8 Feb
2007
8 Feb
'07
12:42 a.m.
Digitizing old analogue recordings SHOULD be as
important to music
buffs as archiving programs is to us. THAT is where the "carnage" will
take place.
Digitizing 78's is important to me, they are fragile, and degrade every time
you play them. With careful work, and a lot of effort my digital copies of
78's sound better than playing the 78 itself on my Stereo. This is in part
due to the lack of a proper pre-amp for 78's on my part. At the same time,
it makes no real sense to digitize 33's or 45's at this point as the vinyl
will outlast the CD-R's I'd put them on, and the CD-R's would be much lower
quality. Last I looked it's impossible to make your own SA-CD or DVD-A
disks (though I'm now seeing some stuff on DVD-A).
Old analogue tape vaults will be the abattoirs, and it
is
nearly certain that much music will, sadly, never make it back out of
them. It would be wonderful if they would at least digitize everything
they have, so that, should they be ABLE to work out the licensing at a
later date, they have something to release. Failing that, historians of
the future will have access to the music, even if it never is a
commercial entity. I can't imagine that creating a digital master of
the original tapes would be that expensive, and the storage would be
significantly cheaper. Leave the re-mixing, and fixing, etc. for some
later time, but MOVE the information onto digital media as quickly as
possible.
Do you have any idea how much time, money, and skill it takes to read those
old masters? Try reading up on it sometime. Digitization isn't always the
answer. And yes, something should be done to preserve them. Last year I
read a couple articles on remastering the RCA Living Stereo and Mercury
Living Presense Classical Music libaries to SA-CD, and it made for some very
interesting reading.
BTW, there are libraries out there actively working to preserve the music.
In fact the one that I'm associated with is looking into the possibility of
dedicating space to this.
Zane