Re: arsclist reel to reel player/recorder

["Doug Pomeroy" <pomeroyaudio@xxxxxxx>]

Don,

Thanks for clarification. I definitely disagree.

You can't copy *anything* forever without SOME loss.
But high-quality digital equipment DOES allow virtually endless
copying WITHOUT loss, digital bit-for-bit. This has been demonstrated.
To suggest that this is "not good enough" strikes me as extreme
stogginess, even without mentioning the weaknesses of the alternatives!

I agree with your admonition about "processing in the digital domain",
but this is *precisely* why archival/preservation work must NEVER
include any digital signal processing. I believe this is fully understood
by all those doing archival preservation work these days.

The matter of "lossy compression" is totally irrelevant, as you seem
to acknowledge.

You say

> "given an old tape or disc, playing it back so
> that nothing is lost is hard,

but I would assure you that there are qualified engineers who CAN
do this extremely well. In spite of what you may have read in the
popular press, which always makes it out as some kind of black art,

> and converting from analogue to digital
> without losing more is also hard.

Wrong. There is nothing "hard" about it. It just requires good equipment,
musical sensibility and a knowledge of the medium(s) involved. And
experience doesn't hurt, of course. I'd venture to say it's only "hard" if
you are dealing with people who don't understand the music and/or the
medium.

I don't mean to sound like a snotty old fart, but there has been SO MUCH
nonesense spread around about these matters, I eventually start to loose
my temper a little bit. Forgive me.

Cheers,

Doug
-------
>From: Don Cox <doncox@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
>To: ARSCLIST@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>Subject: Re: arsclist reel to reel player/recorder
>Date: Wed, Jun 13, 2001, 7:36 PM
>

> On 13-Jun-01, Doug Pomeroy wrote:
>
>>> The problem is getting from one to the other without losing
>>> information.
>>
>> What does this mean? Why should there be a loss? I havn't read
>> Watkinson's book, so maybe the answer is there. My understanding is
>> that the advantage of digital is precisely that program can be
>> migrated *without* loss of info, error correction being extremely
>> robust. Contrast that with analog tape, where frequency-response and
>> phase variations are *invariably* imposed with every copy, not to
>> mention the matter of added tape hiss and modulation noise.
>
> Once you have a digital signal, you can copy it repeatedly with no loss.
> If you start processing it in the digital domain, there may be problems
> with aliasing.
>
> Analogue signals, as everyone knows, degrade with each stage of copying.
> So do any digital signals on which lossy compression has been used (MP3,
> Minidisc, etc), but nobody would use those for archiving.
>
> What I am saying is that, given an old tape or disc, playing it back so
> that nothing is lost is hard, and converting from analogue to digital
> without losing more is also hard.  This is what other people have said
> in their mails.
>
> Regards
> --
> Don Cox
> doncox@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx