Study: Audio recordings of US history fading fast
Study: Audio recordings of US history fading fast
By BRETT ZONGKER, Associated Press Writer Quote:
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Oh great, another crap story spouting myth/BS that isn't backed up by any research, yet will make enough noise that people will believe it.
Good grief. Let's pick this apart... >> POST UPDATE: >> Further posts below this one, as you scroll down the page, reveal it to probably be a bad re-interpretation of a press release. >> Links to the actual LOC study are available, too. Quote:
This person has grossly used this example out of context. Quote:
Old analog formats, such as tape, are not going to survive 150 years. That's going to be a challenge even for film, as George Lucas will surely attest! Quote:
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The last time somebody gave out a stupid timeframe of "two to five years", the story was debunked as the baseless unresearched and unreliable crap it was. This one will be no different. Anybody who claims discs die in 3-5 years either has a vested interest in alternative technology (as was the case with the magnetic media IBM researcher from that story 5 years ago), or the person has simply never burned and tested CD-R over a long period of time. For example, I just removed about 50 CD-R from my car, discs that have lived in my car since the mid 1990s, because I just wasn't listening to them anymore. This was a far-from-ideal environment for those discs, with a majority of the years having been in Texas heat and moisture. In more recent years, the media have sat in sub-freezing nighttime temps, only to be rapidly re-heated when the sun came back out in the early morning. I've abused the heck out of those discs. Yet they are both playing and testing well within tolerances. Some of those are even early-generation AZO media, which will decay more rapidly than more modern AZO or other dye types. The only truth from this article was found at the end of it: Quote:
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The spirit of copyright law was for artists to reap profit from their work, during their lifetime. I think a decade is plenty of time to reap those profits. You don't need to control for 90+ years, as can happen now. That's a gross distortion and violation of the original spirit of laws that can be traced back to the 1700s (arguably earlier, but let's stick to the USA). Characters are protected by trademarks forever, so copyright isn't needed as an extra defacto trademark protection. Also... What amazes me here is the quoted person, Sam Brylawski, was employed by the Library of Congress (LOC), as a cataloger of recordings. He also "prioritized" older recordings for digital transition. That tells me two things: (1) he didn't convert anything himself, and likely has limited knowledge of the digital process and media in use, and (2) he was an integral part of a team that actively converted audio from what he described as long-lasting analog media to quickly-dying digital media. Am I the only one who realizes this article is contrary to his job, and therefore makes no sense. His bio is here: http://www.nedcc.org/education/confe...d2008/bios.php. Glad he's not in charge of the LOC, otherwise he may trying to "archive" CD onto wax Edison cones. I just don't get this. Much like that last 3-5 years CD/DVD article, much of the blame for the misinformation may lie with the article author, Brett Zongker, and not the study or quoted person. This whole thing may have been used out of context. Last time, the author was a cell phone reviewer who was unqualified to write about blank media at that level. Zongker is described as an "(AP) reporter covering arts, culture, entertainment, tourism, nonprofits and Washington." How the hell does this person qualify to write about the technical aspects of optical media? Writing about music isn't the same as writing about the technology that powers music distribution. His bio is at http://muckrack.com/DCArtBeat and I think he looks like some young kid with an attitude. As a part-time reporter myself, I won't write about something when I don't fully comprehend the topic yet. If I was interviewing somebody on cars, for example, I could be told something that a mechanic would immediately know is BS. But I don't know cars, so I'd be dumb enough to include the incorrect factoid in my piece. Had I been interviewing this person, I would NEVER have simple taken notes that CD-R have a 3-5 year lifespan and moved on. HELL NO! I'd have insisted for much deeper information to verify this wild claim. Then again, it appears the article was written from a report, and an interview may have never actually happened. So you have somebody reading something they barely comprehend, and writing something that doesn't make any sense? That makes sense. These things really just give me a headache. What's worse is this anti-CD (and therefore defacto anti-DVD) gibberish may cause people to falsely start storing more content on hard drives, which do actually have a 3-5 year life span. And that, unlike the phantom information used for the CD-R claim, is well-document research performed by several respected groups and companies. Google, for example, has posted their findings on this topic. OnTrack and some others have materials, as well, pertaining to hard drive lifespans being in the half-decade range. Above all else, storage conditions dictate lifespan and condition, not age or medium. These half-assed articles, a mixture of info that is true and not true, do nobody any favors. |
So are well-kept DVDs from a good manufacturer still the best way to go? I have read on some forums that solid state drives are recommended for archiving, but this is questionable since flash drives are known to lose data if is not refreshed occasionally.
Or what about linear tape-open drives? Do they last longer than DVDs, assuming they are recorded to only a couple of times and then put into storage? |
Sad truth is most of our so called authorities in most any given field (not to mention politics) don't know what they are doing or what they are talking about.
Maybe they only used Memorex or something even cheaper to transfer but even in that case more than likely they would last longer than described. Scare-mongering at its best. |
I'll address your two posts in the near future. Right now I'm reading various PDFs -- the actual study. Indeed, the article written by AP is scare-mongering. A number of facts were used by the article's author out of context from the original study, to support some kind of idiotic anti-digital/anti-CD rant that was clearly not present in the study.
For example, the idea that analog audio will outlast digital audio by 150 years is based off a preservation issue, where 21st century digital media simply is not being archived as carefully as analog media had been in the 20th century. I would speculate that it has to do with psychology, where people don't grasp the fact that when a website dies, the information is gone. When a book goes out of print, I can still find a copy. Same applies to audio and video. As an example, Youtube has quite a few funny home videos. But unless those are archived, America's Funniest Home Videos (the studio TV series) will outlast Youtube content and probably still be available in 50+ years. Now, the article writer used this factoid as evidence against digital media, when that was NEVER the claim of the study. What a bastard. It will probably be a few weeks before I'm done. |
Also, here's part the original LOC press release:
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And then here's the original study: http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub148/pub148.pdf I'm having issues with some of the material. There are times when media is discussed in vague opinionated generalities, and completely lacks any scientific backing. For example, sound/audio engineers who think CD is a terrible format. No further information is really given, which I find appalling. I have the opinion that many sound engineers have allowed their psychology to cloud their judgments, as many of them claim to be able to "hear" things that are not actually there. That's always been a popular bias against CD, that it "sounds different". Well, that's mostly a byproduct of how CD-Audio is cooked as compared to other formats (levels off the scale, etc), and not due to the medium itself. Audio engineers should know this, but I don't want to give anybody too much credit these days. Notice that much of the study focuses on storage and handling, too -- which is the true issue of archiving. I have a feeling this study will be like many food studies. In other words, nothing is safe. All options are bad. And somebody got paid big grant bucks to tell us the we should be scared. Yay. |
The Hollywood Reporter did not goof it up. This is a very good interpretation of what the study says:
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So there ARE still quality reporters out there. Sadly, this much better piece will be overshadowed by the crap AP version. There's just no justice sometimes. Ironic that a celebrity magazine full of usually-fluff news gets it right, while a diligent news source like AP gets it wrong. |
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Well, if they're using inferior gold discs, then it's really no wonder they've run into issues. Mitsui (now MAM-A) is/was the only company that claims gold is archival. This is a topic for both a guide and an editorial that going to be published here in the near future, so I won't go into it much more. In short, both gold and the dyes typically used on gold discs are harder on the lasers, and often result in degraded initial burns. As time goes by, multiple factor contribute to a situation where the disc is harder to read than a disc made with cheaper materials. This should not be something that is unknown to archivists, but apparently that is the case. They may as well have used Memorex or office store branded blanks. |
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It's really nice to see the forum members here have not been shaken by this silly AP news hackjob story and are instead relying on the factual information we've long presented here. Others will undoubtedly not be so wise. |
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I'm attaching the study PDF here. :)
I really need to buy myself an iPad to read stuff like this away from the desk. "Dear Santa Claus, this year I would like ...." |
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Admin, could you link to the original LOC press release you quote from? Thanks! |
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Regarding CD-R lifespan. I have "Gold" CD-Rs with the green dye dating back to 1996-97 (they cost $7-8 a piece!). Guess what, they all read fine.
Attachment 1001 Attachment 1002 http://gfx.cdmediaworld.com/c/tdk.jpg http://gfx.cdmediaworld.com/c/tdk_top.jpg Earliest CD-R I have with a Phillips that came with a friend's Phillips CDD2000 2X CD-R drive. Attachment 1003 Attachment 1004 http://gfx.cdmediaworld.com/c/philips.jpg http://gfx.cdmediaworld.com/c/philips3_top.jpg I have a batch of cheap silver discs from 2001 (Ritek likely) that have their fair share of issues. the biggest problem is the top silver layer flaking off. Thankfully I have stored nothing important on them. I am purposely hoarding a batch of "Made in the USA" in-house produced TDK CD-Rs I bought back in 2000, simply because its awesome media. Looks like this: Attachment 1005 http://gfx.cdmediaworld.com/c/tdk_cd-r74.gif After 2000, they started selling re-branded Ritek media. Oh, and I have an early Taiyo-Yuden That's CDR too, circa 1999. Came with my Plextor PX-W4220T CD-RW drive. Reads fine. Attachment 1006 http://gfx.cdmediaworld.com/c/thats.jpg |
Concerning audio cassette tapes, like Admin, I had some Maxell
high bias recordings from LPs made back in the 80's that stayed in my various vehicles over the decades. Some of them I recently transferred to CD and they were in fairly good shape, of course, some of them were in better shape than others and there were a few dropouts on some of them but I was glad to get them copied because they are OOP. |
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The biggest mistake of the study was failure to recognize not all media are made equal. (Again, based on what I've had time to read so far.) By lumping cheap Princo CD/DVD and Taiyo Yuden CD/DVD into the same "disc" category is a disservice to archivists who may be reading this for reassessing their own archive methods. |
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