Library of Congress Study

More evidence of what the Olde Tech mavens have been insisting for years:

http://www.oregonlive.com/performance/index.ssf/2010/09/library_of_congress_study_soun.html

Yep. I have always insisted that the 78rpm record is the single most stable recording format of all time. 78s will still be playable hundreds of years after the last CD-R has disintegrated. Digitization is not preservation.

I wish I could say these findings are surprising, but they're not. It's been a dirty little secret for a while now. About ten years ago a professional recording engineer friend and I were discussing this, and he said the sound quality was already eroding on CDs he'd burned of studio sessions in the 80's and '90's. I've heard similar stories about people's photo albums stored on disks as well. (Edited to add: Factoring in how easy it is to accidentally delete digital files, or lose them in a computer crash or IPod mishap, even more of our musical history will be lost. Few people are diligent about backing up their files.)

fftopic: I'm sure you know this, Lizzie, but for the benefit of those not as well informed of the history of media technology, as a medium, the compact disc was never proven to be particularly stable--it was simply not around long enough before being released to the public for anyone to know what would happen to the data. The actual purpose of the Compact Disc was to pull the recording industry out of a depression it was experiencing in the late 1970's-early 80's. By changing music formats, consumers would boost the economy by purchasing CD players and replacing their records with CDs. I worked in a record store during that transition in the 80's, and they did, in droves. Billboard magazine covered this extensively in the mid to late 1980's, and none of the articles focused on sound quality. Most of them were along the lines of, "Will the Compact Disk save the music industry?" For a while, it did.

This doesn't surprise me at all, and has been part of the reason I was hesitant to jump into the digital music era. I have an iPod, and have practically my entire music and radio show collection on it, as well as my hard drive. However, I've always been cautious knowing how quickly that data could be lost in a hard drive failure or accidental erasing. In that way, I still consider CD's to be much more reliable and stable than a hard drive, so I still keep my CD collection in a giant box in the closet as a backup in the event my hard drives go out. I just hope my older CD's don't wear out before I'd ever need them to backup my collection.

I've always considered digital to be purely a convenience format. I have thousands of hours of vintage radio material on tape, both reels and cassettes, many of which are over thirty years old -- and I've had only a handful that have developed problems over the years. I'd still be more inclined to back up preservation copies on analog tape than any digital format. I do have a considerable number of these recordings in digital form, for computer playback, but I have no intention of ever digitizing the entire collection.

I think I've bought less than two dozen actual CDs since the format came out. I've never liked the idea of a pass/fail format -- even a damaged analog recording can produce salvageable sound, which to me is a huge advantage over anything digital.

One other comment I'd make about the article -- the reference to the first decade of radio being lost is rather misleading. It wasn't lost because the recordings deteriorated -- it was lost because, with a bare handful of exceptions, it was never recorded to begin with.

I think it's quite likely that recordings of *today's* radio may be even scarcer than those of the 1930s a few decades down the line -- I imagine very very few airchecks are being made on tape nowadays. I wouldn't cry too hard if everything broadcast on radio in the last twenty years were to vanish forever into the ether, but certainly someone ought to be making an effort to archive it in a non-digital format.