| Author | Message | ||
     Pádraig Collins Member Username: Pádraig_collins Post Number: 8930 Registered: 05-2005 |
Rob has probably already seen this, but others may not have done. It's a long read, so get a cup of tea first. You'll want to read every word. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/11/magaz ine/universal-fire-master-recordings.htm l?smid=nytcore-ios-share | ||
| Rob Brookman Member Username: Rob_b Post Number: 1953 Registered: 08-2006 |
I did see this. It's a hell of a heartbreaking story. | ||
| Pádraig Collins Member Username: Pádraig_collins Post Number: 8931 Registered: 05-2005 |
Heartbreaking is right. And so callous by the record company to basically say 'nothing to see here, move along'. | ||
| Randy Adams Member Username: Randy_adams Post Number: 4167 Registered: 03-2005 |
I saw that article as well. I think it's interesting that I don't even remember reading of it here in LA when it occurred and I live directly on the other side of the Hollywood Hills from Universal City. It probably won't make you feel enormously better but as a couple of commentarists to the NYT article explained, magnetic recording tape isn't very durable in any case. Over the past decade or so, people have been encountering major problems with the breakdown of both the backing material on which the ferric oxide particles are located and also the failure of the binding of those ferric oxide particles to the backing material. People working in the reissue of old recordings have written about having to heat up the tape in an oven before even being able to run it in a machine for what is likely to be its final time passing through. If you spend a little time on websites geared toward tape-recording anoraks you'll find a lot of discussion of tape degradation. This problem isn't limited to consumer tapes. The material used by companies like Ampex, Scotch and BASF for their higher-quality consumer tapes is exactly the same as that used in the studio with the only difference being the width of the tape and size of the reel. In short, the tapes were already in trouble before the fire occurred. The portion of the article that implies that digital copies of the tapes are inferior is patent nonsense. The tapes that haven't burned are disintegrating as I write this comment. Record companies or other archivists should be digitizing the original unmixed and unmastered multi-track tapes wherever possible. I am referring to the big fat one-inch or two-inch tapes used by the multitrack machines in the recording studios. Digitizing these tapes leaves us a more permanent version of the raw original and then allows future remastering as we see fit without altering the original and thus permitting an infinite number of revisionist remasters down the road. |