteed to have good 
archival storage properties, and this is very true of most known 
digital storage media, where the risk of an unrecoverable loss of 
digits beyond the powers of error correction is very real, especially 
for media such as DAT that are pushing storage technology to its 
limits.
1d. Alternatives

There are alternatives to destroying the original masters if the cost 
of storage is too high. One is to deposit master recordings into 
national or charitably funded archive organisations, such as the 
National Sound Archives in the UK. The National Sound Archives, in 
particular, has a rigorous policy for preventing breaches of 
copyright of material in its hands.

<znip>





--
w/best regards,
seva
mastering engineer
http://www.soundcurrent.com


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Things are not what they seem to be; nor are they otherwise.
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