I third that.
Sent from my ringing donkey
On 30 באוק 2012, at 16:25, Tom Fine <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> There's also the whole issue of "cultural relevance." A tape of a beloved town elder talking about the old days may be of great value and enrichment to a couple of dozen people in a town historical society, and perhaps of great help to a kid working on a history project for high school. If that audio is locked up in an inaccessible medium, it's useless. But, it's not widely valuable under any circumstances. So, if there's some guy in town with a working cassette player and minimal knowledge about digital transfers, I think it's great if he makes the transfer, unlocks the audio and benefits his neighbors. As long as the old-timer's words are audible, they are once again culturally relevant. So I again suggest that people sitting on large piles of narrow-interest oral histories, interviews, that sort of likely-lo-fi audio, don't stand on circumstance. Favor accessibility and availability over strict adherence to technical excellence.
>
> -- Tom Fine
>
> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Richard L. Hess" <[log in to unmask]>
> To: <[log in to unmask]>
> Sent: Tuesday, October 30, 2012 10:14 AM
> Subject: Re: [ARSCLIST] compact audio cassette questions
>
>
>> Hi, Tom,
>>
>> In the dozen or so years that I have been active in audio archiving (as opposed to the previous 40+ years where I was active in audio recording and system/facility design) I have seen a tendency to not touch a recording until it can be transferred with the utmost quality. I am NOT pointing to anyone in particular here, but rather a mindset that may be diminishing. I recall in the past "what is the best A-D converter" questions when, for many applications, the answer is "many will work".
>>
>> One of the questions that haunt people responsible for overall conservation is "how do we empower local archives to undertake these preservation projects when the alternative is letting the material rot into oblivion?" There will never be enough grant funding to pay for all the culturally worthy projects. Some of the most culturally important artifacts rest with people currently unequipped to preserve it. Much of this type of work has been done on artifacts documenting First Nations people, sometimes funded by outsiders with an interest in maintaining the history of a rapidly vanishing culture. More than once, the preservation work has been funded by the original reporter/producer who commissioned/made the recordings decades earlier. These recordings are the ones that most often are burned into optical media if there is no large-scale sponsor/host for the finished material.
>>
>> These recordings were often made under adverse circumstances on inexpensive equipment. It was a joy to transfer a full-track mono 7.5 in/s recording last night for a university client. I had forgotten what good S/N was on a spoken word tape. Alas, this had two whines (very stable) at about 1500 and 1800 Hz that can be easily removed via the Sampltude FFT filter.
>>
>> I did receive permission to post a tape clip that a client was very pleased with the cleanup. I will let the list know when it is posted as it may be a useful frame of reference for the type of tapes Tom and I are discussing here.
>>
>> Cheers,
>>
>> Richard
>>
>> On 2012-10-30 9:51 AM, Tom Fine wrote:
>>> I TOTALLY agree with Richard! You don't need a Nak Dragon and years of experience tweaking parameters to successfully transfer a pile of oral history interviews and get audible results (assuming the original recordings were done with enough competence to produce audibiliy, which is not always the case), for instance. A pile of recital recordings at a music school may be a different animal. My advice would be, following a quicky in-house transfer of the lower-grade audio material, store the cassettes in a dry, reasonably cool environment and if there are a couple of tapes that need extra treatment, they are there to send to a professional.
>>>
>>> -- Tom Fine
>>>
>>
>> --
>> 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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