Universal Music Fire & Audio Fidelity Multichannel SACDs

[humprof]

There was a bit of a silver lining to that section:


I wonder how many of those original five (Thrill through Aja) are left?

Lots of chatter about this today on the Dandom FB group, not surprisingly. One poster says [edit: quotes further from the same paragraph of the NYT Magazine article that @sjcorne cited:]

UMG documents suggest that Steely Dan masters — different tapes than those sought by Azoff — were in Building 6197 when the fire hit. According to [Randy] Aronson [former "Senior Director of Vault Operations" for UMG, fired in 2016], these likely included certain album masters, as well as multitrack masters holding outtakes and unreleased material. “Those songs,” Aronson says, “will never be heard again.”

The Times writer doesn't specify which "UMG documents" suggest this--or how, precisely, the "certain album masters" purportedly lost in the Building 6197 fire differ from the "multitrack masters of Steely Dan's first releases" that were spared because they'd been moved to Iron Mountain's vault outside Philadelphia for preservation and digitization. Another person in the FB thread confirms he was assured--by Roger Nichols, no less--that "much of the SD material" had indeed been safely ensconced in Philly well before 2008. But no details from him, either. (Still, just because it's "safe" doesn't mean it's retrievable. Another former UMG employee, the co-founder of the defunct Hip-O Select, says that anything transferred to Iron Mountain that happens to be mis- or uncatalogued--and that could amount to quite a lot of material--is effectively "lost to history.")

Later in the piece, Aronson estimates that "[m]ost of the session reels and multitracks stored on the backlot, about 250,000 tapes, were moved to the archive in Pennsylvania. This left approximately 120,000 masters — 175,000, if you accept Aronson’s estimate — in Building 6197. These were the recordings that burned on June 1, 2008." After that, as part of their "Project Phoenix," abandoned after just two years, UMG managed to replace "perhaps a fifth of what had been lost" with safety masters and other duplicates.

 

[4-earredwonder]

I am wondering if the fire was one of the reasons BluRay Audio was suddenly ended? Was there a possibility the master tapes for future BluRay Audio discs were burn't to a crisp?

It's bloody sad, a lot of music history was destroyed, Buddy Holly & Chuck Berry master tapes! The history of Rock 'n' Roll destroyed in one moment.

I think Universal's blu ray audio launch was doomed from day one with poor choice of material, releasing Stereo reissues which previously had multichannel, NOT taking full advantage of BD~A's tremendous storage capabilities, poor advertising and putting an exec in charge who was clueless and indifferent to a similar DVD~A/SACD launch that similarly failed in the early 00's....for similar 'sins of ommission.'

At least BD~As continue to be released by Universal's Classical labels, amply filling those discs with hours of remastered music .......some in multichannel.

As for the actual losses incurred by the Universal fire, because of inept bookkeeping and inaccurate labeling of those precious master tapes, many A list artists' legacies will be lost forever....and sadly, will continue to be as these record companies continue to change hands and its new proprietors haphazardly treat these one of a kind master tapes not as the 'intellectual properties' they are.........but rather as a 'storage problem!'

 

[Ranasakawa]

I think Universal's blu ray audio launch was doomed from day one with poor choice of material, releasing Stereo reissues which previously had multichannel, NOT taking full advantage of BD~A's tremendous storage capabilities, poor advertising and putting an exec in charge who was clueless and indifferent to a similar DVD~A/SACD launch that similarly failed in the early 00's....for similar 'sins of ommission.'

At least BD~As continue to be released by Universal's Classical labels, amply filling those discs with hours of remastered music .......some in multichannel.

As for the actual losses incurred by the Universal fire, because of inept bookkeeping and inaccurate labeling of those precious master tapes, many A list artists' legacies will be lost forever....and sadly, will continue to be as these record companies continue to change hands and its new proprietors haphazardly treat these one of a kind master tapes not as the 'intellectual properties' they are.........but rather as a 'storage problem!'

I agree with your opinions on BluRay Audio, I just thought the Universal fire may have 'added fuel to the fire' for the demise of BR-A so to speak

RE: Storage problems: Unfortunately it started way back in the late 1960s when TV stations such as the BBC decided to simply record over the 3" Video Tapes making the previously screened TV program a once only screening. Incredible TV shows such as Doctor Who was a victim of this. Many amazing BBC recorded audio sessions also were wiped. Luckily some genuine fans recorded many of these BBC sessions, it's funny how the BBC is scrambling to obtain these lost classics now.

A great deal of American TV shows seem to have suffered the same fate. I guess no-one considered digital technology in 1969.

 

[privateuniverse]

Billboard is reporting this morning that many artists are now weighing in regarding the lost masters. Among them, Krist Novoselic who was asked about the masters for Nirvana's Nevermind. He responded "I think they are gone forever."

 

[4-earredwonder]

Billboard is reporting this morning that many artists are now weighing in regarding the lost masters. Among them, Krist Novoselic who was asked about the masters for Nirvana's Nevermind. He responded "I think they are gone forever."

Probably just the tip of the iceberg!

 

[skherbeck]

Hopefully this article will spawn enough artist pressure to get whatever surviving tape masters out there transferred and archived digitally in multiple locations.

 

[Clint Eastwood]

Probably just the tip of the iceberg!

Lettuce hope not

 

[IMachine]

I hope those unreleased Greg Penny mixes of Caribou and Don't Shoot Me weren't in that.
Fredblue, (do you know?)
btw - finally saw Rocketman this past weekend. Excellent from a filmmaking standpoint. Weirdly not accurate and accurate at the same time.

Nope that should not be possible, because a surround mix is surely digitalized.

 

[mlrocker]

I'm moving all my masters to the cloud just to be on the safe side

 

[bmoura]

Sony, because of its investment in CD with Phillips, was a major player in bringing high quality archives to the consciousness of music labels, (which it eventually invested in as well).

That also explains why so many of the albums being reissued today are coming from the Sony Music vaults.
Not a coincidence.

 

[The Rang]

There is a huge thread about this on the Both Sides Now page, written by a well known video professional who knows this Aronson fellow.
Interesting I’m sure, but I can’t read it....the whole thing makes me too sick.
Utterly tragic

 

[humprof]

Lots of chatter about this today on the Dandom FB group, not surprisingly. One poster says [edit: quotes further from the same paragraph of the NYT Magazine article that @sjcorne cited:]



The Times writer doesn't specify which "UMG documents" suggest this--or how, precisely, the "certain album masters" purportedly lost in the Building 6197 fire differ from the "multitrack masters of Steely Dan's first releases" that were spared because they'd been moved to Iron Mountain's vault outside Philadelphia for preservation and digitization. Another person in the FB thread confirms he was assured--by Roger Nichols, no less--that "much of the SD material" had indeed been safely ensconced in Philly well before 2008. But no details from him, either. (Still, just because it's "safe" doesn't mean it's retrievable. Another former UMG employee, the co-founder of the defunct Hip-O Select, says that anything transferred to Iron Mountain that happens to be mis- or uncatalogued--and that could amount to quite a lot of material--is effectively "lost to history.")

Later in the piece, Aronson estimates that "[m]ost of the session reels and multitracks stored on the backlot, about 250,000 tapes, were moved to the archive in Pennsylvania. This left approximately 120,000 masters — 175,000, if you accept Aronson’s estimate — in Building 6197. These were the recordings that burned on June 1, 2008." After that, as part of their "Project Phoenix," abandoned after just two years, UMG managed to replace "perhaps a fifth of what had been lost" with safety masters and other duplicates.

More on the Dan front:

• Ultimate Classic Rock says "Steely Dan released a statement saying, 'We have been aware of ‘missing’ original Steely Dan tapes for a long time now. We’ve never been given a plausible explanation. Maybe they burned up in the big fire. In any case, it’s certainly a lost treasure,'” while
• Pitchfork attributes the statement to manager Irving Azoff.

 

[mandrix]

I uneasily listened to Anthony Mason on the CBS Morning show quickly run down what appeared to be a small portion of a list he was given of older masters that were evidently lost forever.
While I certainly don't blame Universal for the fire, I do blame them for not having adequate backups. I mean, even I know that tape doesn't last forever and should have already been digitized and backed up in several locations.
In our great nation we take down mountain tops to scrape coal out of the ground and (now) rewrite the rules to make pollution easier but can't be bothered with preserving much of anything any more. Just the tip of the iceberg as was noted.
I'm more pissed than shocked.

 

[Old Quad Guy]

This is a recap and a behind the scenes of the story, from this morning, in the "California Today" section of the NYT. This week, The New York Times Magazine published an in-depth account of a 2008 fire on the Universal Studios Hollywood backlot that hadn’t previously been understood as the cultural calamity that it truly was. Thousands of masters of recordings by artists ranging from Al Jolson to Yoko Ono, Patsy Cline to Tupac Shakur, had been incinerated.

As Jody Rosen, a contributing writer to the magazine, put it in the piece: “Had a loss of comparable magnitude to the Universal fire occurred at a different cultural institution — say, the Metropolitan Museum of Art — there might have been wider awareness of the event, perhaps some form of accountability.”

I asked Jody to tell us a little more about how the story came together:

The Universal fire was dramatic event, a story of flames consuming buildings, of precious artifacts going up in smoke, of historical loss on a vast scale. But the story first came to my attention in the most banal form imaginable: in the dry bureaucratese of legal documents and company reports.

About five years ago, I obtained a bunch of paperwork related to the fire. It took me some time to orient myself and begin to wrap my head around what those documents were saying. It took me even longer to find people who knew about the fire and the master recordings that were destroyed in it — and it took longer still to persuade those people to speak to me, both on and off the record.

[Here are the top takeaways from the piece.]

It was really those interviews that parted the mists for me. My sources helped me understand that the destruction of the Universal Music Group vault was a major cultural catastrophe, and they helped me to place that disaster in a larger frame, to understand the huge challenge of archiving and preserving the physical relics of recorded sound in the age of streaming media.

One of the people who agreed to speak on the record was Randy Aronson, who worked as UMG’s director of vault operations for years, both before and after the fire. Mr. Aronson was — still is — very emotional about the fire and the huge toll it took. He told me: “The way I felt in the months after the fire — the only thing I can compare it to is when my mother passed away.”

[Here’s what artists like Questlove and R.E.M. had to sayabout the losses.]

The first time I visited Mr. Aronson at his home near Los Angeles, we sat together and I showed him some of the documents I’d gotten. One of these was an internal UMG report that included a huge list of recording artists, page after page famous musicians, alphabetized by first names.

I went through the list with Mr. Aronson: “John Lee Hooker, did he have recordings in the vault?” “Yes.” “Joni Mitchell, did she have recordings in the vault?” “Yes.” “Judy Garland, did she have tapes in the vault?” “Yes.” I remember kind of staggering out of Mr. Aronson’s house that day, getting into my rental car and driving back to L.A. in a daze.

 

[Old Quad Guy]

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/12/...c0b9d1c1109246016127&regi_id=7772750620190613

 

[4-earredwonder]

I uneasily listened to Anthony Mason on the CBS Morning show quickly run down what appeared to be a small portion of a list he was given of older masters that were evidently lost forever.
While I certainly don't blame Universal for the fire, I do blame them for not having adequate backups. I mean, even I know that tape doesn't last forever and should have already been digitized and backed up in several locations.
In our great nation we take down mountain tops to scrape coal out of the ground and (now) rewrite the rules to make pollution easier but can't be bothered with preserving much of anything any more. Just the tip of the iceberg as was noted.
I'm more pissed than shocked.

One of the more alarming and sobering aspects I took from that TIMES article and had heard before is that even digitizing those absolute masters is NOT archival as even digital media is prone to failure. And since they were attempting to do so many digital back~ups at one time, were they utilizing the very best transfer apparatus as every year, especially now with DSD 256 remastering, even digital archiving has vastly improved.

Since I'm an avid fim buff, I've been reading how film archivists have been paintakingly restoring older film negatives in 4K [and higher], sometimes frame by frame, to preserve ours and worldwide film heritage. VERY doubtful such care was taken digitizing those irreplaceable master tapes ........ hope things vastly improve and the awareness that ALL recordings are part of a legacy and not something to be taken lightly.

 

[skherbeck]

One of the more alarming and sobering aspects I took from that TIMES article and had heard before is that even digitizing those absolute masters is NOT archival as even digital media is prone to failure. And since they were attempting to do so many digital back~ups at one time, were they utilizing the very best transfer apparatus as every year, especially now with DSD 256 remastering, even digital archiving has vastly improved.

Since I'm an avid fim buff, I've been reading how film archivists have been paintakingly restoring older film negatives in 4K [and higher], sometimes frame by frame, to preserve ours and worldwide film heritage. VERY doubtful such care was taken digitizing those irreplaceable master tapes ........ hope things vastly improve and the awareness that ALL recordings are part of a legacy and not something to be taken lightly.

The thing I don't understand is how can a lossless high resolution digital transfer of a master not be considered archival just because the medium is "prone to failure"? Is there a medium that isn't prone to failure? At least with digital back-ups multiple copies can be made easily and stored in multiple locations and copied to new drives on a regular schedule to prevent catastophic loss. (I'm not being argumentative... I really want to know what medium doesn't have a risk of failure, lol)

 

[4-earredwonder]

The thing I don't understand is how can a lossless high resolution digital transfer of a master not be considered archival just because the medium is "prone to failure"? Is there a medium that isn't prone to failure? At least with digital back-ups multiple copies can be made easily and stored in multiple locations and copied to new drives on a regular schedule to prevent catastophic loss. (I'm not being argumentative... I really want to know what medium doesn't have a risk of failure, lol)

That's the rub, skherbeck ..... NOTHING is really archival.......I agree digital unlike analogue can withstand multiple generational transfers without loss but the medium to store it is 'apparently' not archival. I'm no expert but I'm just stating facts which are common knowledge in the industry.

And my main concern is the actual transfer of those precious analogue masters from tape>digital. RUSH jobs or done carefully with state of the art equipment? And of course, we are not privy to that information.

And VERY doubtful, other than the actual Stereo Masters, the studio multitracks were probably not digitized [save for a very few] which precludes any future multichannel remixes from the actual master multitrack tapes. The most we can expect are UPMIXES!

And your assertion that these digital copies can have infinite amounts of back~ups as future proof preservation is right on but we're talking millions upon millions of analogue masters a lot of which have no labeling, coding, etc. It would cost the industry billions!

 

[Old Quad Guy]

Podcast from NYT. Hopefully, you can get the link to work. Or find said Podcast on your favorite app. Podcast should be free.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/13/arts/music/popcast-universal-music-fire.html

 

[Old Quad Guy]

EDIT:
The Podcast above is a must listen, IMHO, at a little over an hour. The articles below sort of go over the same material. I was looking for reactions to the NYT articles by, perhaps, music industry insiders. But this is just the beginning, not the end of a whole lot of crap to hit the fan, one would think. Will keep an eye out. Stay frosty and post what info you find. We have a hell of a lot of work to do.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/pitchf...rehouse-fire-story-but-cites-no-evidence/amp/
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.la...recordings-20190611-story.html?outputType=amp
https://www.google.com/amp/s/variet...008-vault-fire-new-york-times-1203239661/amp/