Re: [ARSCLIST] electronic reading of physical media, was: Preservation policy question

[Tom Fine <tflists@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Here's maybe one way this could be done for magnetic tape -- and think of
the ramifications for badly-deteriorated tapes and even sticky but not
stuck-together tapes. Tape is fed into a machine that coats the oxide with a
magnetic developer, then onto a scanning bed that scans X inches per pass
and produces a linear scan for the decoder. Decoder would have do be able to
decode developed magnetic tracks, which I do not know enough about to know
if they contain readable amplitude and frequency information -- or would the
decoder need to simulate what happens when a given magnetic pattern passes
over a given type of head?  If it works for mag-tape, it would of course
work for mag-film, mag discs, mag anything that can be developed and
scanned.

This might be too Buck Rogers -- like I said I don't know exactly what the
developer reveals beyond the tracks' physical location on the tape.

-- Tom Fine

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Lou Judson" <inaudio@xxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <ARSCLIST@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Saturday, December 10, 2005 1:01 AM
Subject: Re: [ARSCLIST] electronic reading of physical media, was:
Preservation policy question


A challenge, yes, but with the way so-called "3D" imaging on computers
has changed over the past ten years, I can imagine that it could be
read in three dimensions in a few more years.. Like the electron
microscope ikmages we ahve seen for so long, just being able to
transmogrify them into audio shouldn't be impossible.

As a science fiction reader who saw communications satellites invented
in fiction before reality, I can imagine many things... and there are
some things I may live to see. This all speaks to saving the originals
while archiving the best we can today.
<L>
Lou Judson • Intuitive Audio
415-883-2689

On Dec 9, 2005, at 9:20 PM, stevenc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

> From: "Lou Judson" <inaudio@xxxxxxxxxxx>
>> This is great food for future-thinking - does anyone think it will
>> eventually become possible to make an image scan of a disc and have
>> the
>> computer read it, in the way a scanner and OCR can turn documents into
>> type or ASCII code? And eventually magnetic tape might be read, the
>> way
>> we used to use chemicals to make magnetic patterns visible? I would
>> think it was easily possible given advanced anough computers and
>> software...
> Well, it shouldn't be too difficult for lateral-cut monophonic
> records, since the path of the cut groove defines the waveform
> which will be reproduced. Vertical-cut records would be more
> complicated to read from image, since the modulation appears
> as groove depth rather than groove path...and stereo records
> carry both lateral and vertical information, thus presenting
> a challenge!=