From: bill@bilver.uucp (Bill Vermillion)
Subject: Re: INFORMATION WANTED ON ARCHIVING RECORDINGS ON A LONG TERM BASIS
Organization: W. J. Vermillion - Winter Park, FL
Date: Thu, 23 Jul 1992 04:40:08 GMT

In article <1013@tekgen.bv.tek.com> robertj@tekgen.bv.tek.com (Robert Jaquiss) writes:

>     I am looking for information and/or opinions on how to archive audio
>recordings on a long term basis.  Thanks in advnace.


Well you neglected to say one thing - how long is long term.

Years ago I remember discussion on this.  At that time (and my personal
opinion and knowledge makes believe that this is still true), the only
media that should be used is a disk.

If extremely long archival is needed then a master is made and and
archival pressing is stamped/molded/formed as a duplicate.  Vinyls
should be avoided because of the loss of plasticity.   Dimensionally
stable plastics or materials similar to bakelite would be good, as
would glass.

Why disk.   Because no matter when you wish to retreive the material,
whether it is 25, 50, 100, 500 years or more, the ability to build a
turntable and phono cartridge would be easily done from stored
drawings.    And decent machine shop could make a turntable, and any
precision machine shop could make a cartridge.

You could probably put a 'one-of-a-kind' unit together for less than
$5000 in todays dollars no matter how far in the future.

But if you picked digital storage for instance, and that technology was
not in vogue at the time, and nothing existed to play it, think of the
cost of building a CD player.

They are cheap because of large production of digital chips designed to
do that one thing.  But talk to people who have equipment that lies
idle today because of chip that used to be common that isn't even
manufactured today.

To build ONE chip costs a lot of money.    To duplicate a digital
playback unit, when nothing like it exists could cost hundreds of
thousands of dollars.   Providing there was enough instruction on
encoding/decoding, etc to build a discrete version of a complex IC.

And what quality must exist on your archival recording.  Does it only
need to convey information - eg voice, or music, or be as faithful a
replica of the original as possible.

Disk would still probably be the medium of choice.

How much would it cost to make ONE thin film head for something like
the upcoming DCC 100 years down the road.

Archival storage implies retrieval.  And that should indicate
relatively simple methods for retrieval, or relatively simple ways to
build a retrieval device.

Given a phonograph, some reasonably intelligent person far in the
future could probably work out a reproducing system intuitively.

Given a CD - what would they think.   It might even  be passed of as
jewelry.

Mechanical simplicity is the key.

CD's have been around for 10 years.  Will anything exist that is
purchaseable in 50 years to play them.  But it is relatively simple to
construct a device that plays Edison cylinder recordings.

Given that the oldest recorded sound is about 4000 years old, I'd stick
with the stylus in a soft medium to start the process.

Oh, you hadn't heard about the sound that was recorded on a clay pot
(or plate) in ancient Sumeria about 2000BC.   

I really don't remember where I ran across that one - so have no way of
verifying, but it would be possible, and it would be awfully easy to
contruct a potters wheel to play it back with a bamboo reed.

If you need ready access and archival time is less than 25 years, I'd
say go with reel-to-reel non-backcoated magnetic tape, or optical sound
tracks on silver based film medium.


-- 
Bill Vermillion - bill.vermillion@oau.org
                - bill@bilver.uucp 
                - ..!{peora|ge-dab|tous|tarpit}!bilver!bill