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A number of years ago Max Schmid of WBAI told me about a collection of very early Jean Shepherd airchecks from the mid-50s that were unplayable because the oxide comes off the base in long strips. A few months after that I had the exact same thing happen with a short segment of tape from about 1957 of about five minutes length alone on a reel. In both cases we had no identification of the tape type. I just received the Basta CD (30-90312) of Andre Popp's 1957 masterpiece "Delirium In Hi-Fi" originally credited to Elsa Popping and Her Pixieland Band or in the original French Elsa Popping et sa Musique Siderante. It won the Grand Prix Academie Charles Cros. The rear cover of the CD booklet shows the orange box of the master tape with the label for Agfa Magnetonband FR. Here is a portion of the liner notes by Piet Schreuders: "The original [1957] mastertape of Delirium in Hi-Fi, untouched for exactly thirty years, was flown in from a Parisian archive to Wisseloord Studios in Holland [in 1987]. The tape box (reproduced on the back of this booklet) had fallen apart and was only held together by a rubber band. The tape had partly detached itself from the spool; sound engineer Emile Elsen spent anxious hours winding it back on. When [producer] Gert-Jan [Blom] and Emile started listening to the tape machine, they watched in horror as the tape disintegrated completely after passing the playback head, leaving only the tape base and a heap of useless emulsion powder. Clearly this mastertape could be played back only once--and for the final time. It was decided then and there to copy it to a digital Betamax machine. You are witnessing that final playback, saved for posterity in digital format and now, almost ten years later, [1997] issued on CD." Unexplained is what part of the tape was destroyed before stopping the first time -- maybe blank or test tones? Also unexplained is what is a "digital Betamax machine" although I assume they mean a Sony F-1 digital encoder into a video recorder. As those who have used the F-1 will often tell, that format is itself in peril, not qualifying for the assurance that the recording is "saved for posterity"! At least IT was usable for mastering the CD ten years later! Imagine their horror if the Beta tape couldn't be played!!!! Further unexplained is if this is the actual studio master or a work-master for cutting the LPs. Are there splices within some of the selections, because there have to have been some edits. Where are the alternate takes? Where are the inserts for the overdubs? Where are the masters for the segments that were played at double or half speed or backwards? Were these segments spliced into the master that they played, or is this a mix-down? And lastly, what tape does Columbia in the U.S. have? Is Agfa FR a tape type or is FR an overview name for their tapes? Was it back-printed so it can be type- and maybe batch-identified so there can be confirmation of what the tape actually was in that Afga box? Has anybody else had exprience with Agfa FR tape from 1957? Of course the two examples I mentioned in the first paragraph were American recordings, and Agfa was rarely seen in the U.S. as raw blank tape. Anybody have contact with the people in this company so we could get these questions answered? Mike Biel [log in to unmask]