[[ARTICLE) Study: Audio Recordings of US History Fading Fast

[sunshineonacloudyday]

Interesting article--

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/articl...a000549D88.DTL

...Makes me appreciate my precious old vinyl even more!

[arrr&bee]

Amen to that sunshine,i love my vinyl and it's sad that a lot of history is being lost.

[soulster]

The article makes the reader assume that all this stuff has been archived to digital. It has not. A lot of recordings have been allowed to deteriorate with nothing done at all.

The article also tries to imply that digital cannot be played back in the future, However, this assumes that t5he codecs will not be available in the future to decode the information.

A real danger is that tape machines will be unavailable in the future. Already, tape plaback decks are becoming more scarce by the day, with fewer people able to repair and maintain the machines that are in operation. In fact, most studios now rent tape decks because it isn't in the budget to keep one on hand.

Sure, it's great to have your old music on vinyl, but what about much music made post 1980? A lot of the digital master tapes are unplayable for a variety of reasons, despite the current crop of converters that will playback any sample rate ever devised. Too many analog master recordings are also deteriorating, and were never backed up or stored properly. Many are missing.

As the article points out, many recordings are held hostage to current copyright laws that prevent them being worked with.

And and to all of this, the new generation of audio engineers have zero experience with, or knowledge of, working with analog tape and the machines.

[nomis]

I heard long ago when I worked at EMI that many of The Beach Boys masters had disintergrated-they had a hard job remastering them...

[soulster]

Back in 1997, Billboard Magazine published a very controversial article by Bill Holland. It describes the awful things record labels did to master recordings.

http://sunraarkive.blogspot.com/2008...-archival.html