Hello, Kevin,
There are two things to consider:
(1) Does 44.1/16 represent any quality loss from the original? Since
you say they are spoken word recordings, I would suggest that if
there is any, it is slight.
(2) Has your tape playback quality increased dramatically over ten
years (i.e., were these tapes played on a Wollensak and you now have a Studer)?
If you don't think you'd get any meaningful quality improvement by
investing in 500 hours of re-transfer (while other material then
waits), I would go the EAC route. Give the discs to a good clerical
person, train them in the use of EAC, save the log files and you
review them (note that errors can be caused at track transitions for
some reason w/o ultimately affecting the quality of transfer). I
would suspect that in 100 hours of clerical time and less than 500
minutes of your time it would be done.
Cheers,
Richard
At 09:22 AM 2007-04-27, [log in to unmask] wrote:
> Ten years ago, the organization I am with was reformatting
> to 1/4" analog as preservation master and CD-DA for security backup
> and access. Now, I have a question. We need to either recopy the
> stuff already done to 1/4" while the originals are still
> viable (about 500 hours of material). Or, we can extract to .wav
> from the discs. Since the discs were done as security backups
> their quality was checked with a Clover Systems analyzer which
> means we have documentation demonstrating their superior
> quality. Aside from their being 16 / 44.1k what does everyone
> think of such a scenario? Obviously the reason we want to do this
> is cost. I would use Exact Audio Copy to assure error-free
> extractions. These are spoken word recordings.
>
> Thank you.
> Kevin Irelan
Richard L. Hess email: [log in to unmask]
Aurora, Ontario, Canada (905) 713 6733 1-877-TAPE-FIX
Detailed contact information: http://www.richardhess.com/tape/contact.htm
Quality tape transfers -- even from hard-to-play tapes.
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