Re: [ARSCLIST] Preservation media WAS: Cataloguing still :-)

[Tom Fine <tflists@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Grooved disks do seem to be the cockroaches of audio storage -- ie they seem to survive all sorts of 
conditions that destroy other media, including the simple march of time.

Cassettes -- I have a good built-in laboratory here because my father had one of the first cassette 
duplicating operations in NY. I have quite a few tapes from those days. Quick aside, some of the 
better ones, as far as content goes, are the Pan Am-produced "walking tours" of various European 
cities. I gotta transfer those so I can pop them into my iPod if I ever have a free half day in one 
of those cities.

Anyway, almost all of those old cassettes still play. They've gotten stiffer over time and I've had 
to replace shells on a few of them. The worse problem they have is the felt pad falling off. The 
problem is, back in those early days, cassettes and high-fidelity were different zones of the audio 
universe, so it's hard to know how much the sound quality has degraded. Spoken-word retains good 
audibility with much more typical tape degradation than high-quality music retains high quality.

The oldest cassettes I have that were recorded with good fidelity and are of good-sounding music 
date from 1979, when I got my first good-quality cassette deck (a Sanyo, believe it or not -- it 
really made great-sounding tapes until I upgraded in 1983 to the Teac deck that got me thru college 
and into adulthood). Those are all Maxell UD-XLII C-90's and they all still play well and sound 
great. And some of them have been played literally hundreds of times.

I would have thought, with the tight data-pack on cassettes, they'd not last this long, much less 
still sound good (yes, over time, the high end has dropped off, but not disappeared and can be fixed 
with an equalizer). Much more problematic are later cassettes, made with my last heavy-use cassette 
deck, a Yamaha. I stupidly bought into Dolby C and it has bitten me. Dolby C needs high-freq 
information to stay in day-of-recording condition in order to track correctly. Well, that just 
doesn't happen with cassettes, especially the C-100's that were the norm as CD's became the release 
medium of the major record companies. So many of those later-era cassettes do not sound very good 
anymore. Luckily, soon after many of them were made, CD duping became cheap/quick/common, so I've 
managed to get all of the material on CD, and thus gave away all the cassettes.

-- Tom Fine

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "steven c" <stevenc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <ARSCLIST@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Saturday, September 02, 2006 7:47 PM
Subject: Re: [ARSCLIST] Preservation media WAS: Cataloguing still :-)


> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "Richard L. Hess" <arclists@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> > At 10:13 AM 9/2/2006, Mike Csontos Mwcpc6@xxxxxxx wrote:
> > >To me, the long term archiving by digitization of books is just as
> > >questionable as it is for images and audio.
> > Mike,
> >
> > What would you propose as the alternative?
> > I think you'll agree that regular cloning of analog tapes will degrade
> quality.
> > I would like to suggest that the effective life of an analog tape is,
> > with luck, on average 50 years, although it seems the _design_ life
> > (of at least some brands) might have been less.
> >
> > Digital is the best shot we have to capture recordings before they
> > deteriorate (further) and then be able to rejuvenate them over time
> > to keep them safe.
> >
> > I don't see shellac, vinyl, nor analog tape being a viable method of
> > maintaining the high quality of original recordings made from c. 1954
> > until the present.
> Actually, I have a handful of Philips cassettes which are approaching
> forty years of age, and still play (well, as well as they ever did)...
> do I expect these to suddenly burst into flame, explode, dissolve
> or otherwise go see Jesus around the fall of 2018?
>
> As well, I have shellac discs which are now over a century old...and
> don't appear to have suffered ill effects from age (wish I could say
> the same thing about myself!).
>
> So it looks like our best approach may be to recreate (possibly in
> an improved form, by using a much more finely-ground "filler" in
> the mix?) shellac-moulding technology...?!
>
> Steven C. Barr