[ARSCLIST] Plus Deck

[Frank Forman <fforman1@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Frank Forman" <fforman1@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: "Association for Recorded Sound Discussion List" <ARSCLIST@xxxxxxx>
Cc: <project-gramophone@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>; "Checker" <checker@xxxxxxxxx>
Sent: December 26, 2005 5:25 PM
Subject: Plus Deck


Frank Forman here:

I have purchased this unit, described at http://plusdeck.com. It plugs
into a bay on your computer and lets you pop an audio cassette into it and
make sound files, wav and MP3 among them, to your hard disk. It uses a
serial cable, but my new e-Machine does not take them, and I'll have to
buy a serial card to get it to work.

My purpose is to make DVDs from 1000-2000 C-90s I inherited from William
Lampe, an elementary school teacher in Huron, SD, from his estate. Among
many misc. 78s of classical music, they contain most of the Victor and
Columbia M-sets. They were made a consumer grade turntable, amplifier, and
cassette recorder. They have given both of us, and others, a great deal of
pleasure over the years. I'm too hard of hearing to tell, but Bill and
others insisted that they sounded, for all the purpose of just listening,
as satisfying as those reprocessed for CDs by transfer engineers like
Mark Obert-Thorn.

Residual copyright problems, as you all know, preclude putting these on a
server in the United States. If I could get someome to host them on a
server outside this country, I could make DVDs of MP3 files of the C-90s.
There are many projects underway to put huge numbers of 78s onto websites,
but so far this has been mostly preliminary talk, esp. over standards of
quality for the transfers, which are uniformly set at high professional
standards. Money to do the job to fully professional standards might be as
much as $100 million for all 78s, classical and popular.

(I have describe this before, what I call the four Cs: collecting.
converting, cataloging (absolutely essential), and copyright. Even if the
copyright problem can be gotten around and collectors are willing to lend
their discs to the converters, we are still talking about vast sums for
the middle two Cs. The cost of maintainnig the site is trivial, compared
to the four Cs. The $100 million would include the Old Record Foundation,
say, itself buying and warehousing the 78s. Cataloging, as everyone in
ARSC knows, can be indefinitely refined. You may recall my own "Acoustic
Chamber Music Sets, 1899-1926: A Discography," which appeared in three
parts in the ARSC Journal in 2000 and 2001. That had an unusually high
level of documentation for each recording, but even describing the
contents of each M set would require a good deal of work, since all lists
of M-sets contain errors and a standard format would have to be devised,
just for this preliminary project of putting Bill's M-sets onto a site.

(Of course, the philanthropist could simply buy out any residual 
copyrights that are held by claimants in the United States and transfer 
them to the Old Record Foundation or, even better, just put them into the 
public domain. I doubt that the total profits from CDs of classical 78s 
since the beginning of CDs are more than $1 million. Any estimates?)

Getting Bill's tape onto a site, provided the sound is at least reasonably
adequate, might do wonders to show philanthropists that here is something
that is not just theoretical but actual. These M-sets would remain on the
site until the money rolls in in pieces and each M-set gets replaced with
a thoroughly engineered job from original 78 rpm source material.

In short, I want to jump start the process of the grand 78 to Web dream we
all have.

What I'd like to get from this list is an appraisal of the PlusDeck and a
volunteer to place the result on a server or help in finding one. My
difficulty is that I am extremely hard of hearing and don't want to spend
hundreds of hours producing something of poor quality, nor to do a lot of
work and being unable to find anyone willing to host the results. I would
also like to know about how cheap and medium grade C-90s deteriorate over
time.

Frank