Indeed it would! I was once hired to record oral histories of SF Port people before they passed on. We had four couples around a table in the Ferry Building, responding to questions and conversing. Each had a lavalier mic and we used a Dugan System auto mixer into Pro Tools. Two sessions like that before they ran out of funding. ’Twas fun while it lasted and sounded darn good!
I had a few dozen cassettes of a famus psychologist to transfer from classes at a college back East. I noticed that the last few words were repeated on the other side, and sure enough later on they got the original reels, and I got to do it all again but better. Been there, done that! :-)
Good move to make them more affordable - ethics trump (Ooo, hard to use that word any more!) profits.
It has amazed me how good a recording can be made with an iPhone laying on a table - they are so thin, it is like a PZM, and can be enhanced for pretty good clarity!
(I recommend Retro Recorder for this - been using it for meeting records and darn good for that!)
<http://mcdsp.com/2013/08/06/retro-recorder/> and they got the visual design just right:
<http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/review/retro_recorder_1.1.1> More than a toy!)
<L>
Lou Judson
Intuitive Audio
415-883-2689
On Jan 21, 2016, at 11:14 AM, Richard L. Hess <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> On 1/20/2016 8:49 PM, Lou Judson wrote:
>> I wish people would hire engineers to record oral histories!
>
> Wouldn't that be Nirvana?
>
> I recall that there was one client who had a mix of reels and cassettes of oral histories. They started out with reels. Someone made cassette copies of the reels so the client wanted me to digitize the cassette copies, but she didn't want to pay the extra cost of digitizing from the reels (the reels needed baking). I dropped my price on the reels as I refused to do it from the cassettes when the reels were still transferrable.
>
> The reels were good--even the 1.88 in/s ones, though the odd 7.5 in/s one was spectacular. Anyway, I convinced myself that the reels were recorded by someone who knew what they were doing with a good external mic (like usually came with a Uher).
>
> So then they got to the cassettes...yup, $29.95 drugstore cassette recorders with built-in mics sitting just far enough off tables...
>
> Cheers,
>
> Richard
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