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Re: [ARSCLIST] National Recording Preservation Board (NRPB) Study



Well, one question immediately comes to mind. Who CARES about 78's issued after the advent of tape (1947-48), unless the tape master has been lost? Even if only a good-condition LP exists (post-1948), it is almost guaranteed to sound better and have a wider frequency/dynamic range than the 78. So I ask again, who cares about what's gotta be the vast majority of late-era 78's? I mean, they might make a nice novelty, but they have little or no historical value since they're a worst-case/obsolete-technology version of something.

-- Tom Fine

----- Original Message ----- From: "steven c" <stevenc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <ARSCLIST@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Monday, May 15, 2006 6:00 PM
Subject: Re: [ARSCLIST] National Recording Preservation Board (NRPB) Study



----- Original Message ----- From: "Tom Fine" <tflists@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
I honestly didn't know there were 80,000 unique 78 sides recorded! What is
the material?

Steven, do you think you have more disks than Joe Bussard? Did I
understand you correctly that you
have 40 THOUSAND unique 78's (ie no repeats)? Or, how much of that is
overlap?

My estimate is that three million 78's were issued in North America
between 1892 (Berliner's first attempts) and 1960 (last commercial
78's pressed). That would be six million unique sides (or about
5.98 million, allowing for early/classical SF 78's). That gives
me just over 1% of the possible total!

I would currently guess an overlap of around 5%. I'm currently
doing a limited database of label/number only, just to identify
duplicates...at this point I have about 19,000 phonorecords in
data records, with less than a thousand duplications.

And...I suspect there are other privately-held shellac archives
that are larger!

Steven C. Barr


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