Well, preserving the format in this instance is a misnomer, as the format itself is not preserved, only the program material thereupon.Don't kid yourself. It's still all about the money, or at least the recognition/acknowledgement of your peers, otherwise boards such as these wouldn't exist.
Even the most junior archivist, transcriptionist or restorationist in even the smallest archive gets paid for his work. Of course, at the original time of preservation, archival work by its' own definition is commercially non-viable. Nobody in the classic film, television or music days could have known about the development of CD's, DVD,s Blu-Ray or Internet-streaming of content at the time of original production.
However much we all wish it was not all about the money and that people with the professional ways and means were altruistic, the same as in any other non-commercial art-form, patrons of the arts need to be found to provide the means for perpetuating the cause. If the resulting preservation, restoration and transcription becomes commercially viable at some later date, then all the better.Consumers (rolleyes). I’m just like any other professional engineer in the last 50 years, under whose tutelage I was trained, make no apologies therefor, and why my sign-off everyplace else on the Net (Lathe Trollers, BSNPubs, Steve Hoffman, etc. etc. etc.) is:
There’s 2 kinds of men & 2 kinds of tape.
Low Noise & Wide Range. LN is OK fidelity, cheap & easy to come by.
WR is High Fidelity, more rare & abrasive to it's environment.
Remember that when you run across a Grumpy Engineer
-D)
which I took from the late Wally Traugott.
I’m sure you couldn’t even PAY to take your LP or tape collection to Bernie Grundman or Frank DeLuna or Stan Ricker or Steven Marcussen or Doug Sax or any other Hollywood, New York, Nashville or Miami mastering engineer and have them perform the transfers and restorations themselves.
Like me, they wouldn’t have the time or interest. They’d take it in, sure, charge you their going studio rate and then make a mint by farming it out to the kids for free at the junior colleges in the L.A. Valley, Upstate, NY, in Mississippi or Alabama for Nashville, or up in Broward County in the case of Miami to use as practice in the computer lab, just like they did when I was a junior engineer.It's not about the money. Uh-Huh. Like the Quadraphonic Preservation Society.
Uh-Huh. Well, we all know what happened to
that venture don't we?
Grown men who ``aren't into it for the money or recognition'' squabbling over money and recognition just like aaaaaaaannybody else.
But I never said there wasn’t a place in the marketplace for the home-hobbyist or junior or wannabe- engineer doing it for either his own or his friends' enjoyment. I just said I was no longer one of them. For about 30 years now.
Yes, anyone can do transfers, like everyone can cook. (
Ratatouille) but that doesn't mean everyone
should. Unfortunately, from a professional commercial restoration standpoint, 99% of the consumer-transferred, or consumer-restored material received by just about any professional studio engineer can only be used as an audition copy to possibly evaluate the potential validity for artistic or commercial restoration. Almost all of the time, the original material must once again be summoned from its' original source for the transfers and restorations to be performed anew to modern commercial standards. And, therein lies the difference between the consumer/hobbyist doing it in his basement, garage or bedroom using consumer gear and the professional in a studio with a staff.
You wouldn’t ask a plumber or a car mechanic or any other tradesman to come to your house or even a comedian to entertain you for free, same holds true for professional studio engineers and their professional restoration equipment, trainees and support staff, all of which must be paid for in one capacity or the other.In the professional world, at least some noise reduction is a necessity for a restoration to be commercially viable. Tapes, films and discs pick up additional noise over the years, and the modern consumer ear does not magically mask the hiss, pops and crackle as the ear of the vintage-format listener once did. And, again, the difference to that and studio work is that the studios would use either the I.R.E.N.E. scanning system for monaural discs or the Confocal Microscopy technique described in this video:
http://www.kqed.org/quest/television/how-edison-got-his-groove-back
for stereo or vertically-modulated discs to eliminate the action of a linear-tracker, i.e. the stylus follows the groove, becomes out-of-kilter as a result, trips a motor to drive the tonearm back into alignment and repeats the process throughout the disc resulting in the stylus being continuously behind or ahead in exact groove alignment as well as eliminating stylus playback artifacts such as vinyl-grain noise.
MIT here SCA with graduate-school work at CalTech in Pasadena and four years of interning at JPL which is why I know about the Cray Supercomputer arrays.
--------------------------------------------------------------------
There’s 2 kinds of men & 2 kinds of tape.
Low Noise & Wide Range. LN is OK fidelity, cheap & easy to come by.
WR is High Fidelity, more rare & abrasive to it's environment.
Remember that when you run across a Grumpy Engineer
-D)
