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Re: [ARSCLIST] 'New' solution for sticky shed
Backing up Richard's point -- it's just not that expensive to transfer and store in VERY high
quality. You can get set up and work in all 96K/24-bit for LESS money than it used to cost for a
noticeably inferior DAT or CD-grade system (44.1 or 48/16 bit). The A-D chips are better and cheaper
than ever. The D-A chips likewise. I'm a big advocate for spending a little extra for good analog
stages on both ends, but none of that needs to be ridicu-cost unless you WANT to pay a huge premium
to have a cult brand in your studio.
Regarding 30-year-old stuck like glue analog tapes. We need to be sane here and cut losses. If they
can be baked to playability, play them into a good digital converter and move on. Do not waste money
trying to keep around decades old and clearly chemically shot tapes. And certainly don't waste money
on the cult-cure-of-the-hour because NONE of them have worked over time and most of them are
promoted by half-sane charlitans (like much audio gear, especially in the high-end hifi arena).
Spend your money on a great managed digital storage system. Your grandkids will thank you.
-- Tom Fine
----- Original Message -----
From: "Richard L. Hess" <arclists@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <ARSCLIST@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Monday, May 14, 2007 5:13 PM
Subject: Re: [ARSCLIST] 'New' solution for sticky shed
Hello, Konrad,
I understand your point, but when someone is ready they will come over here from TapeOp and
rec.audio.pro.
I just got asked if I was hallucinating on the Studer list for saying something similar to what
Jim said and was told that analog is alive and well and being widely used--I think I might have
finally gotten my point across of "fine if you want to use analog, also make a simultaneous
digital copy, 'cause archiving analog today is an unnecessary cost burden on the archive and on
the future".
I will gladly share and accept knowledge with/from this group, but there are other groups who
"know it all" such as the reel-to-reel group where the opinion is "two-track is junk, give me
quarter track". Life is too short to even attempt to educate some of these groups. They live in
their own parallel universe.
I have a client right now who is spending lots of his money with me to take a 1/4-track and
1/2-track mixed 7.5 in/s analog master and make a 15 in/s 2-track analog master to cut a disc
from. He won't let me do the cleanup and editing in the DAW as he doesn't want it touched by
digital--though I'm sending him a 96/24 ref copy to see if he wants me to proceed with the
expensive analog recording--expensive as he has to bear the full cost of the record alignment of
the machine as there is no other client to amortize it over. I haven't done an analog recording in
three years.
I think we all need to take to heart what Jim said. In correspondence with Ric Bradshaw, he
wondered why archives did not get content off failing carriers 20 years ago when it would have
been easier. He doesn't subscribe to "define a perfect storage environment and it will last
forever" either.
Thanks, Jim, for the detailed explanation and the market research. I, too, in my small way, am
working on cheap, easy, and effective ways to play lots of tapes. I'm looking at "massively
parallel" operations (i.e. I need a justification for the 16 tracks of digitization that I have
<smile>) and I hope next week to be ingesting four reels and four cassettes simultaneously--two
channels each. I think the cold playing is an easy solution to the squealing tape problem.
The other thing to consider is that some/much of the content while interesting and important is
not the pinnacle of quality. While quality matters, the last dB or % of quality matters less for a
large segment of recordings. For example, in a lecture recording that is already flawed by bad mic
placement and lots of room rumble, finessing fractions of a dB are far less important than making
an excellent (albeit not absolute perfection) copy and capturing the thoughts represented in that
lecture. In fact, the more I look at the numbers, the less I am sure that you can get absolute
perfection because the recording process is less well defined than we would like to think.
I have asked the question in some of my presentations over the last half dozen years: "Will our
grandchildren be happier if we saved more at slightly lower (but adequate) quality or less at an
extreme pinnacle of quality?" Somehow, I always think the answer is "more" rather than "absolute
highest quality"...but I could be wrong.
Cheers,
Richard
Richard L. Hess email: richard@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Aurora, Ontario, Canada (905) 713 6733 1-877-TAPE-FIX
Detailed contact information: http://www.richardhess.com/tape/contact.htm
Quality tape transfers -- even from hard-to-play tapes.