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Re: [ARSCLIST] Seeking recommendations for oral history digitization equipment (fwd)
At 09:37 PM 2008-08-14, Tom Fine wrote:
The most cost-effective way to do a large-ish transfer project is do
it once and do it right. So, you don't want to cut too many corners.
Joel has laid out a bunch of good points before. Even for
cassette-quality oral history type stuff, it's best to do a good
-resolution transfer once on a well-maintained deck into a decent
digital signal chain. Bottom-barrell stuff will give bottom-barrell
results but there is a whole range of reasonably-priced and good
quality gear out there.
I would like to add some additional thoughts to Tom's post.
(1) The tapes aren't getting better with age.
(2) Tape machine availability -- especially of high-end machines --
is becoming an issue
(3) I find cassettes to be problematic these days. Lots of azimuth
issues (search for it in my tips and notes section--there is a demo
of good vs bad azimuth) poor channel balance.
(4) Consider parallel ingest. There are lots of reasonable 8-channel
A-D converters that would permit 4-stereo-pair ingest in parallel.
Samplitude will easily deal with it.
With two RME multifaces, I sometimes do 7-parallel ingests. I do 7
because the RME software has 8 presets and preset 8 is "cocktail
party mode" where I hear all 7 tapes at once, coming out of five
speakers and then 1-7 are the stereo views of the individual machines.
Raid storage is getting cheaper. I now have a pair of Netgear
ReadyNAS NV+ and a pair of Thecus N5200 PRO NAS boxes and both are
great and appear to be just what we need. Dual redundant NAS boxes
seem to be pretty safe. Each one is RAID 5 and then the second one is
off-site connected by a fibre link.
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.