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#41
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In article znr1105614064k@trad, Mike Rivers wrote:
In article . net writes: Have no fear, it's like when Coke years ago, as you remember, decided to change thier secret ingredients, well everyone flip a lid when the new coke came out , so soon , out comes the "classic coke." Bad example. The Coca Cola company didn't go out of business, fire all their employees, and sell off their manufacturing equipment. But if they HAD, they probably would have got a lot less bad press than they did. If there was an uproar because Quantegy stopped making 456 but still made GP9, perhaps they might start making it again (maybe naming it "Classic 456"). We should all demand real cane sugar back. --scott -- "C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis." |
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#42
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Scott Dorsey wrote:
The 38 is the most reliable of the bunch. The 20-bit units definitely are much more touchy about setup and alignment than the 16-bit units. I wasn't aware of 20-bit Tascams. Mine are 24-bit. |
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#43
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"Edward Bridge" wrote in message
nk.net... Has Quantegy hired Sorry, I meant "Has Quantegy fired ".. umm. maybe to much coke with the_cane_ in my dazes or days.. :) -- Peace, Ed Bridge Brooklyn N.Y. http://www.bridgeclassicalguitars.com/ |
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#44
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"Mike Rivers" wrote in message Another thing is that the people who have the budget for analog tape projects today prefer to start with new tape. I think the point is that 'prefer' may not be an option.... geoff |
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#45
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"Mike Rivers" wrote in message news:znr1105617039k@trad... In article writes: Well you can clone "bit-for-bit" a hard disk to as many other digital media that does exist, and those that will exist. My point, that you obvioulsy missed, is that you HAVE to do that in order to have any expectation of being able to recover the archived material. Banks don't have a problem with that. And they are pretty mean. You can put a reel of analog tape on a shelf for 50 years, and as long as it stays in a place where you don't mind living, you'll be able to play it. It may not be bit-perfect but it will be playable. CD-Rs, well we just don't know. Mitsui were suggesting 300 years in proper conditions. geoff |
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#46
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On 1/12/05 12:13 PM, in article ZMdFd.7812$gb.6970@trndny03,
"U-CDK_CHARLES\Charles" "Charles wrote: So has anyone ever made a "Tape Saturation Amplifier" that approximates the charactistics of tape? Most of the standard plug-in's are not that great, but on a per-track basis they can be somewhat useful. The best one out there is the Crane Song HEDD-192. A lot of us mastering engineer-types use them on a daily basis, replacing the previous technique of moving all-digital mixes to tape before loading them back in. Allen -- Allen Corneau Mastering Engineer Essential Sound Mastering Houston, TX |
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#48
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#49
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In article znr1105649409k@trad, Mike Rivers wrote:
Anyone with tools and a knowledge of basic electronics can build an analog tape deck, but I can't conceive of reverse-engineering something to put the pits into meaningful form from a CD. CD isn't so bad. It's just data bits and CRC bits and not much else in the bitstream. I think I could probably do it. MD would be a _lot_ harder. --scott (reverse-engineering CDC tape formats from just the media this month) -- "C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis." |
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#50
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On 13 Jan 2005 18:06:31 -0500, (Mike Rivers)
wrote: In article writes: CD-Rs, well we just don't know. Mitsui were suggesting 300 years in proper conditions. But a CD-R is pretty useless without a CD player. My money is on there not being any CD players 300 years (and small money on 100 years) from now, and there won't be because the archivists haven't preserved the documentation well enough to know how to build one. This seems to be a silly argument. Do you think there will be Studer 24 track machines in working condition 300 years from now? What do you think the odds are that in 300 years there will still be digitally-based music files, and machines to read them, as opposed to the possibility of having working machines that can play back magnetic tape? Al |
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#51
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On 2005-01-13, Mike Rivers wrote:
They have the equipment, they have the money, all they need is the tape. They didn't expect that to be yanked away from them suddenly. Suddenly? The demise of vinyl might have been sudden, but the writing's been on the wall about the coming of digital for a couple of decades. Now, we've dropped the ball, as we are *just now* getting to the point where we can take for granted things like accurate clocks and standardized lossless transfer interfaces, but the writing's been on the wall, and that stuff is coming late. People sandbagged instead of moving with the trend of technolog, and that includes studio owners as well as engineers and the people who finance them. The whole revelation that analog tape involved killing whales did it for me. I say yank it away with prejudice. People scream bloody murder when a hardware or software product is discontinued. Eventually they make an adjustment, but it doesn't happen overnight. Well, when a whole *industry* is discontinued, they usually do more than just scream bloody murder. They do stuff like litigate, and corner markets. It happened with bat guano, it's happening with tape, and someday, it will happen with crude oil. You know, the day crude oil becomes unavailable, I imagine people will be complaining how their whole supply was "yanked away from them suddenly." They will have had centuries to prepare, and while there might be sympathy for those who procrastinate, there will also be success for those who did not. Adapt, buggy whip manufacturers, for the age of the automobile is at hand. |
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#52
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On 2005-01-13, Mike Rivers wrote:
Another thing is that the people who have the budget for analog tape projects today prefer to start with new tape. Lightly used tape is fine for most projects, but most people who regularly use it have had a problem at some time. I used to get 1" tape for dirt cheap (price of the reels, in the mid-80's), from a place that recorded stuff like radio jingles. The point is, even they wouldn't re-use the tape. I never had a problem that I know of, but then, all I used it for was recording the college choir. |
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#53
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"Mike Rivers" wrote in message news:znr1105649409k@trad... In article writes: CD-Rs, well we just don't know. Mitsui were suggesting 300 years in proper conditions. But a CD-R is pretty useless without a CD player. My money is on there not being any CD players 300 years (and small money on 100 years) We'll al be 'virtual' by then anyway... geoff " We knew all along there were never any WMDs. We just lied..." G W Bush |
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#54
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On 12 Jan 2005 19:36:44 -0500, (Scott Dorsey) wrote:
... Georges Collinais even plays a 78 now and then. Who is that? I googled the web, and the ONLY reference I found is where you mention his name in a post last summer, archived on one of these Usenet-ripoff websites: http://www.audio-forum.net/pro/The_e...ar_914336.html --scott ----- http://mindspring.com/~benbradley |
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#55
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On 2005-01-12, U-CDK_CHARLES\Charles "Charles wrote:
So has anyone ever made a "Tape Saturation Amplifier" that approximates the charactistics of tape? Ah, this is the rub -- you can apply expensive and complex signal processing to try to simulate the desirable aberrations of tape, but you will always have just that, a simulation, and it's a state that you get with tape by default. (Actually, I know there is a great deal of skill involved in finesseing tape). Another problem is more fundamental (no pun intended yet), as the continuity inherent in an analog singal path is not really available in digital. So you end up with odd-ordered harmonics (it may be high in the frequency range, but sooner or later you have a shelf, and a square wave is up there, and it's too often too close to 40kHz.) Acoustic/analog devices tend to aberrate toward adding even-ordered harmonics, and digital devices tend to aberrate toward odd harmonics. People like to simplify things by explaining that digital is a "perfect" reproduction, and the reasoning is that the frequency and dynamic domains are well beyond the proportions of human perception. But that's an oversimplification. There is plenty of dynamic headroom, sure, and a 24kHz Nyquist frequency is enough for any musical application (despite the fact that people still argue this, not all of them researchers involved with bats and submarines), but that's still not the whole story. So you can simulate tape, with something complicated and expensive and imperfect, or you can use tape, and keep it simple, except for the complexity and expense of obtaining the tape resource. |
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#56
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["Followup-To:" header set to rec.audio.pro.]
On 2005-01-12, Geoff Wood wrote: Compresion with artifacts (maybe as yet unquantified) that for some reason sound nice. Nothing to do with euphoniums, necessarily. The "some reason" is at least partly, continuity in the harmonics, and the characteristics of digital devices that lead to a high proportion of odd-ordered harmonics. |
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#57
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"james of tucson" wrote in
message atory.com On 2005-01-12, U-CDK_CHARLES\Charles "Charles wrote: So has anyone ever made a "Tape Saturation Amplifier" that approximates the charactistics of tape? Ah, this is the rub -- you can apply expensive and complex signal processing to try to simulate the desirable aberrations of tape, but you will always have just that, a simulation, and it's a state that you get with tape by default. (Actually, I know there is a great deal of skill involved in finesseing tape). The beauty of tape simulations is what you don't get. Another problem is more fundamental (no pun intended yet), as the continuity inherent in an analog singal path is not really available in digital. Oh boy, here we go again! This is simply not true. So you end up with odd-ordered harmonics (it may be high in the frequency range, but sooner or later you have a shelf, and a square wave is up there, and it's too often too close to 40kHz.) It's sad when people set them up as critics of technology that they obviously don't understand. Acoustic/analog devices tend to aberrate toward adding even-ordered harmonics, and digital devices tend to aberrate toward odd harmonics. If only... People like to simplify things by explaining that digital is a "perfect" reproduction, and the reasoning is that the frequency and dynamic domains are well beyond the proportions of human perception. Well, by the time you get to 24/192 the digital format is very much overkill. But blind tests show that even 14/32 is on the edge of overkill. But that's an oversimplification. There is plenty of dynamic headroom, sure, and a 24kHz Nyquist frequency is enough for any musical application (despite the fact that people still argue this, not all of them researchers involved with bats and submarines), but that's still not the whole story. Actually it is, and this paragraph contradicts your earlier claims, James. So you can simulate tape, with something complicated and expensive and imperfect, Like a piece of software with an incremental cost of next to zero. or you can use tape, and keep it simple, except for the complexity and expense of obtaining the tape resource. If tape were only that simple to live with there would be no such thing as digital audio. |
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#58
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#59
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"Jay Kadis" wrote in message
... In article , Michel Hafner wrote: MrPepper11 wrote: The purists have a romantic attachment to the taping process. "It's a much more musical medium than digital could ever dream of being," says Joe Gastwirt, a mastering engineer who has worked with the Grateful Dead and others. "It actually does something to the music. The last sentence says it all. I'd rather do 'something' to the music under my control, not the medium's, should I feel the need to do 'something'. In fact, one could argue that real purists welcome modern digital systems that do not "do something" to the signal. Or at least do less. I'm doing my first project entirely in Logic and I'm a little surprised by how much I like the sound. I do still have a case of 1/2" 456, but it's looking less and less like it'll get used any time soon. Even if digital resulted in exactly the same final product as tape, this will at very least take good producers with 20 or 30 years of experience off the job while they struggle with learning a new system. Some of them will never make the transition -- good ears, not so bright with a mouse. dtk |
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#61
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james of tucson wrote:
You know, the day crude oil becomes unavailable, I imagine people will be complaining how their whole supply was "yanked away from them suddenly." They will have had centuries to prepare, and while there might be sympathy for those who procrastinate, there will also be success for those who did not. The whole of the Petroleum Age will not last centuries; it'll be about 150 years, end-to-end, and the downside of the curve will be much steeper than was the upside, given the skyrocketing demand for crude oil as formerly undeveloped nations race to get their own hot tubs. As for success coming from foresight, the world will go from 6+ billion humans back to aproximately 2 billion, in keeping with the human population sustainable on an Earth without oil. -- ha |
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#62
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On 2005-01-13, Scott Dorsey wrote:
We should all demand real cane sugar back. I get that easily in Louisiana, as well as the real molasses I use in my secret barbeque sauce. |
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#63
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On 2005-01-14, Arny Krueger wrote:
Oh boy, here we go again! This is simply not true. Arny, I'm on your side of this argument. Digital recording should have made tape obsolete ten years ago. The people on the supply side of the technology have dragged their feet so that we are only just now getting good converters and clocks. It's sad when people set them up as critics of technology that they obviously don't understand. I still say it's expensive and complicated to simulate tube gain and tape saturation. I think I understand parts of the reasons also. Instead of throwing a brick at me, why don't you explain what I've got wrong? |
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#64
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On 2005-01-13, Geoff Wood wrote:
Banks don't have a problem with that. And they are pretty mean. Bank products are usually inherently valuable, unlike stuff like radio transcriptions, tv jingles, data from space missions, unused alternate takes, etc. The attitude that media could just stay put, neglected in a warehouse is why we have lost some of the greatest works of the golden age of Hollywood, why much of the source material that Shakespeare drew from is known only by a vague idea that it once existed, and why my almost complete collection of Marvel Comics from 1969 to 1979 went up in smoke. |
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#65
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On 2005-01-14, Mike Rivers wrote:
Suddenly? The demise of vinyl might have been sudden, but the writing's been on the wall about the coming of digital for a couple of decades. Oh, horse****! There has been a steady base of analog studios all along. True, many offer digital recording and some have moved entirely to digital recording, but there's been no compelling need, nor any indication that they would not have material to use. There is now. If my business depended on a resource with a single supply, I'm sure I'd be investing in that supplier. None of these studios had the clout or the presence of forethought to become a major stakeholder in Quantegy? Nobody had a colleague with a seat on the board? The decision to shut down should not have come as a surprise, to big industry professionals, that's part of what I'm saying. Hydrogen cars are on the horizon, too. When are you going to give up your gas guzzler? Interesting question. My state offers a subsantial tax incentive for alternative energy use, including converted/hybrid cars, solar heating, etc. I have a solar water heater. When I travel on business I always rent a Prius. I'm too happy with my 90's model Volvo to give it up, but when I do, I'm sure I won't buy a gas guzzler. Now, we've dropped the ball, as we are *just now* getting to the point where we can take for granted things like accurate clocks and standardized lossless transfer interfaces, but the writing's been on the wall, and that stuff is coming late. This is what I was suggesting when I said that the media was suddenly been yanked away. Many users of analog media were not ready to make the switch because they weren't happy with the results they could get by going entirely to a digital system. Now, there are people who argue that digital systems don't render sufficient quality to justify switching from analog. There are others who claim that's a load of crap. So 2" tape is more expensive now, and that means some people will have to apply more critical logic to support these claims, because there is a stronger business incentive to do so. People sandbagged instead of moving with the trend of technolog, and that includes studio owners as well as engineers and the people who finance them. It's the hardware developers who develop the digital hardware. It's the studio users who buy the tape. Why should a studio owner move to an inferior sounding system and hope that some day the quality comes back up to his standards? Wait, nobody is an island. Where in the rule book does it say these two shouldn't have some sort of synergy, some sort of direct producer/consumer relationship? The studio user *is* partly responsible for the slow ascent of quality gear. You're the driver of the process, and you shouldn't have taken the attitude that, well, analog tape will always be cheap and will be available forever, so I'll just keep these blinders on, and I'll just continue to assert that 24-bit audio isn't as good as my tape machine. Pro Tools HD might be there now, but that's a pretty expensive investment for a business that's running at the marginal-profit level. Protools is the best solution for technical, or for business reasons? Seriously, what's the deal here? If DAW systems aren't there yet, the demand side of the curve shares the responsibility. We need to stop trying to press general purpose computer systems like PC's and Mac's into service for DAW. We need vertical solutions, something that fits in the form factor of a recording console, that has controls like a console, everything but the tape transport. Why isn't there a demand for this kind of thing? How does someone who has been using the same analog recorder for 20 years relate to this from a business investment standpoint? Well, ten years ago, he might have taken some of his R&D budget and invested in R&D for the next generation. He has to be convinced that if he plunks down another $25K for a system to replace his trusted analog recorder, his sustainment costs won't take a big leap because the manufacturer decides in two years that there will be no more support for his hardware and he has to replace it or be left in the cold next time he has a problem. Yes, I agree with that point entirely. The economics don't work because we are still waiting for the kind of systems that will have durable utility. Even the most dedicated pro systems seem to be built with consumer general purpose components. A fancy control surface plugged into a Macintosh is nothing but a simulation of what you should have by now. Nor will a studio that's based its reputation on its sound be willing to switch to a $2000 perpetually interim DAW. Right, for lots of reasons -- proper change management requires a longer evaluation period than the life expectancy of some of the equipment! The whole revelation that analog tape involved killing whales did it for me. I say yank it away with prejudice. That's a rather silly argument against analog tape. I can't support any industry that supports whaling. I'd kill you to save a whale. People scream bloody murder when a hardware or software product is discontinued. Eventually they make an adjustment, but it doesn't happen overnight. Well, when a whole *industry* is discontinued, they usually do more than just scream bloody murder. They do stuff like litigate, and corner markets. OK, so where's the litigation to get analog tape manufacturers back in business? No, not to get them back in business! More like, a desperate attempt to compensate for their failed business model! Look at what SCO has been doing for the past year or so. That sort of litigation isn't meant to put SCO back in business, it's more a desperate ploy to make sure the execs can retire on the ashes of the company. I didn't mean to suggest the litigation would be meant to benefit you. Sure we saw them drop away, but you'd think that this would strengthen the one remaining company that had the monopoly. So what's their problem? We don't know because we don't have accesss to their books. Anyone whose large business relied entirely on this one company, should have had enough of a vested interest in that company, that they held preferred stock, or even had a strong association with one of the directors. You *should* have access to their books. Obviously not small time operators like you. But it doesn't sound like Capitol or Vivendi or RCA or Sony or Disney did either. That's a mistake. Any of these companies could have propped up Quantegy lock stock and barrel with spare change, could have done it quietly, and we wouldn't be having this discussion. You know, the day crude oil becomes unavailable, I imagine people will be complaining how their whole supply was "yanked away from them suddenly." Think about digital television. They were going to yank away analog broadcasting last year, but they didn't. Too many people didn't want to buy new TV sets so they could watch Oprah. Unfortunately the recording industry doesn't have that much clout. Frontal nudity (not Oprah!) is all it would take to make that happen. |
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#66
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james of tucson wrote:
On 2005-01-13, Mike Rivers wrote: They have the equipment, they have the money, all they need is the tape. They didn't expect that to be yanked away from them suddenly. Suddenly? The demise of vinyl might have been sudden, but the writing's been on the wall about the coming of digital for a couple of decades. What demise of vinyl? I have cutting jobs booked up about three weeks in advance right now. --scott -- "C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis." |
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#67
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Ben Bradley wrote:
On 12 Jan 2005 19:36:44 -0500, (Scott Dorsey) wrote: ... Georges Collinais even plays a 78 now and then. Who is that? I googled the web, and the ONLY reference I found is where you mention his name in a post last summer, archived on one of these Usenet-ripoff websites: I probably spelled it wrong. He's the host of AFROPOP WORLDWIDE, which around here airs on Friday nights with a great mix of pop music from places around the world with African roots. --scott -- "C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis." |
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#68
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In article , (Scott Dorsey)
wrote: Ben Bradley wrote: On 12 Jan 2005 19:36:44 -0500, (Scott Dorsey) wrote: ... Georges Collinais even plays a 78 now and then. Who is that? I googled the web, and the ONLY reference I found is where you mention his name in a post last summer, archived on one of these Usenet-ripoff websites: I probably spelled it wrong. He's the host of AFROPOP WORLDWIDE, which around here airs on Friday nights with a great mix of pop music from places around the world with African roots. --scott Georges Collinet www.afropop.org -Jay -- x------- Jay Kadis ------- x---- Jay's Attic Studio ------x x Lecturer, Audio Engineer x Dexter Records x x CCRMA, Stanford University x http://www.offbeats.com/ x x---------- http://ccrma.stanford.edu/~jay/ ------------x |
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#69
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Scott Dorsey wrote:
Ben Bradley wrote: On 12 Jan 2005 19:36:44 -0500, (Scott Dorsey) wrote: Georges Collinais even plays a 78 now and then. Who is that? I googled the web, and the ONLY reference I found is where you mention his name in a post last summer, archived on one of these Usenet-ripoff websites: I probably spelled it wrong. He's the host of AFROPOP WORLDWIDE, which around here airs on Friday nights with a great mix of pop music from places around the world with African roots. Georges Collinet http://afropop.org/ It's really one of the best syndicated shows on public radio. |
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#70
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On Fri, 14 Jan 2005 17:35:13 GMT, james of tucson
wrote: -----------------8------------------------ Arny, I'm on your side of this argument. Digital recording should have made tape obsolete ten years ago. The people on the supply side of the technology have dragged their feet so that we are only just now getting good converters and clocks. I was just thinking to myself -- if some technologies hadn't been put aside after the onset of "new and revolutionary" technologies, who knows where such parallel developments could lead to? For example, using the latest stand of research and technics, how would today a tape recorder and tape material look -- if they have been developed at a pace of, say, a hard disk and other computer products, with latest electronics etc.? -- Oh, just a thought, not of importance. I have a book about video recorders, how much effort has been put at Ampex to make a viable recording and reproduction of video material. Magnifficient. Motors with air bearings, suction-assisted tape transport, advanced servo and sync systems, etc. (Ray Dolby has been in a development team and there has been a "Bing Crosby System" -- _that_ Bing?  Edi Zubovic, Crikvenica, Croatia PS. Nowadays, there are problems in reproduction of really old video recordings. They are still playable though. So I think, if a recording of a bandwidth in a magnitude of megahertz and more can be still reproduced, I give audio tapes a long go provided that they are physically and chemically stable and stored properly -- and by no means zapped. |
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#71
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Mike Rivers wrote:
In article writes: But a CD-R is pretty useless without a CD player. My money is on there not being any CD players 300 years (and small money on 100 years) from now, and there won't be because the archivists haven't preserved the documentation well enough to know how to build one. This seems to be a silly argument. Do you think there will be Studer 24 track machines in working condition 300 years from now? Of course not, but there will be lathes and amplifiers and soldering irons. How easy is it to build a CD player and figure out how to put the bits in some useful form to produce audio? It might be easier than building a tape machine! First of all, for a tape machine, you've got to have a tape head. That is not the easiest thing in the world to build. There are lots of physics involved. With a CD, the pits should be visible with a microscope. It won't take long to realize that they're arranged in one great big spiral. Next step is to figure out which end of the spiral is the start and which is the end. That's not hard -- if you look at 3 or 4 different CDs in the light, you'll see that you can tell which part of the disc has info on it and which doesn't, and that the info always reaches the inner edge but not the outer. Therefore, it either starts in the middle or is a seriously brain-damaged format. Now, once you've done that, you've identified what the stream of bits is, and the next task is to read it off. That's a bit trickier. In theory, if you can see them with a microscope, you can read them. But I don't want to read 5 billion bits by hand, and neither does anyone else. So, I will posit that by the year 2305, they'll have some kind of microscope or scanner or something somewhere in a lab that can take a 10000 dpi image (or whatever it takes) of a 5" disc and save it to a really big honkin bitmap file. Once you have this gigantic bitmap file, you can write software to recognize the spiral pattern of the bits and extra the bits. Now, at this point you have a big stream of bits, so how do you decode it? Well, I don't know the specifics of the CD audio format, although I do know that in vague terms it's pretty simple as formats go. However, what I do know is that in WWII, the Germans used Enigma machines to encrypt communications prior to transmitting them by radio, and an team of mathematicians managed to break some of the codes and decrypt the communications without the help of the general purpose computers! So, figuring out which bits are the most significant and least significant in PCM encoding is not likely to be an insurmountable task for the archeologists of the future. To me, this is somewhat about perspective. I think it's easy to make sense of a stream of bits because I have a computer science degree. Someone who designs and works with analog electronics probably thinks it's easier to build a machine to read reel-to-reel tapes. My guess is that in the future, there will be no shortage of people who know about computers, but there probably also won't be a shortage of people who know about electronics and magnetism either. By the way, if you *really* want your digital audio data to stay around a long time, get a 600 dpi laser printer and print out each bit as a square that is 0.01 inches on a side. Make dark 0 and light 1. If you do this, you can fit about 100 kilobytes on each side of a page. If you print on both sides, you can fit 200 MB per 1000 sheets of paper. So, the media costs are about $15 (plus toner!) to encode an audio CD. - Logan |
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#72
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Logan Shaw wrote:
By the way, if you *really* want your digital audio data to stay around a long time, get a 600 dpi laser printer and print out each bit as a square that is 0.01 inches on a side. Make dark 0 and light 1. If you do this, you can fit about 100 kilobytes on each side of a page. If you print on both sides, you can fit 200 MB per 1000 sheets of paper. So, the media costs are about $15 (plus toner!) to encode an audio CD. physical imprint of pigmented ink via offset or letter press would be even better; toner seems prone to "drop outs", but that may just be the result of early laser printers which didn't fuse at sufficient high heat. this would be a nifty project, though. I wonder what kind of error correcting codes would work the best for this application? -- Aaron J. Grier | "Not your ordinary poofy goof." | The United States is the one true country. The US is just. The US is fair. The US respects its citizens. The US loves you. We have always been at war against terrorism. |
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#73
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"Logan Shaw" wrote in message
... By the way, if you *really* want your digital audio data to stay around a long time, get a 600 dpi laser printer and print out each bit as a square that is 0.01 inches on a side. Make dark 0 and light 1. If you do this, you can fit about 100 kilobytes on each side of a page. If you print on both sides, you can fit 200 MB per 1000 sheets of paper. So, the media costs are about $15 (plus toner!) to encode an audio CD. We laugh, but the film used for the early Edison movies disintegrated years ago. The only reason we have them available as MPEGs on loc.gov is because they originally printed each frame and bound them in books so they'd be covered by the copyright laws of that time. If you really want your music to last a long time, encoded it in a genetic sequence and integrate it into the gene pool of a flock of crows. It'll still be floating around long after the last humans have passed on and clever aliens will be amused when they find it -- along with later Monsanto trademarks -- in dna surveys. dtk |
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#74
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In article , "dt king"
wrote: [snip] If you really want your music to last a long time, encoded it in a genetic sequence and integrate it into the gene pool of a flock of crows. It'll still be floating around long after the last humans have passed on and clever aliens will be amused when they find it -- along with later Monsanto trademarks -- in dna surveys. dtk By the time you read the DNA, it will bear little resemblance to the sequences that were originally introduced. DNA is unstable and must undergo constant error detection and correction just like digital audio. -Jay -- x------- Jay Kadis ------- x---- Jay's Attic Studio ------x x Lecturer, Audio Engineer x Dexter Records x x CCRMA, Stanford University x http://www.offbeats.com/ x x---------- http://ccrma.stanford.edu/~jay/ ------------x |
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On Fri, 14 Jan 2005 10:44:22 -0800, Kurt Albershardt
wrote: Scott Dorsey wrote: Ben Bradley wrote: On 12 Jan 2005 19:36:44 -0500, (Scott Dorsey) wrote: Georges Collinais even plays a 78 now and then. Who is that? I googled the web, and the ONLY reference I found is where you mention his name in a post last summer, archived on one of these Usenet-ripoff websites: I probably spelled it wrong. He's the host of AFROPOP WORLDWIDE, which around here airs on Friday nights with a great mix of pop music from places around the world with African roots. ISTR hearing the name of that show, perhaps when I lived on Long Island, or eariler in Atlanta before. Regardless, WABE doesn't currently carry it. Georges Collinet http://afropop.org/ It's really one of the best syndicated shows on public radio. I enjoyed the 'free listens.' ----- http://mindspring.com/~benbradley |
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On 2005-01-14, Mike Rivers wrote:
They barely have the resoruces to be major stockholders in their own companies. At least Mike Spitz (ATR Service) thought about it. Success will often come with power. Without success, you're just another whining victim. I know that's an overly simplistic view, that it wasn't realistic for studios to take control of the means of production of tape, etc. But if they had, they wouldn't have this problem. So the ability to make it is still there, it was just a business decision to shut down what was coincidentally the last plant to make tape for recording studios. And Sony, Disney, Universal, etc., didn't have a contract that would have overridden the authority for that business decision to be made. Again, an opportunity was missed where the consumer could have had a significant role in the policies and the means of production for their materials. They share in the responsibility for their misfortune. I'll stand in between, but I don't do enough business to care one way or another. I'm just a musician. I have a Teac 4-track that you probably think is a joke, and I can't imagine even plugging it in today, considering the 12-channel 24/96 DAW in my keyboard rack. From where I sit, I just can't see anyone being any more upset about tape supplies diminishing, than they are about 78 lacquers being no longer available! Seriously. Consumer digital crap is so much better (depending on what you measure, let's stick to frequency response and dynamic range and harmonic distortion) the best you can hope for with tape is to be "imperceptibly accurate" and you'd probably use a digital sample to measure "imperceptibly." I still have 1/4" machines, but I gave up my 2" machine a few years ago - not because it was a dinosaur, but because I was hardly doing any multitrack sessions (and not because of the tape cost, because I just wasn't interested). I now have a Mackie hard disk recorder that I use for multitrack and I find it to be totally satisfactory. I can bumble my way through using my computer as a multitrack recorder, but it's not neearly as easy to use as either dedicated recorder (the Ampex or the Mackie). If I was doing a lot of multitrack work, it would be on the Mackie, not on a computer. But that's just my old fart ergonomic preference. That's completely reasonable. What's missing from the market, are recorders that aren't merely consumer PC's (and Macs) pressed into service as recording consoles. The thin layer of "control surface" makes for a nice prototype, but let's face it, we need vertical solutions, designed from the ground up to live in the space that has historically been dominated by multitrack tape consoles. Even the highest-end DAW's are little more than a thin veneer over what is essentially no different from a well-spec'd consumer general purpose computer. The reality is that rates don't go up because the clients will go elsewhere, and in fact, profits go down because the studio is no longer making a little on the sale of tape. But, if the supply of tape actually dries up, or if the quality floor drops out, then who will benefit? The people who have *already* invested in digital systems. You're free to hold that belief that ProTools is the best overall choice/only serious choice, but I think the industry could produce something *much* better if there were demand. There will be demand, if this tape thing is as bad as it's made out to be. If your studio already does digital media, you've got the jump on anyone who dragged his feet in the false economy of waiting until the last minute to update. The only saving grace is that clients tend to spend more time fiddling with the tracks because they can. This might be a consequence of ergonomics as well. If the studio were the same, every control and every setting the same, except no actual tape transport on the console, why would the workflow change? In fact, the studios HAVE driven the improvements in professional digital audio gear. But it comes slowly because the manufacturers with all the money are busy turning out crap for the mass market. Okay, in my fantasy world there is the consumer marketplace, and then, in a whole nother universe, there is the professional marketplace, and they don't necessarily overlap. This has nothing to do with A/V, it's every industry. Entertainment is obviously polluted in that respect. It's what they (Digidesign) has to do in order to stay in business. Tell me how Ampex, SSL, etc., stayed in business, if their customers are one-shot lifetime purchasers? Thanks for the info on new big integrated systems. I didn't even realize Fairlight was still in business. I'm just a musician, so my perspective on the whole recording thing is from the whole other end of the telescope. I still say, even at the consumer end, audio gear is getting hella good, and anybody clinging to the anchor of last-generation-technology is in for a good dunking. |
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On 1/12/05 12:13 PM, in article ZMdFd.7812$gb.6970@trndny03,
"U-CDK_CHARLES\Charles" "Charles wrote: So has anyone ever made a "Tape Saturation Amplifier" that approximates the charactistics of tape? Most of the standard plug-in's are not that great, but on a per-track basis they can be somewhat useful. The best one out there is the Crane Song HEDD-192. A lot of us mastering engineer-types use them on a daily basis, replacing the previous technique of moving all-digital mixes to tape before loading them back in. Allen -- Allen Corneau Mastering Engineer Essential Sound Mastering Houston, TX |
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#79
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Sorry for sending this again, hit the wrong button! Allen -- Allen Corneau Mastering Engineer Essential Sound Mastering Houston, TX |
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On Fri, 14 Jan 2005 21:01:35 GMT, Logan Shaw
wrote: Mike Rivers wrote: In article writes: But a CD-R is pretty useless without a CD player. My money is on there not being any CD players 300 years (and small money on 100 years) from now, and there won't be because the archivists haven't preserved the documentation well enough to know how to build one. This seems to be a silly argument. Do you think there will be Studer 24 track machines in working condition 300 years from now? Of course not, I think a few will end up in the hands of museums and collectors, and some will be anal about keeping them working. There are many working acoustic phonographs now, and I presume many of them will be kept in operational shape and last much longer. FWIW, I really think Mike is wrong on this, that not only analog recorders, but (barring nuclear war or other major civilization breakdown) both CD players and the info to recreate them will be around for hundreds of years. but there will be lathes and amplifiers and soldering irons. How easy is it to build a CD player and figure out how to put the bits in some useful form to produce audio? It might be easier than building a tape machine! First of all, for a tape machine, you've got to have a tape head. That is not the easiest thing in the world to build. This brought back memories. Read on... There are lots of physics involved. When I was about 14 years old I made a tape head. I used a (approximately) 3/4" steel washer, filed down a flat side until just before I got to the hole inside, cut a slot wide enough to put 22-24 gauge magnet wire through it, wound (onto electrical tape put on the washer) a few hundred turns (howevermany would fit), and held it onto a running tape with the coil going to a guitar amp. It played recognizable music at 7 1/2 IPS, with of course a low output and response probably no higher than 1kHz to 2kHz, but it worked. I recall hammering on it (carefully, I didn't want to smash the coil) to try to get the gap smaller. ... - Logan ----- http://mindspring.com/~benbradley |
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