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

[Malcolm F Davidson <malcolm_davidson@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Who cares indeed?  This brings up the vexing issue of content alone versus
the actual original physical media.  The greek philosopher  Epicurus, stated
"Live today, forget the cares of the past".   A wise or foolish thought
perhaps, worth nothing on today's laptops, but invaluable on the original
parchment.  I choose not to separate the content from the carrier, for their
is intrinsic beauty and value in the 78, for all its known limitations.
Keeping the disk safely and the original sound digitized at 96/88.2 24 bit
has merit.

The challenge, because of limited funding is always where do we draw the
line?  In a previous posting I stated that we need to look at funding,
education and process.  If we have low levels of funding then we cannot do
justice to process and education.  More funding enables a more coherent
approach to be taken for protection of the music and spoken word.  Think of
the knowledge that is lost when one of the archiving community's elders
statesmen passes on?

Many priceless artifacts in Iraq were lost under the jackboots of war, I
doubt many 78's can be saved from the incessant trampling of the ipod
generation.

Malcolm Davidson

----- Original Message -----
From: "Mike Richter" <mrichter@xxxxxxx>
To: <ARSCLIST@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Monday, May 15, 2006 7:10 PM
Subject: Re: [ARSCLIST] National Recording Preservation Board (NRPB) Study


> Tom Fine wrote:
> > 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.
>
> I could not understand this post until I realized that it assumes that
> all 78s issued after 1947 or so were also published on LP. Not so in my
> experience. In addition, while a transfer to LP may "sound better" in
> some sense, if the original issue was on 78 and the content is of value
> at all, the 78 is the primary (available) source.
>
> One may argue which source should be seen as primary when issues were
> concurrent in different formats (LP/45, LP/open-reel, ...).
>
> Finally, in cases where original tapes, metal parts or other earlier
> sources are available, they may or may not be primary and may or may not
> be appropriate to archive in some fashion.
>
> Mike
> --
> mrichter@xxxxxxx
> http://www.mrichter.com/
>
>