They gather, test and evaluate. What right have they to withold this data? Can it be uncovered through the Freedom on Information act? Is there anything in the constitution that prevents them from disclosing this info? Steve Smolian Original Message: ----------------- From: Richard L. Hess [log in to unmask] Date: Sat, 8 Mar 2003 11:45:03 -0800 To: [log in to unmask] Subject: Re: [ARSCLIST] International Archive for Recording Devices There have been many suggestions here that are great. Steve's recent post about sharing resources with other evaluation organizations was a good one. The reason that the government does research and doesn't publish names is they don't want to interfere with the commercial marketplace as that might not even be legal. It certainly would bring a test of the legality. On the other hand, however, I'd like to suggest that a polling of the experts here on this list is about as valuable as you're going to get, in reality. One of the items in the mix is familiarity. I suspect, for example, that Graham Newton gets better results out of his Ampex ATR-800s than I would AND I suspect that I get better results out of my Sony APR-5003Vs than perhaps Graham would--at least initially. Especially in reel-to-reel, each machine has its idiosyncrasies and when those are understood by the operator, and worked around, then the results can be stupendous. I think we had pretty good unanimity on the cassette deck of choice for restoration--I'll admit to being the odd outlier on this, but I took the route of recommending an out-of-production machine because for my purposes, it is superior--but there is an overhead to maintaining them. I know that many of you cannot take that route and must buy items that are new and available from the usual source. There is nothing wrong with the Tascam 122 MKIII and it is also, in my opinion, probably the best cassette machine available new today. I've designed them into many projects although I don't have hands-on experience with them. Perhaps the easy thing for people to do would be for someone (not me) to volunteer to tally the postings and put up a Web page something like: ARSC Member Equipment Preferences That's really what it is...it's not a rating system. The pages could look like: CASSETTE REPRODUCER ==================== Tascam 122B MK III: John, Sally, Joe ... Nakamichi Dragon: Richard REEL TO REEL REPRODUCER ======================= Ampex ATR-800: Graham Sony APR-5003V: Richard Studer A820 2CH: Parker, Richard, Fred Studer A810: Richard, John, Sam Studer A807: Richard, David Otari MTR-10/12: Richard (with reservations), Dave Not scientific, but a way for someone to get an idea of what some of us think without having to have the thread over and over. We could probably even put email links in there...although we should ask which email address (not necessarily the list address) we'd want...me: [log in to unmask] for this kind of stuff. Cheers, Richard -------------------------------------------------------------------- mail2web - Check your email from the web at http://mail2web.com/ .