And let Chronos’ experience be a lesson to us all.
During the transition overlap from one media to another, there are ample opportunities to transfer from the old to the new. But after a time, that becomes more difficult.
I have some files on 8" floppy that would have been easy to transfer to 5" or other media at one time. Now that is next-to-unpossible. If only we could see ahead to the obvious!
I have a stainless steel wire recorder my dad used. The media seems permanent. The magnetic field probably decays slowly due to cosmic rays, but certainly very slowly. The sound is as good as ever, even from recordings from the 40’s.
What did my dad consider important enough to put on this media?
Lawrence Welk shows.
Sigh.
Oh, I do have a report from a deer camp from one year. Waiting in line to use the ferry across the Mackinac Straits to get to the Upper Penninsula.
And a speech by a labor organizer trying to organize a farming cooperative.
But about 8 hours of Lawrence Welk.
I used to work for a company that put digital data onto audio format CD’s (red book audio). We ran into all sorts of problems doing this, and, by necessity, became somewhat expert in CD data encoding. What we found was that there are a suprising number of errors that occur in reading even a well-preserved disc, often going beyond the capability of the built-in error correction algorithms to correct. Most of the time you don’t notice this when you are listening to music because the default action is to average between the last two good values that were decoded. For most music, you won’t notice this missing (and clumsily replaced) data unless you are paying very close attention.
We found that light and heat caused a very noticable degradation in the data, particularly for rewritable discs. We could make a CD-RW pretty much unplayable by leaving it on a desk in the sunlight for a week or so. These discs didn’t get hot, just warm. Maybe they have changed the formulation of the average CD-RW since then, but my suggestion is to keep any CD with data you can’t easily replace out of the sun. And don’t count on any CD-RW lasting longer than 5 or 10 years, even in perfect climate-controlled storage.
Stamped CD’s are substantially hardier, but you are still vulnerable to variations in transparency and delamination over time. The long-term stability of the plastic and the plastic-metal interface has not been proven. And, as has been mentioned above, variations in the plastic formulation will probably yield variations in longevity.
On the sub-thread of nuances lost in the digital conversion, this is a well-researched subject which is very well understood. Digital sampling at 44 kHz is audibly different from high-quality analog recordings. The reasons are easy to understand, and easily available elsewhere, so I won’t bore you with the details unless someone provokes me with more talk of psycho-acoustics and double-blind tests.
Indubitably. Not digital, I realize, but still . . .
I’ve always wondered about this question, because a number of musicians (Eric Clapton that I remember off-hand) have claimed that LPs can deliver better quality audio than CDs. Is there somewhere I can educate myself on this topic?