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Re: [ARSCLIST] formats: Racal Wordsafe, RSC Tracker
Hi, Tom,
There is a quest to preserve lots of things.
As to the 9/11 9-11 tapes, the City of New York has a local
contractor working on it and they apparently had gotten rid of the
playback machines and he contacted me, but I didn't think my
20-channel 1/2-inch Dictaphone was robust enough to do the job and
required too many mods. I don't know what they've done.
I was contacted by a Scandinavian national organization that had a
lot of broadcast logger tapes that they had decided to save in a
5-track (4 audio tracks plus timecode) 1/4-inch format. Joe Dundovic
had two of these heads. I got one a long time ago and I pointed the
Scandinavian to Joe to get the other.
IF we are going to preserve some of this oddball stuff, the sooner
the better. We have a much better chance of playing 2-track 15 in/s
1/4-inch tape next decade than some of this stuff.
Also, some of this stuff is still be used in legal
proceedings--another contact since I've been back from vacation also
looking for some Racal stuff.
For the record, I only have Racal INSTRUMENTATION recorders -- (3)
1/4-inch 4-track (15/16-60 in/s) and (1) 1/2-inch 7-track. These take
small reels (up to 8" only), with the 1/2-inch being on NAB hubs.
These are the Racal Store 4DS and 7DS, respectively.
With all of these formats being semi-proprietary, you practically
need a player for each format--or at least a robust transport and
head assemblies and timecode readers from each format.
While I agree that telemarketer and service centre calls are pretty
boring--and even run-of-the-mill 9-11 calls are boring (my second
40-track 1-inch recorder came with a test tape from Kansas City
9-11), the Scandinavian group, if I recall correctly, were preserving
program logging tapes as many of the shows were not recorded in any other way.
Cheers,
Richard
At 06:41 PM 2007-09-12, Tom Fine wrote:
Hi Brandon:
If you can say, what is on these tapes? As far as I can tell, they
typical application was stuff like telemarketer "this call may be
recorded" stuff and emergency-911 dispatchers. Unless it's the
September 11 E911 tapes or something similar, I'd question whether
what's on the tape is worth a lot of extraction work. Richard and
others would know better but I wonder if there's anything beyond
barely-audible fidelity in this format. Again, though, if it centers
around some important time/place/event, it's of course worth all efforts.
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.