Physicist at IBM says: magnetic tapes superior storage media!

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I'm just impressed you read Maximum Rock & Roll!

................... :eek: ;)
 
Yep, this issue has been on the minds of archivists for a long time.

I am still looking for that article from 2003, here is one from my files going back to 1996.

"We believe that long term preservation of audio will be digital. For now, however, our experience is the current digital media and systems are not appropriate for long term storage or preservation.

For preservation the Library of Congress, the largest information collector in the world, depends on half track, quarter-inch analog audio tape for backing up its over three million sound recordings.

Further, we are very leery of any compression schemes for the long term storage of preservation masters because of fear compression means loss of information regardless of how good the algorithm is. I have reservations, as an archivist and a historian, that I can really rely upon that machine to make the decision as to what's not useful data."

Gerry Gibson, Electronic Media Preservation Specialist
Library of Congress
MIX Magazine, August 1996
 
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SteveMac said:
Oh great, there go all the inexpensive tape decks!! :rolleyes: :D

I have CDs older than ten years that still play fine. I don't know, it's probably true but not to that extreme. 5 year life span?
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Same here. I'm no physicist, but two to five years? Come on. Seems there is plenty of proof this is not the case.
 
I’m sure we all have commercial CDs that are 10+ years old that play flawlessly. I think my current Boston CD (first album) is around 15-years old and sounds better to me than newer ones. I also have a couple early CD-Rs with data on them that are fine. They were recorded around 1997 on an old 1x burner. But I also have plenty of “coasters” that just spin endlessly because they are unreadable – some less than a year old.

However, it’s the statistical big picture that is of concern to researchers, and not our anecdotal examples.

There are numerous papers on commercial “CD rot” and the general unreliability of CD-Rs for archival purposes going back many years. That part of the article is not news. And of course all CD-Rs are not created equal -- you get what you pay for. :)
 
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Beck, please accept my apology for having said you are narrow minded. I know that you aren't. It's just that I'm not so sure that I buy into the claim that CD storage lifetime will be that much less than tape has proven to be thus far.

Tape is cellulose, right? Correct me if I am wrong. Hmmmm. Ted Turner spent a fortune to restore old films that had deteriorated.

Once again, my apology to you. :o
 
The Ghost of FM said:
That's an interesting wish but even your wish itself has the evolution of progress built into it. Records came out first with limited lifespans after a given number of plays, were susceptible to scratches and skipping, had limited bandwidth and dynamics and also didn't offer any editing capabilities or very long play times...All of those shortcomings were addressed and improved upon with the advent of magnetic tape.

Magnetic tape recording also has it's known set of shortcomings and in many respects, the intentions and aspirations of it's digital replacements were honest attempts at delivering a more flexible format for sound engineers to work with and for the public to play with. I wouldn't characterize the manufacturer's intentions as evil or strictly capital driven! The only thing we can really say about digital that is true is that it is not a mature technology yet. We have growing pains to still go through with it. We need storage formats that are more reliable. We need interfaces to work with that are as intuitive as what we came to rely upon with good analog gear. We need computers that process all of the tasks we need them to perform with the speed of an analog circuit no matter how many things are going on in the background.

Once digital does mature to a stage where it is not only equal to analog in all of its beneficial fidelity and operational ways, we can at that point happily retire our analog equipment and storage mediums and move on to something truly superior.

We're not there yet.

Cheers! :)
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Yep, and the next wave of CD/DVD is coming soon. Sony (I believe) and another company have come up with a coating for the BlueRay or HD-DVD or whatever ends up winning, that is almost completly scratch proof. Obviously a knife or something will scratch it by carving out a chunk, but 99.999% of scratches CD/DVDs current obtain will be done with. I think I read somewhere you can scrub it with a brissle pad and it won't even leave a mark. :eek: :D
 
8tothebar said:
Tape is cellulose, right? Correct me if I am wrong. Hmmmm. Ted Turner spent a fortune to restore old films that had deteriorated.
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Old acetate tape (usually pre-1960) does suffer from the same kind of vinegar syndrome that can destroy old film, but most tape from the last 45+ years has used polyester/mylar film as a base and does not suffer from this problem. Prior to acetate, paper tape was used, although this is going back to the very, very early days of tape recording.

My Ferrograph series 2, which was manufactured in 1956, mentions polyester tape as a recording medium in the manual.
 
8tothebar said:
Beck, please accept my apology...
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Yes, of course. We all say we things we wish we hadn’t in these forums… I do it all the time. All is forgiven.

I don't hold an isolated outburst against anyone in these forums, but we all take note of patterns of ill-treatment. No pattern, no problem.

Sorry for the rather un-Christian retort, but I’m Scottish :) and a bit rough around the edges – more so than I used to be.

Tape is cellulose, right? Correct me if I am wrong. Hmmmm. Ted Turner spent a fortune to restore old films that had deteriorated
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Yes, very old audio tape had a cellulose acetate backing. Modern tape is polyester (mylar) based, as others have already pointed out. Tape has suffered its problems over the years, and we discuss those problems here in depth.

The point that should not be missed regarding Ted Turner’s recovery efforts of old film is that the films/tapes could be recovered. The same goes for older poly tapes with unstable binders.

When CDs first came on the scene they were promising up to 100 years of data integrity. They started falling apart in ten. The fact that one of the layers in a commercial CD is aluminum should have been a red flag for anyone who works with that metal in other industries, but apparently no one was watching. There is no coating, paint or treatment to date that I’m aware of that will prevent aluminum from eventually oxidizing.

The key to the angst that preservationists are now struggling with is, if those old recordings had been on any known digital format the outcome would have been very different. When the 1’s and 0’s of any digital format are gone they are gone.

Dr. John Van Bogart of the National Media Laboratory explained it like this. He is talking about digital tape long before the above article that Daniel posted, but the principle applies to any digital medium:

“In an analog recording, the signal recorded on the audio or videotape is a representation of the signal originally heard or seen by the microphone or video camera. The volume of a sound recording or the intensity of the color of a video image is directly related to the strength of the magnetic signal recorded on the tape.

In a digital recording the audio or video source signal is digitized - the signal is sampled at specific points in time and converted to a number that reflects the intensity of the signal at the time of sampling (analog-to-digital conversion). These numbers, in binary form, are written to the tape, rather than the analog signal. On playback, the numbers are read and used to reconstruct a signal that is representative of the original signal (digital-to-analog conversion).

The chief advantage of an analog recording for archival purposes is that the deterioration over time is gradual and discernible. This allows the tape to be transcribed before it reaches a point where the recording quality has degraded to an unusable level. Even in instances of severe tape degradation, where sound or video quality is severely compromised by tape squealing or a high rate of dropouts, some portion of the original recording will still be perceptible.

A digitally recorded tape will show little, if any, deterioration in quality up to the time of catastrophic failure when large sections of recorded information will be completely missing. None of the original material will be detectable in these missing sections.”

New technology comes along with promises, and we have often been disappointed when it doesn’t deliver. I’d guess that archivists have been on quite a roller coaster over the last couple decades trying to preserve our music heritage.

As for me, I have a professional CD recorder that I’m quite happy with and will continue to use the best possible CD-Rs to backup my own music. But the masters will also be on half-track analog tape.

That’s the best we can do until a more permanent solution comes along.


-Tim
 
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As Easy As

Plus there were big & little floppy discs for storing "data". I can't recall how many of those I've scrunched after they failed for any number of reasons.
Digital disaster - as easy as 1, 2,... oops as easy as 0, 1!
Cheers
rayC
 
Outlaws said:
Yep, and the next wave of CD/DVD is coming soon. Sony (I believe) and another company have come up with a coating for the BlueRay or HD-DVD or whatever ends up winning, that is almost completly scratch proof. Obviously a knife or something will scratch it by carving out a chunk, but 99.999% of scratches CD/DVDs current obtain will be done with. :eek: :D
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Um, I'm sure I remember back in 88 when I bought my first CD (VH 1984) that this was the big selling point back then as well.
 
Outstanding and immensely informative posts! Well done guys!!
 
EDAN said:
Um, I'm sure I remember back in 88 when I bought my first CD (VH 1984) that this was the big selling point back then as well.
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I saw this demostrated on television. The only reason they are not incorporating it into current CD/DVD production is the cost to overhaul current systems.
 
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