On 2011-10-20 12:08 PM, Thatcher Graham wrote:
> The content on certain cassettes is no more or less rare or treasured
> than what you'll find in your own collections.
A significant portion of my work comes from people with cassettes that
they made. My insurance company and I agreed it is not a good idea to
make duplicates of commercial cassettes, so I don't. Some time in the
1970s, people felt that a cassette was good enough to preserve history,
so while there are excellent quality oral histories from the 1950s,
1960s, and in to the 1970s on reels, from the late 1960s on we see many
oral histories on cassettes. There was also the difference that someone
who could reliably thread a reel-to-reel tape recorder also might know
something about the need for more than one mic and few reel-to-reels had
built-in mics. So, the actual recording quality was often much better on
the reels than the "plunk the cassette down in the middle of a table"
school of cassette recording.
I know a management consultant in this area who was having a
high-profile meeting of about 16-20 executives in a round-table
discussion. The arrangement was an open-rectangle of tables in a hotel
conference room. She said she absolutely had to have it recorded and it
had to be intelligible and no excuses for failure. I had her go out and
buy a Zoom H2 and she also rented (there was a budget) my Zoom H2. We
set both in 4-channel mode and she placed them at either end of the
table array, inside, and hit record.
The lady who transcribed the entire event found the different
perspective tracks quite useful for pulling one voice out of the crowd.
So for $400, we had an 8-channel recorder with two groups of four sync'd
channels -- each group being close, but not sync'd with the other. This
includes mics.
Anyway, I think the nadir of oral histories came with the cassette...and
we're not out of it yet.
Cheers???
Richard
--
Richard L. Hess email: [log in to unmask]
Aurora, Ontario, Canada (905) 713 6733 1-877-TAPE-FIX
http://www.richardhess.com/tape/contact.htm
Quality tape transfers -- even from hard-to-play tapes.
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