On Listening to that Old
Material in the Future
A conductor once observed to me that musicians often had
lousy stereo systems. He believed it was because they didn't really care that their
equipment could reproduce the sound of an oboe exactly -- they knew what an oboe sounded
like -- they were more interested in what the player did with it. They could listen through
the system, however flawed, to the music behind it.
I was reminded of this one evening when my wife and I were
"exercising the collection," as we usually refer to it. While I'll never stop
buying CDs, or whatever supplants them in the future, I've pretty well finished replacing
favorite old vinyl recordings with their digital versions. There are still gaps to be
filled, but the days of adding hundreds of oldies at a time have passed.
And yet, there is still a lot of music that I don't have
CDs of, but which we like to listen to from time to time. That applies particularly to
artists who only recorded one or two tracks we would care to hear again. In vinyl days I
would think nothing of buying an LP for a single cut, but I can't really bring myself to
repeat that on CD.
So I've been rediscovering my vinyl. Every once in a while
we descend to our family room where the old records and the equipment to play them on are
located, and settle in for an evening of musical reminiscence. It usually starts with one
of us remembering a song we'd like to hear, and that leads to another, and another, and so
on. At the end of a typical session, there's usually a stack of records about a foot high
that will have to be refiled in the morning.
There was a time when I couldn't stand to listen to vinyl.
Even the most pristine records had some surface noise, and there was all sorts of hiss
from the original tape, and rumble from the turntable, and distortion from the cartridge
-- all of it was more noticeable to me than the music itself.
I can still hear all of it, but I've learned to listen
through it to the music behind, like those classical musicians. Once I stopped being
offended by the drawbacks of the recording system, I could relax and enjoy a wealth of
music I had been avoiding for years.
And it served to remind me that superb recordings certainly
didn't start with the digital age. The widespread passion for high-fidelity sound existed
because there was a lot of wonderful material out there. My wall of records looks better
and better all the time.
I am concerned, however, that I may not be able to enjoy
this luxury forever. Some years ago, an archivist who was responsible for a large
collection of recorded material pointed out to me that one of the frustrations of his job
was finding a truly permanent medium to preserve audio history. He wanted to acquire
something that would last, on which he could copy all the original recordings without
necessitating dubbing to further media in the future.
It is true that records become worn, tapes can get sticky
and unplayable, and CDs can develop laser rot. But in all these cases, the problems affect
only a small percentage of samples; properly preserved, the vast majority of recordings
can be expected to last virtually indefinitely.
The problem is that there may not be anything to play them
on. I have the luxury of being able to exercise my vinyl collection because, early in the
CD age, I invested in a state-of-the-art turntable and cartridge, which are still
performing like new decades later. But when they finally grind to a halt, I may have to
convert my precious LPs to beer trays.
Or I could do what one reader suggested. He wanted to buy
half a dozen turntables when there was still some selection, and then wear each one of
them out in succession. He figured the tables would outlive him.
Several formats have basically suffered that fate. I once
visited Canada’s National Library in Ottawa, and was astounded that the only way they
could listen to their large collection of cylinder recordings was to crank up an old
acoustic phonograph; if they wanted to archive the sound, the only method was to plop a
microphone in front of it and record it that way. Later they did commission an engineer to
create an electronic cylinder player, but that was a one-shot deal, not available to
anyone else, however many cylinders they may have collected.
Until only a short time ago, my own recorded history was
preserved primarily on open-reel tape. Over the years, I have owned numerous recorders,
many of which are still kicking around in my basement in various states of disrepair, but
I didn't mind too much as each of them bit the dust because I had one excellent machine
that was flexible enough to handle tapes in any of the formats I had used. Half-track
stereo at 15ips? Sure. Mono 3-3/4? No probs. 1-7/8 mono on 3" reels? That one took a
bit of fiddling but it could be done.
Now I've discovered that this peerless machine has begun to
malfunction in several ways. I'll certainly be able to have it repaired now, but that may
not be possible down the road. So my archivist's concerns have hit home fairly hard. If I
want to keep this stuff, I'll have to find a way to back it up. But how?
One excellent choice might be VHS Hi-Fi, but if the movie
companies’ swing over to DVD goes as predicted, VHS may go the way of the LP and the
eight-track cartridge, and the machines will surely disappear. Recordable or rewritable
CDs might do, but they may turn out to be ephemeral as well. DVD players can play CDs, but
that may not always be the case, and even now there are incompatibilities between DVD
players and some recordable CDs. So nothing is certain.
Maybe the guy with the six disposable turntables had the
right idea.
...Ian G. Masters
ian@mastersonaudio.com
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