We were recently sent a collection of 7″ 8-track reel-to-reel tapes. All the 8-track tapes were recorded using Dolby C noise reduction on a Fostex A8 machine. They hadn’t been stored in optimum conditions and as many were recorded on AMPEX tape, we did need “bake” them prior to transfer, to treat binder hydrolysis.
The A-8 was part of the home recording revolution that took the ’80s by storm. The A-8 in particular was popular because it was the first machine to offer eight tracks on just one 1/4″ tape.
The machine, like its ‘first mate’ the 350 Mixer, were not meant for professionals but enthusiastic amateurs who were happy to work things out themselves. ‘Sure you won’t know everything right off. But you won’t have to. Just hook up to the 350 (our instructions are easy and explicit) and go to work. You can learn the key to incredible flexibility as you go. While you are working on your music. Not before,’ were the encouraging words in the 350 mixer manual.
Products like the Fostex A-8 enabled bands and artists who would never have got a commercial record deal to record their music. All sorts of weird and wonderful sounds were recorded on multi-track tape recorders, and they often received airplay on John Peel‘s radio shows.
When we transfer reel-to-reel multi-track tapes we save each stem individually, so you can remix the recordings digitally if you want to. If you spent far too much time in the early ’80s playing with your home studio and have a load of old tapes lying in your cupboard, we can help give them a new lease of life. With Ampex tapes in particular, it is critical to transfer them now because they will deteriorate quickly if action is not taken soon.
The oldest tape we have received at the Greatbear is a spool of paper backed magnetic tape, c.1948-1950. It’s pretty rare to be sent paper-backed tape, and we have been on a bit of adventure trying to find more about its history. On our trail we found a tale of war, economics, industry and invention as we chased the story of the ‘magnetic ribbon’.
The first thing to recount is how the development of magnetic tape in the 1930s and 1940s is enmeshed with events in the Second World War. The Germans were pioneers of magnetic tape, and in 1935 AEG demonstrated the Magnetophon, the first ever tape recorder. The Germans continued to develop magnetic tape, but as the 1930s wore on and war declared, the fruits of technological invention were not widely shared – establishing sophisticated telecommunication systems was essential for the ‘war effort’ on both sides.
Towards the end of the war when the Allies liberated the towns and cities of Europe, they liberated its magnetic tape recording equipment too. Don Rushin writes in ‘The Magic of Magnetic Tape.’
‘By late 1944, the World War II Allies were aware of the magnetic recorder developed by German engineers, a recorder that used an iron-powder-coated paper tape, which achieved much better sound quality that was possible with phonograph discs. A young Signal Corps technician, Jack Mullin, became part of a scavenging team assigned to follow the retreating German army and to pick up items of electronic interest. He found parts of recorders used in the field, two working tape recorders and a library of tapes in the studios of Radio Frankfurt in Bad Nauheim.’
In the United States in WW2, significant resources were used to develop magnetic tape. ‘With money no object and the necessity of adequate recording devices for the military, developments moved at a brisker pace’, writes Mark Mooney.
This where our paper tape comes into the equation, courtesy of Polish-born inventor Semi J. Begun. Begun began working for the Brush Development Company in 1938, who were one of the companies contracted to develop magnetic tape for the US Navy during the war. In his position at Brush Begun invented the ‘Sound Mirror.’ Developed in 1939-1940 but released on the market in 1946, it was the first magnetic tape recorder to be sold commercially in the US post WW2.
As the post-war rush to capitalise on an emerging consumer market gathered apace, companies such as 3M developed their own magnetic tapes. Paper backed magnetic tape was superseded toward the end of the 1940s by plastic tape, making a short but significant appearance in the history of recording media.
This however is a story of magnetic tape in the US, and our tape was recorded in England, so the mystery of the paper tape has not been solved. Around the rim of the rusted spool it states that it is ‘Licensed by the Brush Development Co U.S.A’, ‘Made in England’, ‘Patents Pending’ and ‘Thermionic Products Ltd.’
Thermionic were the British company who acquired the license to build the Soundmirror in 1948. Barry M Jones, who has collected a wider history of the British tape recorder, home studio and studio recording industries writes, ‘[Soundmirror] was the first British-built domestic tape-recorder, whereas the first British built-and-designed tape recorder was the Wright & Weaire, which appeared a few weeks later. Production began in autumn 1948 but the quality of the paper tape meant it shedded oxide too readily and clogged the heads!’
Production of the Soundmirrors continued to late 1954 so it is possible to date the tape as being recorded some time between 1948 and 1958. The weight of the spool and the tape is surprisingly heavy, the tape incredibly fragile, marking its passage through time with signs of corrosion and wear. It is a beautiful object, as many of the tapes we get are, that is entwined with the social histories of media, invention, economy and everyday life.
Metadata is data about data. Maybe that sounds pretty boring, but archivists love it, and it is really important for digitisation work.
As mentioned in the previous post that focused on the British Library’s digital preservation strategies, as well as manyotherfeatures on thisblog, it is fairly easy to change a digital file without knowing because you can’t see the changes. Sometimes changing a file is reversible (as in non-destructive editing) but sometimes it is not (destructive editing). What is important to realise is changing a digital file irrevocably, or applying lossy instead of lossless compression, will affect the integrity and authenticity of the data.
What is perhaps worse in the professional archive sector than changing the structure of the data, is not making a record of it in the metadata.
Metadata is a way to record all the journeys a data object has gone through in its lifetime. It can be used to highlight preservation concerns if, for example, a file has undergone several cycles of coding and decoding that potentially make it vulnerable to degradation.
‘technical data (info on resolution, image size, file format, version, size), structural metadata (describes how digital objects are put together such as a structure of files in different folders) and descriptive (info on title, subject, description and covering dates) with each type providing important information about the digital object.’
As the previous blog entry detailed, digital preservation is a dynamic, constantly changing sector. Furthermore, digital data requires far greater intervention to manage collections than physical objects and even analogue media. In such a context data objects undergo rapid changes as they adapt to the technical systems they are opened by and moved between. This would produce, one would speculate, a large stream of metadata.
What is most revealing about metadata surrounding digital objects, is they create a trail of information not only about the objects themselves. They also document our changing relationship to, and knowledge about, digital preservation. Metadata can help tell the story about how a digital object is transformed as different technical systems are adopted and then left behind. The marks of those changes are carried in the data object’s file structure, and the metadata that further elaborate those changes.
Like those who preserve physical heritage collections, a practice of minimal intervention is the ideal for maintaining both the integrity and authenticity of digital collections. But mistakes are made, and attempts to ‘clean up’ or otherwise clarify digital data do happen, so when they do, it is important to record those changes because they help guide how we look after archives in the long term.
In a blog post a few weeks ago we reflected on several practical and ethical questions emerging from our digitisation work. To explore these issues further we decided to take an in-depth look at the British Library’s Digital Preservation Strategy 2013-2016 that was launched in March 2013. The British Library is an interesting case study because they were an ‘early adopter’ of digital technology (2002), and are also committed to ensuring their digital archives are accessible in the long term.
Making sure the UK’s digital archives are available for subsequent generations seems like an obvious aim for an institution like the British Library. That’s what they should be doing, right? Yet it is clear from reading the strategy report that digital preservation is an unsettled and complex field, one that is certainly ‘not straightforward. It requires action and intervention throughout the lifecycle, far earlier and more frequently than does our physical collection (3).’
The British Library’s collection is huge and therefore requires coherent systems capable of managing its vast quantities of information.
‘In all, we estimate we already have over 280 terabytes of collection content – or over 11,500,000 million items – stored in our long term digital library system, with more awaiting ingest. The onset of non-print legal deposit legislation will significantly increase our annual digital acquisitions: 4.8 million websites, 120,000 e-journal articles and 12,000 e-books will be collected in the first year alone (FY 13/14). We expect that the total size of our collection will increase massively in future years to around 5 petabytes [that’s 5000 terabytes] by 2020.’
All that data needs to be backed up as well. In some cases valuable digital collections are backed up in different locations/ servers seven times (amounting to 35 petabytes/ 3500 terabytes). So imagine it is 2020, and you walk into a large room crammed full of rack upon rack of hard drives bursting with digital information. The data files – which include everything from a BWAV audio file of a speech by Natalie Bennett, leader of the Green Party after her election victory in 2015, to 3-D data files of cunieform scripts from Mesopotamia, are constantly being monitored by algorithms designed to maintain the integrity of data objects. The algorithms measure bit rot and data decay and produce further volumes of metadata as each wave of file validation is initiated. The back up systems consume large amounts of energy and are costly, but in beholding them you stand in the same room as the memory of the world, automatically checked, corrected and repaired in monthly cycles.
Such a scenario is gestured toward in the British Library’s long term preservation strategy, but it is clear that it remains a work in progress, largely because the field of digital preservation is always changing. While the British Library has well-established procedures in place to manage their physical collections, they have not yet achieved this with their digital ones. Not surprisingly ‘technological obsolescence is often regarded as the greatest technical threat to preserving digital material: as technology changes, it becomes increasingly difficult to reliably access content created on and intended to be accessed on older computing platforms.’ An article fromThe Economist in 2012 reflected on this problem too: ‘The stakes are high. Mistakes 30 years ago mean that much of the early digital age is already a closed book (or no book at all) to historians.’
There are also shorter term digital preservation challenges, which encompass ‘everything from media integrity and bit rot to digital rights management and metadata.’ Bit rot is one of those terms capable of inducing widespread panic. It refers to how storage media, in particular optical media like CDs and DVDs, decay over time often because they have not been stored correctly. When bit rot occurs, a small electric charge of a ‘bit’ in memory disperses, possibly altering program code or stored data, making the media difficult to read and at worst, unreadable. Higher level software systems used by large institutional archives mitigate the risk of such underlying failures by implementing integrity checking and self-repairing algorithms (as imagined in the 2020 digital archive fantasy above). These technological processes help maintain ‘integrity and fixity checking, content stabilisation, format validation and file characterisation.’
300 years, are you sure?
Preservation differences between analogue and digital media
The British Library isolate three main areas where digital technologies differ from their analogue counterparts. Firstly there is the issue of ‘proactive lifestyle management‘. This refers to how preservation interventions for digital data need to happen earlier, and be reviewed more frequently, than analogue data. Secondly there is the issue of file ‘integrity and validation.’ This refers to how it is far easier to make changes to a digital file without noticing, while with a physical object it is usually clear if it has decayed or a bit has fallen off. This means there are greater risks to the authenticity and integrity of digital objects, and any changes need to be carefully managed and recorded properly in metadata.
Finally, and perhaps most worrying, is the ‘fragility of storage media‘. Here the British Library explain:
‘The media upon which digital materials are stored is often unstable and its reliability diminishes over time. This can be exacerbated by unsuitable storage conditions and handling. The resulting bit rot can prevent files from rendering correctly if at all; this can happen with no notice and within just a few years, sometimes less, of the media being produced’.
A holistic approach to digital preservation involves taking and assessing significant risks, as well as adapting to vast technological change. ‘The strategies we implement must be regularly re-assessed: technologies and technical infrastructures will continue to evolve, so preservation solutions may themselves become obsolete if not regularly re-validated in each new technological environment.’
Establishing best practice for digital preservation remains a bit of an experiment, and different strategies such as migration, emulation and normalisation are tested to find out what model best helps counter the real threats of inaccessibility and obsolescence we may face in 5-10 years from now. What is encouraging about the British Library’s strategic vision is they are committed to ensuring digital archives are accessible for years to come despite the very clear challenges they face.
We have already written about noise reduction this week, but did so without acknowledging the life of Ray Dolby, one of the inventors of video tape recording while working at Ampex and the inventor and founder of Dolby Noise Reduction, who died on 12 September 2013.
‘His noise-reduction system worked by applying a pre-emphasis to the audio recording, usually boosting the quieter passages. The reverse process was used on playback. Removing the boost – lowering the level – also removed most of the tape hiss that accompanied all analogue recordings. Of course, people did not care how it worked: they could hear the difference.’
Dolby managed to solve a clear problem blighting analogue tape recording: the high frequency noise or tape hiss inherent when recording on magnetic tape.
Like many professional recording studios from the 1960s onwards, the Great Bear Studio uses the Dolby A noise-reduction system that we use to play back Dolby A encoded tape. On the Dolby A the input signal is split into four individual frequency bands and provided 10 dB of broadband noise reduction overall.
We also have a Dolby SR system that was introduced in 1986 to improve upon analogue systems and in some cases surpass rapidly innovating digital sound technologies. Dolby SR maximises the recorded signal at all times using a complex series of filters that change according to the input signal and can account for up to 25dB noise reduction.
We get a range of tape and video recordings to digitise at the Great Bear. Our attention is captured daily by things which are often unusual, interesting and historically significant in their own way.
Last week we received a recording of Pilot Officer Edwin Aldridge ‘Finn’ Haddock talking about his experiences in the Second World War. Finn, who has since passed away, had made the tape in preparation for a talk he was doing at a local school, using the recording in order to rehearse his memories.
Despite the dramatic nature of the story where he is shot down in Northern France, sheltered by the French resistance and captured by the Germans, it is told in a remarkably matter of fact, detached manner. This is probably because the recording was made with no specific audience in mind, but was used to prompt his talk.
Finn’s story gives us a small insight into the bravery and resilience of people in such exceptional circumstances. The recording tells us what happened in vivid terms, from everyday facts such as what he ate during his shelter and capture to mass executions conducted by the Gestapo.
The now digitised tape recording, which was sent to us by his niece, will be shared among family members and a copy deposited with the local history club in Wheatley Hill, where Finn was born.
Finn was also interviewed by the Imperial War Museum about his experiences, which can be accessed if you click on this link.
On a technical note, when we were sent the tape we were asked if we could reduce the noise and otherwise ‘clean up’ the recording. While the question of how far it is reasonable to change the original recording remains an important consideration for those involved in digital archiving work, as was discussed last week on the Great Bear tape blog, there are some things which can be done if there is excessive hiss or other forms of noise on a recording.
The first step is to remove transient noise which manifest as clicks and pops which can affect the audibility of the recording. Family home recordings that were made with cheap tape recorders and microphones often picked up knocks and bangs, and there were some on Finn’s tape that were most probably the result of him moving around as he recorded his story.
The second step is to deploy broadband noise reduction, which removes noise across the audio spectrum. To do this we use high pass and low pass filters which effectively smooth off unwanted noise at either end of the frequency range. The limited frequency range of the male voice means that it is acceptable to employ filters at 50 Hz (high pass) and 8000 Hz (low pass) and this will not affect the integrity of the recording.
It is important to remember that noise reduction is always a bit of a compromise because you don’t want to clean something up to the extent that it sounds completely artificial. This is why it is important to keep the ‘raw’ transfer as well as an uncompressed edited version because we do not know what noise reduction techniques may be available in five, ten or twenty years from now. Although we have a lot of experience in achieving high quality digital transfers at the Great Bear, any editing we do to a transfer is only one person’s interpretation of what sounds clear or appropriate. We therefore always err on the side of caution and provide customers with copies of uncompressed raw, edited and compressed access copies of digitised files.
Finn’s story noise reduced
The ‘raw’ transfer
A further problem in noise reduction work is that it is possible to push noise reduction technology too much so that you end up creating ‘artefacts’ in the recording. Artefacts are fundamental alterations of the sound quality in ways that are inappropriate for digitisation work.
Another thing to consider is destructive and non-destructive editing. Destructive editing is when a recording has been processed in software and changed irrevocably. Non-destructive editing, not surprisingly, is reversible, and Samplitude, the software we use at the Great Bear, can save all the alterations made to the file so if certain editing steps need to be undone they can be.
Again, while in essence the principles of digital transfer are simple, the intricacies of the work are what makes it challenging and time consuming.
Today is the first day of iPres 2013, the 10th international conference on the preservation of digital objects held in Lisbon, Portugal. To mark the occasion we want to reflect on an issue that is increasingly important for the long term management of digital data: curation.
Anyone who has lived through the digital transition in the 21st century surely cannot ignore the information revolution they have been part of. In the past ten years, vast archives of analogue media have been migrated to digital formats and everyday we create new digital information that is archived and distributed through networks. Arcomen, who are running a workshop at iPres on ‘Archiving Community Memories’, describe how
‘in addition to the “common” challenges of digital preservation, such as media decay, technological obsolescence, authenticity and integrity issues, web preservation has to deal with the sheer size and ever-increasing growth and change rate of Web data. Hence, selection of content sources becomes a crucial and challenging task for archival organizations.’
As well as the necessary and sometimes difficult choices archival organisations have to make in the process of collecting an archive, there is then the issue of what to do with your data once it has been created. This is where the issue of digital curation comes in.
Screenshot of the SONY website from 1996
Traditionally, the role of the curator is to ‘take care’ and interpret collections in an art gallery or a museum. In contemporary society, however, there is an increasing need for people to curate collections that are exclusively digital, and can only be accessed through the web. Part of any long term digitisation strategy, particularly if an archive is to be used for education or research purposes, should therefore factor in plans and time for curation.
Curation transforms a digital collection from being the equivalent of a library, which may be searchable, organised and catalogued, into something more akin to an exhibition. Curation helps to select aspects of an archive in order to tell deliberate stories, or simply help the user navigate content in a particular way. Curating material is particularly important if an archive deals with a specialist subject that no one knows about because visitors often need help to manoeuvre large amounts of complex information. Being overwhelmed by content on the internet is an often cited expression, but ensuring digital content is curated carefully means it is more likely that people visiting your site will be able to cope with what they find there, and delve deeper into your digitsed archival treasures.
Like all things digital, there is no one steadfast or established guidelines for how to ensure your collection is curated well. The rapid speed that technology changes, from preferred archival formats, software to interface design, mean that digital curation can never be a static procedure. New multiple web authoring tools such as zeega, klynt and 3WDOC will soon become integrated into web design in a similar fashion to the current Web 2.0 tools we use now, therefore creating further possibilities for the visual, immersive and interactive presentation of digital archive material.
Screenshot of the Fostex website from Dec 1998
Curation is an important aspect of digital preservation in general because it can facilitate long term use and engagement with your collection. What may be lost when archive sites become pruned and more self-consciously arranged is the spontaneous and sometimes chaotic experience of exploring information on the web.
Ultimately though, digital curation will enable more people to navigate archival collections in ways that can foster meaningful, transformative and informative encounters with digitised material.
As lovers of magnetic tape and obsolete media, we keep our eyes open for people who remain attached to the formats most have forgot.
A recent film posted on Vimeo features the creative life of part time chef, noise musician and tape DJ Micke, also known as ‘The Magnetist’.
The film follows the Stockholm-based artist through his life as a ‘tapeologist.’ From demagnetising tape in order to create soundscapes, to running a club night comprised of tapes scavenged from wherever he can find them, Micke demonstrates how the audio cassette remains a source of inspiration within counter culture.
The wider resurgence of cassettes is evident from the forthcoming Cassette Store Day, an event that will be marked in record stores in the UK, USA, Europe and South America.
So what’s behind the sub-cultural obsession with the audio cassette tape? Perhaps it is no more complex than novelty value and nostalgia. It may however be evidence of the persistence of analogue technologies in an era where digital technologies appear to have colonised our relationship to sound and vision.
Is there a yearning to resist the ways digital media shapes how we listen to music, both at the level of sound quality, and the promiscuous skipping through mp3 files?
You simply can’t do that with tape. You have to rewind, fast forward or listen the whole way through. Its a mechanical process, often shrouded in hiss.
What is certain, fashion or no fashion, the wheels on the Great Bear tape machines will keep turning.
In archiving, the simple truth is formats matter. If you want the best quality recording, that not only sounds good but has a strong chance of surviving over time, it needs to be recorded on an appropriate format.
Most of us, however, do not have specialised knowledge of recording technologies and use what is immediately available. Often we record things within limited budgets, and need to make the most of our resources. We are keen to document what’s happening in front of us, rather than create something that will necessarily be accessible many years from now.
At the Great Bear we often receive people’s personal archives on a variety of magnetic tape. Not all of these tapes, although certainly made to ensure memories were recorded, were done on the best quality formats.
Recently we migrated a recording of a wedding service from 1970 made on C-120 audio cassette.
Image taken using a smart phone @ 72 dpi resolution
C60 and C90 tapes are probably familiar to most readers of this blog, but the C-120 was never widely adopted by markets or manufacturers because of its lesser recording quality. The C-120 tape records for an hour each side, and uses thinner tape than its C90 and C60 counterparts. This means the tape is more fragile, and is less likely to produce optimum recordings. Thinner tapes is also more likely to suffer from ‘print-through‘ echo.
As the Nakamichi 680 tape manual, which is pretty much consulted as the bible on all matters tape in the Great Bear studio, insists:
‘Choosing a high quality recording tape is extremely important. A sophisticated cassette deck, like the 680, cannot be expected to deliver superior performance with inferior tapes. The numerous brands and types of blank cassettes on the market vary not only in the consistency of the tape coating, but in the degree of mechanical precision as well. The performance of an otherwise excellent tape is often marred by a poor housing, which can result in skewing and other unsteady tape travel conditions.’
The manual goes on to stress ‘Nakamichi does not recommend the use of C-120 or ferrichrome cassettes under any circumstances.’ Strong words indeed!
It is usually possible to playback most of the tape we receive, but a far greater risk is taken when recordings are made on fragile or low quality formats. The question that has to be thought through when making recordings is: what are you making them for? If they are meant to be a long term record of events, careful consideration of the quality of the recording format used needs to be made to ensure they have the greatest chance of survival.
Such wisdom seems easy to grasp in retrospect, but what about contemporary personal archives that are increasingly ‘born digital’?
A digital equivalent of the C-120 tape would be the MP3 format. While MP3 files are easier to store, duplicate and move across digital locations, they offer substantially less quality than larger, uncompressed audio files, such as WAVs or AIFFs. The current recommended archival standard for recording digital audio is 24 bit/ 48 kHz, so if you are making new recordings, or migrating analogue tapes to digital formats, it is a good idea to ensure they are sampled at this rate
‘in the midst of an amazing revolution in computer technology, there is a near total lack of systems designed with digital preservation in mind. Instead, we have technology seemingly designed to work against digital preservation. The biggest single issue is that we are encouraged to scatter content so broadly among so many different and changing services that it practically guarantees loss. We need programs to automatically capture, organize and keep our content securely under our control.’
The issue of format quality also comes to the fore with the type of everyday records we make of our digital lives. The images and video footage we take on smart phones, for example, are often low resolution, and most people enjoy the flexibility of compressed audio files. In ten years time will the records of our digital lives look pixelated and poor quality, despite the ubiquity of high tech capture devices used to record and share them? Of course, these are all speculations, and as time goes on new technologies may emerge that focus on digital restoration, as well as preservation.
Ultimately, across analogue and digital technologies the archival principles are the same: use the best quality formats and it is far more likely you will make recordings that people many years from now can access.
The Archive Trust for Research in Mathematical Sciences and Philosophy holds an extensive collection of audio and video recordings on subjects in mathematics, physics and philosophy, particularly the philosophy and foundations of mathematics and the exact sciences recorded since the early 1970s.
The website explains further the rationale for collecting the recordings:
Such recordings allow historians of science and mathematics to form a better appreciation of the background to the emergence of new ideas; and also of the complex pattern formed by “roads not taken” – ideas which for whatever reason were laid aside, or apparently subsumed in other developments. Those ideas may later re-emerge in ways yielding a new perspective on those developments. Such a rich archive of primary oral source material naturally aids historical study of the Sciences and the conceptual and philosophical questions to which they give rise.
The project started in 1973 when Michael recorded lectures, seminars and courses relating to Maths and Philosophy when he was a doctoral student. The early recordings were made in Oxford, London and Cambridge and were done on an enthusiastic, if amateur basis. In the 1980s and 1990s the recording process became more systematic, and more video recordings were taken. The archive is still collecting material, and Michael often travels to conferences and lectures to record contemporary debates in the field, as he is this week when he travels to Warsaw for Samuel Eilenberg Centenary conference (there are recordings of Eilenberg’s lectures and an interview collected in the archive).
What started as a hobby for Michael has now become a full time commitment. The archive contains a staggering 37,000 recordings, those he made and ones solicited from other individuals. They include recordings of figures such as Imre Lakatos, Ilya Prigogine, contemporary philosopher Alain Badiou and many more.
The majority of recordings from 1973-2003 were recorded on audio cassette format, although some were done on reel-to-reel recorders. Many of these recordings remain on analogue tape, and the biggest challenge for the archive is now to find the funds to migrate several thousand hours of recordings to digital format.
The archive also track downs and publishes existing material that may be collected in other archives, or are stored in people’s personal collections. For Michael the biggest revelation in constructing the archive was finding out about the amount of material people have that are sitting in the back of their cupboards. This is either because people have forgotten they exist, or because they simply do not known what to do with them.
The archive became a charitable trust in 2008 and names among its trustees English mathematical physicist and philosopher Sir Roger Penrose, and Martin Rees, former Master of Trinity College and Emeritus Professor of Cosmology at the University of Cambridge and President of the Royal Society.
Its an exciting, and transitional, time for the archive as it plans to take its next steps. In the coming years there are plans to develop the website through uploading ‘born digital’ information, attain funds for wholesale digitisation of tape and paper resources and continue to collect recordings. This ambitious project is well on its way to becoming a vital and unique contribution to the subject, and will interest many other people who are simply curious about these rich and complex topics.
Often when we think about the reasons to digitise magnetic tape collections we are considering the future. We digitise to make material accessible so it can be used again, or to preserve it so subsequent generations can benefit or learn from it. But how sustainable is digitisation and digital technology? What is the ecological impact of the widespread and breathtakingly fast adoption of digital technologies since the late 1990s?
At an everyday, consumer level, the use of digital technologies comes with real human and environmental costs, as Professor Toby Miller and Professor Richard Maxwell demonstrate in a recent article in The Guardian. They argue that the very metaphors we use to describe digital media – ‘virtual,’ ‘cloud’, ‘streams’ and ‘mobiles’ – dangerously obscure the fact they come from materials, such as the minerals Tatalun, Tungsten, Tin and Gold, and cover up the exploitative labour conditions, and war torn situations from which they are extracted:
‘Suggestions that we live in a dematerialised world are not only exaggerated; they are doing more harm than good. One person’s cloud is another’s pollution, and one person’s mobile is another’s enslavement. From electronic waste to conflict minerals, the new media leave an indelible mark on bodies and the Earth they inhabit.’
The extent of violence and exploitation that lie at the end of the digital supply chain is hardly a secret. At a consumer level there seems to be very little resistance to the use of mobile digital devices, probably because our very social existence is dependent upon them in a culture where media is pervasive. It is not easy to opt out, and what would you do if you did?
As heavy users of digital technologies we walk with our heads in the clouds, so to speak, unable to access the wider environmental impact of our actions. This impact is intensified by the pressure to continually upgrade our devices, as Dr Chris Priest writes,
‘the regularity with which you replace a device becomes more important in determining the overall footprint of the device. If we take a hypothetical device with a 50% use footprint, and replace it after two years rather than three, then it will increase our overall footprint by 25%. Of course, new devices might be becoming increasingly efficient and this could offset the increase to some extent. Though even if the new device used no power, it could not offset it completely.’
Yet these are speculations not empirical fact. It is hard to know concretely what the environmental consequences of becoming immediate adopters of the latest (fastest, smallest, bestest) digital technologies are. One thing is certain, new goods will appear and people will be told they can’t live without them. This is how an economy driven by innovation works.
Thinking about the uptake of digital technologies at an institutional level, it is clear that within a technological climate pre-disposed to the production of ‘digital waste’ and obsolescence, the mismanagement of energy resources in order to keep digital data ‘alive’ (that is useable, accessible) is a real possibility. One only need turn to the financial and technological waste produced from the BBC’s Digital Media Initiative (DMI) to confirm that the creation of technical systems devised to manage large digital archives are not moving at the same relentless speed as the neoliberal market.
Which begs the question: can there be an ecological solution to the problem of digitisation, and the use of digital technologies in an innovation/ obsolescence economy? Can digitisation ever be energy efficient, non-exploitative and flexible enough to cope with the technological changes that will inevitably happen? What would a sustainable and ethical approach to digital information management look like?
As our world gets increasingly networked these are pressing questions effecting everyone. And clearly understanding the wider impact of the use of technology on people and the earth is a serious issue, usually forgotten when scrolling through data feeds in a voracious, but often distracted, manner. These are admittedly big questions and we welcome comments, links and ideas on how to answer them.
As keen hoarders of mechanical waste from the analogue era who are passionate about making data accessible in digital form, we are contributing to a world that places unprecedented value on technological information.
Need this, however, always be at the expense of people and the world we share as currently it seems to be?
We have recently been sent a Sony V62 high density video tape by Barrie Hesketh. Barrie has had an active career in theatre and in 1966 he set up the Mull Little Theatre on the Isle of Mull off the West Coast of Scotland with his late wife Marianne Hesketh. Specialising in what Barrie calls the ‘imaginative use of nothing’ they toured the UK, Germany and Holland and gained a lot of publicity world wide in the process. Both Marianne and Barrie were awarded MBEs for their services to Scottish Theatre.
You can read a more detailed history of the Mull Little Theatre in this book written by Barrie.
Panasonic VTR NV-8030 EIAJ ½” reel to reel video recorder
The video tape Barrie sent us came from when he and Marianne were working as actors in residence at Churchill College at Cambridge University. Barrie and Marianne had what Barrie described as ‘academic leanings,’ gained from their time as students at the Central College of Speech and Drama in London.
In a letter Barrie sent with the tape he wrote:
‘I own a copy of a video tape recording made for me by the University of Cambridge video unit in 1979. I was researching audience/actors responses and the recording shows the audience on the top half of the picture, and the actors on the bottom half – I have not seen the stuff for years, but have recently been asked about it.’
While audience research is a fairly common practice now in the Creative Arts, in 1979 Barrie’s work was pioneering. Barrie was very aware of audience’s interests when he performed, and was keen to identify what he calls ‘the cool part’ of the audience, and find out ways to ‘warm them up.’
Recording audience responses was a means to sharpen the attention of actors. He was particularly interested in the research to identify ‘includers’. These were individuals who influenced the wider audience by picking up intentions of the performers and clearly responding. The movement of this individual (who would look around from time to time to see if other people ‘got it’), would be picked up in the peripheral vision of other audience members and an awareness gradually trickled throughout. Seeing such behaviour helped Barrie to understand how to engage audiences in his subsequent work.
Barrie’s tape would have been recorded on one of the later reel-to-reel tape machines that conformed to the EIAJ Standard.
The EIAJ-1 was developed in 1969 by the Electronic Industries Association of Japan. It was the first standardized format for industrial/non-broadcast video tape recording. Once implemented it enabled video tapes to be played on machines made by different manufacturers.
Prior to the introduction of the standard, tapes could not be interchanged between comparable models made by different manufacturers. The EIAJ standard changed all this, and certainly makes the job of transferring tapes easier for us today! Imagine the difficulties we would face if we had to get exactly the right machine for each tape transfer. It would probably magnify the problem of tape and machine obsolescence effecting magnetic tape collections.
In the Greatbear Studio we have the National Panasonic Time Lapse VTR NV-8030 and Hitachi SV-640.
Like Ampex tapes, all the Sony EIAJ tape tend to suffer from sticky shed syndrome caused by absorption of moisture into the binder of the tape. Tapes need to be dehydrated and cleaned before being played back, as we did with Barrie’s tape.
The tape is now being transferred and Barrie intends to give copies to his sons. It will also be used by Dr Richard Trim in an academic research project. In both cases it is gratifying to give the these video tapes a new lease of life through digitisation. No doubt they will be of real interest to Barrie’s family and the wider research community.
In a recent blog article on the Presto Centre website, Richard Wright argues that ‘the audiovisual collections of the 20th century were analogue, and we are now at a critical time for considering the digital future of that analogue content.’ He goes on to say, emphatically:
‘All analogue audio and video formats are obsolete. Digital content walks through walls, travels at the speed of light, can be in many places at the same time, and can (with care) be perfectly copied, again and again. So digitisation has become the solution to the obsolescence of all analogue audio and video formats.’
Although careful not to make too clinical a statement, he bookmarks 15 April 2023 as the date when analogue obsolescence really kicks in.
A major problem is finding spare parts for machines after manufacturers stop producing them. Many components were made according to very precise specifications that are hard to make from scratch. When machines and their parts wear out it will therefore be difficult, if not impossible, to keep them working.
This means that the cost of transfers will rise due to machine scarcity. At an institutional level this may lead to selective decisions about what gets digitised and what doesn’t.
Writing for music magazine The Wire, Numero Group’s Rob Sevier and Ken Shipley describe how ‘vinyl’s violent sales spike has been a lonely bright spot in what has been a 14 year deterioration in sales of recorded music’.
Yet the resilience of vinyl and other contemporary fringe uses of analogue media, such as the cassette tape and floppy disk, is not enough to stop the march of digitisation. For experts like Wright the digital future for the majority of people is inevitable, irresistible even, given how it enables collections to be open, replicable and accessible.
Yet committing to digital technologies as a preservation and access strategy does not solve our information problems, as we have been keen to stress on this blog. There is also a worrying lack of long term strategy for managing digital information, a problem which is ever more pronounced in film preservation where analogue tape is still marked as the original from which digital copies are made.
It is clear that the information we create, store and use is in transition. It probably always has been. The emergence of digital technologies has just made this a pressing issue, not only for large institutions, but for people as we go about our day to day lives.
‘Digitise now!!’ is Richard Wright’s advice – and of course we agree.
Digitising legacy and obsolete video formats in essence is simple but the technical details make the process more complex. Experience and knowledge are therefore needed to make the most appropriate choices for the medium.
The U-matic video format usually had two types of video output, composite and a y/c type connector that Sony named ‘Dub’. Originally designed as a higher quality method to make analogue ‘dubs’, or for connections in an edit suite, the Dub connector offers a higher performance signal path for the video signal.
It would make sense to use the higher quality dub output when digitising U-matic tapes but here lies the problem. Firstly the connector uses the larger 7 pin y/c type connector that can be quite hard to find connectors for.
Secondly and most significantly, the chrominance subcarrier frequency is not the standard PAL 4.43Mhz but down converted by U-matic recorders to 0.686Mhz for low band recordings and 0.984Mhz for high band recordings.
What this means in practice is that you’ll only get a monochrome image using the U-matic dub connector unless you can find a way to convert the chroma subcarrier frequency back to 4.43Mhz.
There are several solutions:
Convert this Dub signal chroma frequency using one of a few older Timebase Correctors / Frame Synchronisers from the U-matic era.
These are now rare and often have other other faults that would degrade the signal.
Take the Luma and Chroma signals at the correct frequency directly from certain test points on the circuit boards inside the machines.
This can work well but is a slightly ‘messy’ solution and makes it hard to swap machines around, which is a necessity with older hardware.
Convert the dub signal using a dedicated external dub – y/c converter circuit. This is our preferred solution that works well technically. It is flexible enough to swap around to different machines easily. It is also a relatively simple circuit that is easy to repair and doesn’t subject the video signal to unnecessary extra processing.
Below are two stills taken from a Apple ProRes recording from a Low Band PAL U-matic tape.
The first image is via the Dub connecter but converted to PAL Y/C.
The second images is via the Composite video out.
It’s clear from the images that there is more fine detail in the picture from the U-matic Dub version. The pattern / texture in the jacket and the texture and tone in the face is more detailed. In contrast, the version digitised through the Composite video connector has less noise but due to the extra encoding and decoding there is less detail and more ‘blurring’.
While less noise may be preferable in some instances, having the option to choose between these two is always better. It’s this kind of attention detail and investment in equipment and knowledge that we are proud of and makes us a preferred supplier of digitising services for U-matic video tape.
We were recently sent a ¼ inch tape by Ed Bates that included recordings from the Couriers Folk Club in Leicester, which ran from Autumn 1964 – June 1974.
The tape features performances from The Couriers (Jack Harris and Rex Brisland), George and Thadeus Kaye, Bill Pickering, Mark Newman and Mick Odam.
Jack Harris, who alongside Rex Brisland ran the club, describes how ‘traditional singers like Bert Lloyd, Ewan MacColl and Pete Seeger, Bob Davenport were regular visitors together with ageing ploughboys, miners and fishermen who were often so infirm or unlikely to make their own way to Leicester they had to be fetched by car.’
As well as supporting grassroots folk music from the local area, well known performers such as musical superstar Barbara Dickson, Paul Simon and Joni Mitchell graced the stage.
The tape recordings we received span five years. The first recording was made on 6 August 1966, then 3 September 1966, 8 February 1970 and finally 9 April 1971.
Each performance was recorded on a separate track in mono. This means that the 7” long spool contains 8 hours of music!
Like today’s MP3 digital files, the quality of the recorded sound is compromised because so much information is squeezed into a smaller space on the tape. A better quality recording would have been made if all four channels were used for a single performance, rather than one track for each performance.
The speed at which recordings were made also effects the quality of the recordings, simply because you can record more information per second at a faster rate. The tapes we were sent were recorded at 7 ½ per second on what is likely to have been a domestic tape recorder such as the Sony TC-263D. Ed’s letter to us speaks volumes about the conditions in which the recordings were made:
‘I was present at the Couriers Folk Club in Leicester when they were recorded so I can say that the recording quality is not good. The Sony recorder was used as an amplifier and on some occasions (if someone remembered) a tape was recorded.’
While the recordings certainly would have benefited from less haphazard recording conditions, the quality of the transfer is surprisingly crisp, as you can hear from this excerpt.
Excerpt from the digitised recordings of the Couriers folk club
The tape was in good condition, as Philips magnetic reel-to-reel tape often survives well over time, which aided a good transfer. One thing we were especially attentive to in the transfer process was carefully adjusting the azimuth, because of the slow speed of the original recording and the narrow track width.
Image taken from the BASF magnetic tape manual that illustrates how four tracks can be recorded on magnetic tape
The emergence of recordings of the Couriers Club is especially timely given the recent launch of the English and Folk Dance Society‘s The Full English online digital archive . This contains a massive 44,000 records and over 58,000 digitised images about English folk history.
With a dozen or more tapes recently found from the Club, we look forward to helping this unique part of cultural heritage become accessible again.
There are plenty of reflections on the Great Bear tape blog about the fragility of digital data, and the need to think about digitisation as part of a wider process of data migration your information will need to make in its lifetime.
We have also explored how fast moving technological change can sometimes compromise our capacity to construct long term strategies for the survival of digital data.
This why it is so important that organisations such as the Digital Preservation Coalition, founded in February 2002, articulate a vision that aims to make ‘digital memory accessible tomorrow.’ Their website goes on to say:
Our generation has invested as never before in digital resources and we’ve done so because of the opportunity they bring. They have grown in volume, complexity and importance to the point that our children are baffled by the inefficiencies of the analogue age. Pervasive, fluid and fragile: digital data is a defining feature of our age. Industry, commerce, government, law, research, health, social care, education, the creative industries, the heritage sector and private life depend on digital materials to satisfy ubiquitous information needs and expectations. Digital preservation is an issue which all organisations, particularly in the knowledge sector, will need to address sooner or later.
As providers of a digitisation service it is important for us to understand digitisation in line with the ideas articulated above. This means creating high quality, uncompressed files that will make it as easy as possible for data migrations to happen in the future should they need to.
Organisations such as the Digital Preservation Coalition are providing sensible advice and creating forums for learning and debate about the problems and possibilities of digital preservation.
These are two things that are needed as we come to navigate an information environment heavily populated by ‘pervasive, fluid and fragile’ digital data.
‘It seems we are living in an age in which practically every dream comes true. At no time in the past have so many scientific discoveries and inventions changed our way of life and the face of the world. Yes, we live in the age of science! Maybe we are forgetting to be awed, or are we so used to acquainting ourselves with the new that we seem to take anything for granted nowadays?’
This is the opening paragraph to A Comprehensive Booklet on BASF Magnetic Recording Tape, published c.1965 by the German company BASF.
The booklet, that we will feature more of in later posts, offers advice and instructions on how to record sound on magnetic tape.
While in today’s culture we may well have forgotten ‘to be awed’ by sound recording technology, there was a time when home recording was an extremely novel activity. As our recent post about Brian Pimm-Smith’s tapes demonstrates, sound recording was done by enthusiasts – it was by no means an everyday activity.
Tape recording clubs were however very popular in the 1960s-1970s, with groups forming all around the country.
Sound artist Mark Vernon describes how ‘dedicated amateurs would meet and swap tips, exchange recordings, enter competitions and arrange activities such as field recording trips. Eager members would lug heavy reel-to-reel recorders around the countryside, to church concerts, fire stations, airports and carnivals to capture the sounds around them.’
The excitement of recording sound on a ‘mysterious little reddish-brown ribbon’ is clear from reading the BASF manual. There is no shortage of awe for the ‘magic tape that practically does everything from writing out cheques to guiding missiles in space.’
In contemporary western culture the use of recording technologies has become as common as eating or breathing. Mystery and magic are words not often used to describe our laptops, phones or tablets. Yet it may well be worth remembering how mysterious and magic technology can be. That the things we take for granted as part of our everyday lives were once new inventions that radically transformed perceptions and our ability to document the world we live in.
As the BASF manual enthused, ‘the multitude of different impressions in the acoustic world…are just as beautiful and gratifying as those of the visible world [and] can now be conserved for all posterity.’
A recent news report on the BBC website about recycling and repairing ‘old’ technology resonates strongly with the work of Greatbear.
The story focused on the work of Restart Project, a charity organisation who are encouraging positive behavioural change by empowering people to use their electronics for longer. Their website states,
the time has come to move beyond the culture of incessant electronics upgrades and defeatism in the face of technical problems. We are preparing the ground for a future economy of maintenance and repair by reskilling, supporting repair entrepreneurs, and helping people of all walks of life to be more resilient.
We are all familiar with the pressure to adopt new technologies and throw away the old, but what are the consequences of living in such a disposable culture? The BBC report describes how ‘in developed nations people have lost the will to fix broken gadgets. A combination of convenience and cultural pressure leads people to buy new rather than repair.’
These tendencies have been theorised by French philosopher of technology Bernard Stiegler as the loss of knowledge of how to live (savoir-vivre). Here people lose not only basic skills (such as how to repair a broken electronic device), but are also increasingly reliant on the market apparatus to provide for them (for example, the latest new product when the ‘old’ one no longer works).
A lot of the work of Greatbear revolves around repairing consumer electronics from bygone eras. Our desks are awash with soldering irons, hot air rework stations, circuit boards, capacitors, automatic wire strippers and a whole host of other tools.
We have bookshelves full of operating manuals. These can help us navigate the machinery in the absence of a skilled engineer who has been trained how to fix a MII, U-Matic or D3 tape machine.
As providers of a digitisation service we know that maintaining obsolete machines appropriate to the transfer is the only way we can access tape-based media. But the knowledge and skills of how to do so are rapidly disappearing – unless of course they are actively remembered through practice.
The Restart Project offers a community-orientated counterpoint to the erosion of skills and knowledge tacitly promoted by the current consumer culture. Promoting values of maintenance and repair opens up the possibility for sustainable, rather than throwaway, uses of technology.
Even if the Restart Project doesn’t catch on as widely as it deserves to, Greatbear will continue to collect, maintain and repair old equipment until the very last tape head on earth is worn down.
A recent addition to the Greatear digitising studio is a BTS D-1 digital video cassette recorder.
As revolutionary as it was at the time, early digital audio and video tape recording is more threatened with obsolescence than earlier analogue formats.
Introduced in 1986, D-1 was the very first, real-time, digital broadcast-quality tape format. It stored uncompressed digitized component video, had uncompromising picture quality and used enormous bandwidth for its time. The maximum record time on a D-1 tape is 94 minutes.
Enormous is certainly the word for the D-1 tape! Compared with the so-called ‘invisible’ nature of today’s digital data and the miniDV introduced in 1998, this tape from 1992 is in comedy proportions.
D-1 was notoriously expensive and the equipment required large infrastructure changes in facilities which upgraded to this digital recording format.
Early D-1 operations were plagued with difficulties, though the format quickly stabilized and is still renowned for its superb standard definition image quality, sometimes referred to as a ‘no compromise’ format.
D-1 kept the data recorded as uncompressed 8bit 4:2:2, unlike today where compression is required for digital data to save space and time for practical delivery to the home, but sacrificing the picture and sound quality in the process.
D1 was supplanted by subsequent D models that recorded component (D-5) and composite (D-2 and D-3) signals.
Doing transfers quickly would potentially keep the costs of our work down, but there are substantial risks involved in mass migrations of tape-based material.
Problems with digital transfers can occur at two points: the quality of the playback machine and the quality of the tape.
Let’s focus on the playback machine.
Each time a cassette is transferred we have to ensure that the cassette deck is calibrated to the technical specification appropriate to that machine. Calibration is a testing procedure where a standard test tape is used to set the levels for tape to be digitised. The calibration process allows us to check tapes are played back at the correct speed and audio levels, that wow and flutter levels are set and the azimuth is aligned.
Azimuth refers to the angle between the tape head(s) and tape. Differences in Azimuth alignment arise from the azimuth of the original recording. You cannot know this information from just looking at a tape and you will get a sub-optimal transfer unless you adjust your machine’s azimuth to match the original recording.
Regularly checking the Wow and Flutter on the tape machine is also very important for doing quality transfers. Wow and flutter refer to fluctuations in speed on the playback mechanism, flutter being a higher rate version of wow. If you have listened to a tape you will probably be familiar with the sound of warped and woozy tape – this is the presence of wow. All tape machines have wow and flutter, but as components in the mechanisms stretch there is the potential for wow and flutter to increase. It is therefore essential to know what level the wow and flutter are set on your tape deck –less than 0.08% Weighted Peak on our Nakamichi 680 machines – to ensure optimal transfer quality.
Not all cassette machines were made equal either, and the quality of playback is absolutely dependent on the type of machine you have. There is a massive difference between the cheap domestic cassette machines made by Amstrad, to the cassette decks we use at Great Bear. Nakamichi machines were designed to squeeze the most out of the cassette, and their performance is way above the standard ‘two head’ cheap domestic machines.
Even with a Nakamichi deck, however, they have to be regularly checked because they are fragile electromagnetic machines that will drift out of specification over time. When machines drift they slip out of alignment, therefore effecting their operating capacity. This can occur through subtle knocks, everyday wear and tear and general ageing of mechanical and electrical components. For example, with extended use the grease in the components dries up and goes hard, and therefore affects the movement of the mechanisms.
Problems can also arise with the tapes themselves.
Most issues arise from tapes not being played back in well calibrated machines.
With audio cassettes the potential for azimuth error is increased because the speed the tape moves pasts the head is very slow. The tape therefore needs to be assessed to see if it is in a playable condition. It is played back in mono because it is easier to hear if there are problems with the azimuth, and then the azimuth is manually adjusted on the machine.
Migrating tape is unquestionably a ‘real time’ process. You need to listen and monitor what’s on the tape and the digitised version to ensure that problems with the transfer are detected as it is happening. It is a very hands on activity, that cannot be done without time, care and attention.
The bread and butter work of Greatbear Analogue and Digital Media is to migrate analogue and digital magnetic tape to digital files, but recently we were asked by a customer to transfer a digital file to ¼ analogue tape.
The customer was concerned about the longevity of electronic digital formats, and wanted to transfer his most valued recordings to a tangible format he knew and trust. Transferring from digital to analogue was certainly more expensive: the blank tape media cost over £50 alone.
In a world where digital technology seems pervasive, remaining so attached to analogue media may appear surprising. Yet the resilience of tape as a recorded medium is far greater than is widely understood.
Take this collection of old tapes that are in the back yard of the Greatbear office. Fear not customers, this is not what happens to your tapes when you send them to us! They are a collection of test tapes that live outside all year round without shelter from the elements. We use them to test ways of treating degraded tapes because we don’t want to take unnecessary risks with our customers’ material.
Despite being subject to pretty harsh conditions, the majority of material on these tapes is recoverable to some degree.
Would digital data stored on a hard drive survive if it had to endure similar conditions? It is far less likely.
Due to its electronic composition digital data is fragile in comparison with analogue magnetic tape. This is also the ironic conclusion of Side by Side (2012), the documentary film narrated by Keanu Reeves which explores the impact of digital technology on the film industry.
Requests for digital to analogue transfers are fairly rare at Great Bear, but we are happy to do them should the need arise!
And don’t forget to back up your digital files in at least three different locations to ensure it is safe.
In theory the work we do at Greatbear is very simple: we migrate information from analogue or digital magnetic tape to electronic digital files.
Once transferred, digital files can be easily edited, tagged, accessed, shared or added to a database. Due to the ubiquitous nature of digital media today, if you want to use your data, it needs to be in a digital form.
In practice however, there are a lot more issues that arise when migrating tape based media. These can stem from the obsolescence of machines (spare parts being a particular issue), physical problems with the tape and significantly, the actual person-time involved in doing the transfer.
While large institutions like the Library of Congress in USA can invest in technology that enables mass digitisation like those developed by Samma Systems, most transfers require operators to do the work. The simple truth is that for fragile and obsolete tape media, there is no other option. In the film ‘Living Archive – Preservation Challenge‘ David Crostwait from American digitisation company DC Video describes the importance of careful, real time transfers:
‘When a tape is played back, that tape starts from the very beginning and may run for 60-65 minutes straight. One person sits in front of that machine and watches that tape from beginning to end, s/he does nothing else but watch that tape. We feel this procedure is the only way to guarantee the highest quality possible.’
At Greatbear we echo this sentiment. We give each transfer individual attention so that the information is migrated accurately and effectively. Sometimes this means doing things slowly to ensure that tape is spooled correctly and the tension within the tape pack is even. If transfers are rushed there is always the danger that tape could get crumpled or damaged, which is why we take our time.
As an archival process digitisation offers the promise of a dream: improved accessibility, preservation and storage.
However the digital age is not without its archival headaches. News of the BBC’s plans to abandon their Digital Media Initiative (DMI), which aimed to make the BBC media archive ‘tapeless’, clearly demonstrates this. As reported in The Guardian:
‘DMI has cost £98.4m, and was meant to bring £95.4m of benefits to the organisation by making all the corporation’s raw and edited video footage available to staff for re-editing and output. In 2007, when the project was conceived, making a single TV programme could require 70 individual video-handling processes; DMI was meant to halve that.’
The project’s failure has been explained by its size and ambition. Another telling reason was cited: the software and hardware used to deliver the project was developed for exclusive use by the BBC. In a statement BBC Director Tony Hall referred to the fast development of digital technology, stating that ‘off-the-shelf [editing] tools were now available that could do the same job “that simply didn’t exist five years ago”.’
The fate of the DMI initiative should act as a sobering lesson for institutions, organisations and individuals who have not thought about digitisation as a long, rather than short term, archival solution.
As technology continues to ‘innovate’ at startling rate, it is hard to predict how long the current archival standard for audio and audio-visual will last.
Being an early adopter of technology can be an attractive proposition: you are up to date with the latest ideas, flying the flag for the cutting edge. Yet new technology becomes old fast, and this potentially creates problems for accessing and managing information. The fragility of digital data comes to the fore, and the risk of investing all our archival dreams in exclusive technological formats as the BBC did, becomes far greater.
In order for our data to survive we need to appreciate that we are living in what media theorist Jussi Parikka calls an ‘information management society.’ Digitisation has made it patently clear that information is dynamic rather than stored safely in static objects. Migrating tape based archives to digital files is one stage in a series of transitions material can potentially make in its lifetime.
Given the evolution of media and technology in the 20th and 21st centuries, it feels safe to speculate that new technologies will emerge to supplant uncompressed WAV and AIFF files, just as AAC has now become preferred to MP3 as a compressed audio format because it achieves better sound quality at similar bit rates.
Because of this at Greatbear we always migrate analogue and digital magnetic tape at the recommended archival standard, and provide customers with high quality and access copies. Furthermore, we strongly recommend to customers to back up archive quality files in at least three separate locations because it is highly likely data will need to be migrated again in the future.
We are currently digitising a collection of U-matic Ampex KCS-20 video tapes for Keith Barnfather, the founder of Reeltime Pictures.
Reeltime Pictures are most well-known for their production of documentaries about the BBC series Doctor Who. They also made Doctor Who spin-off films, a kind of film equivalent of fan fiction, that revived old and often marginal characters from the popular TV series.
The tapes we were sent were Ampex’s U-matic video tapes. For those of you out there that have recorded material on Ampex tape be it audio or video, we have bad news for you. While much magnetic tape is more robust than most people imagine, this is not true of tape made by Ampex in the 1970s and 1980s.
Nearly all Ampex tape degrades disgracefully with age. A common outcome is ‘sticky shed syndrome,‘ a condition created by the deterioration of the binders in a magnetic tape which hold the iron oxide magnetic coating to its plastic carrier. So common was this problem with Ampex tape that the company patented the process of baking the tape (to be done strictly at the temperature 54 Centrigade, for a period of 16 hours), that would enable the tape to be played back.
In order to migrate the Ampex video tapes to a digital format they have, therefore, to be dehydrated in our incubator. This is careful process where we remove the tape from its outer shell to minimise ‘outgassing‘. Outgassing refers to the release of a gas that has become dissolved, trapped, frozen or absorbed in material. This can have significant effects if the released gas collects in a closed environment where air is stagnant or recirculated. The smell of new cars is a good example of outgassing that most people are familiar with.
When baking a tape in an enclosed incubator, it can therefore be vulnerable to the potential release of gasses from the shell, as well as the tape and its constituent material parts. Removing the shell primarily minimises danger to the tape, as it is difficult to know in advance what chemicals will be released when baking occurs.
It is important to stress that tape dehydration needs to be done in a controlled manner within a specifically designed lab incubator. This enables the temperature to be carefully regulated to the degree. Such precision cannot of course be achieved with domestic ovens (which are designed to cook things!), nor even food dehydrators, because there is very little temperature control.
So if you do have Ampex tapes, whether audio or video, we recommend that you treat them with extreme care, and if what is recorded on them is important to you, migrate them to a digital format before they almost certainly deteriorate.
In February 2013 we digitised a VHS tape from Martin Smith, the 1994 documentary Life Can Be Wonderful. The VHS tape was the only copy of the film Smith owned, and it is quite common for Great Bear to digitise projects where the film maker does not have the master copy. This is because original copies are often held by large production companies, and films can be subject to complex distribution and screening conditions.
Life Can Be Wonderful is a film was about the life of his good friend Stanley Forman, a committed communist and major figure in British left-wing cinema, who passed away at the age of 91 on 7 February 2013. Forman’s dedication to communism remained a controversial issue until his death. Smith described his conflicts with his friend which ‘most often they centred on what I saw as his refusal to own up to the enormity of Stalin’s crimes. On camera he told me that I was his dear friend, “but not a dear comrade” and apologised for failing to convey “the spirit of the times”‘.
Stanley Forman is a fascinating figure in terms of the work we do at the Great Bear. He is described on the website Putney Debater as ‘the archive man.’ The site goes on to say
His company, Plato/ Education and Television Films (ETV), held a unique library of left- wing documentaries which amounted to the history of the twentieth century from a socialist perspective. Established in 1950 as Plato Films, the outfit was what would be called in Cold War ideology a front organisation, set up by members of the Communist Party to distribute films from behind the Iron Curtain. Under the slogan ‘See the other half of the world’, Plato provided the movement with a film distributor for documentaries from the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, taking in China (until the Sino-Soviet split), Cuba, Vietnam and elsewhere, which would otherwise never be seen here.
The Educational and Television Films archive is held at the British Film Institute, and some material is available to view on the JISC Media Hub website.
In today’s digital society most people have an archive. On personal computers, tablets and mobile devices we store, create and share vast amounts of information. We use archives to tell others about our lives, and the things that are important to us.
Gone are the days when archives were dusty, dark places where experts went to research esoteric knowledge. Archives are everywhere. They are dynamic, digital and personal, as well as being institutional, historical, corporate and civic.
The creation of personal archives is of course nothing new, but the digital age forces us to have a far more intimate relationship with information, and its organisation. Put simply, there is loads more information, and if it isn’t collected in a systematic way you may well drown in a sea of your own, not to mention everybody else’s, data. Maybe this is happening to you right now! If so, you need to embrace the archival moment and get your own collections in shape.
Part of this everyday information management is migrating archives stored on obsolete formats, such as the many different types of analogue and digital magnetic tape we work with at Greatbear. Digitising tape gives it new life, allowing it to be easily circulated, shared and used with today’s technologies.
A significant amount of the Greatbear’s work involves digitising the diverse collections people produce in their everyday working, creative and social lives.
Here are two recent digitisation projects which are a good example of our work.
Swansea Sound 1976
We were sent a number of ¼ inch reel to reel Scotch 3M tape ‘made for the BBC’ tape, recorded at the rate of 7 ½ inches per second from local radio station Swansea Sound in 1976. The tapes were all in good condition, although the boxes had some evidence of water damage. Over time the tension in the tape pack had also changed, so they required careful re-spooling before being played.
The recordings were fascinating to digitise because they communicated how little the format of radio programmes have changed since the late 1970s. Jingles, news reports, chat and music were all part of the show, and anyone familiar with BBC Radio 2 would certainly enjoy the recordings, that still seem to be played every Saturday morning!
Brian Pimm-Smith’s recording diaries and tape letters
A collection of Brian’s 1/4 inch tapes
Another collection was sent to us from Brian Pimm-Smith. Brian enthusiastically documented his life and work activities using a Uher open reel portable tape recorder which he acquired in 1963. The box included many ¼ inch tapes that could record up to 10 minutes at 3 and ¾ inches per second. These tapes could also record up to 4 mono tracks at 10 minutes each, allowing for storage of up to forty minutes at a time. The main bulk of the collection is a series of spoken letters sent to and from Pimm-Smith and his family, who between them lived in Britain, Pakistan, Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), Japan and Saudi-Arabia, but it also includes recordings of when Brian worked taking weather measurements for the British Antarctic Survey.
Some of the 1/4 inch tapes were marketed by companies such as Scotch and EMI specifically to be used as ‘voice letters’ that ‘links absent friends’. Despite this Pimm-Smith said that making such recordings was pretty rare, something ‘quite out there’ for most people. Brian’s mother nonetheless embraced the activity, as they shared correspondence back and forth between wherever they lived at the time.
Voice Letters
The 1/4 inch tape boxes in themselves are a colourful record of international postage in the late 1960s. Sent from Pakistan, Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), Saudi Arabia, Australia and Japan, the small boxes are plastered with stamps. The boxes were reinforced with sellotape to ensure the contents didn’t fall out (which is still stuck fast to the boxes, by the way, clearly demonstrating the surprising longevity of some forms of sticky tape). Pimm-Smith’s tapes are fascinating objects in themselves that bear the marks of travel through space in the form of postal stamp marks, and time, as they sit on the desk now in the Greatbear Studio.
Perhaps the most exciting and unique recording Brian has kept is the audio diary of his trip through the Sahara desert. For the trip Brian drove an early 70s Range Rover which had a cassette player-recorder, a technological device only available in Africa which used audio cassette tapes. This enabled him to document his impressions as he drove along. Brian describes how he had taken a portable typewriter with the intention of keeping a written diary, but he used the tape recorder because it was more ‘immediate.’ On hearing the digitised tapes Brian was amazed at how clear the recordings sound today, particularly because he was driving at the same time and there was likely to be background noise. You can hear the hum of the car engine in the extract below, but the voice is still clearly very audible.
Listen to Brian talk about problems with his tyre as he drove across the Sahara Desert in 1976
The stories Swansea Sound radio and Pimm-Smith’s collection tell are part of wider social histories. They tell us about communities and places, as well as the continuities of style in broadcast radio. They tell us how people used analogue tape recordings to document personal adventures and communicate with families who lived in different countries.
Both tapes are examples of the sheer diversity of personal, magnetic tape based archives that people have been keeping for years, and which we digitise at the Greatbear. Brian Pimm-Smith contacted Greatbear because he wanted to make his tapes accessible, and preserve them for future use. He is hoping one day to write a book from his many adventures and these recordings can now remind him not only of what he did, but how he felt in the moment he made them.
We were recently sent a collection of recorded interviews with residents of Hebden Bridge, a mill town in the Pennines. They were recorded on regular, domestic tapes of the mid-1970s, the kind that were sold in shops such as Woolworths or WHSmith.
As magnetic cassette tapes go, these cheaper tapes can often deteriorate at a fast rate because they were aimed at a mass consumer market, and therefore not made with longevity in mind. These tapes however were in excellent condition, and no issues arose in the digitisation process.
Here is what Susie Parr told us about the project behind the tapes, and the publishing plans for the material later this year. We were very happy to be part of a creative project that will enable the stories to be shown to new audiences because of digitisation.
‘In 1975 photographer Martin Parr moved to Hebden Bridge, a mill town in the Pennines, with some friends from art school in Manchester. In a project that was to last five years, he started photographing the area, documenting a traditional culture and way of life that were slowly declining. Susie Mitchell, who also lived in Hebden Bridge, wrote about the people and places that Martin photographed. Together they built up a record of the day to day lives of mill-workers, game-keepers, coal miners, hill-farmers and chapel-goers. As part of their research, Susie and Martin would tape record their conversations with some of the characters they met. Thirty years later, the elderly audio tapes have been digitised and the photographs and texts are going to be published by Aperture in a book called The Non Conformists. In September, an exhibition will open in London.’
Below is an audio snippet of one of the tapes. This is a raw unprocessed version, notice the tape hiss inherent in these types of recordings. Sympathetic noise reduction to reduce this type of noise, can be process on these file if necessary.
8 track cartridges were a very popular domestic audio format in the United States, although there were also sold in the UK and Europe. The growth of the 8 track was synonymous with its use in car industry, as it allowed people to listen to music on the move.
Although phased out in the early 1980s as CDs became increasingly popular, the 8 track retains a cult following, as demonstrated by this video which takes a virtual tour around the 8 track museum in Dallas, Texas, USA.
Screenshot of software encoding a file to MP3 used at the Great Bear
After we have migrated your analogue or digital tape to a digital file, we offer a range of delivery formats.
For video, using the International Association of Sound & Audiovisual Archives Guidelines for the Preservation of Video Recordings, as our guide, we deliver FFV1 lossless files or 10-bit uncompressed video files in .mkv or QuickTime compatible .mov containers. We add viewing files as H264 encoded .mp4 files or DVD. We’ll also produce any other digital video files, according to your needs, such as AVI in any codec; any MacOS, Windows or GNU/Linux filesystem (HFS+, NTFS or EXT3.
For audio we offer Broadcast WAV (B-WAV) files on hard drive or optical media (CD) at 16 bit/44.1 kHz (commonly used for CDs) or 24 bit/96 kHz (which is the minimum recommended archival standard) and anything up to 24 bit / 192 kHz. We can also deliver access copies on CD or MP3 (that you could upload to the internet, or listen to on an ipod, for example).
Why are there so many digital file types and what distinguishes them from each other?
The main difference that is important to grasp is between an uncompressed digital file and a compressed one.
On the JISC Digital Media website, they describe uncompressed audio files as follows:
‘Uncompressed audio files are the most accurate digital representation of a soundwave, but can also be the most resource-intensive method of recording and storing digital audio, both in terms of storage and management. Their accuracy makes them suitable for archiving and delivering audio at high resolution, and working with audio at a professional level, and they are the “master” audio format of choice.’
Why uncompressed?
As a Greatbear client you may wonder why you need a large, uncompressed digital file if you only want to listen to your old analogue and digital tapes again. The simple answer is: we live in an age where information is dynamic rather static. An uncompressed digital recording captured at a high bit and kHz rate is the most stable media format you can store your data on. Technology is always changing and evolving, and not all types of digital files that are common today are safe from obsolescence.
It is important to consider questions of accessibility not only for the present moment, but also for the future. There may come a time when your digitised audio or video file needs to be migrated again, so that it can be played back on whatever device has become ‘the latest thing’ in a market driven by perpetual innovation. It is essential that you have access to the best quality digital file possible, should you need to transport your data in ten, fifteen or twenty years from now.
Compression and compromise?
Uncompressed digital files are sound and vision captured in their purest, ‘most accurate’ form. Parts of the original recording are not lost when the file is converted or saved. When a digital file is saved to a compressed, lossy format, some of its information is lost. Lossy compression eliminates ‘unnecessary’ bits of information, tailoring the file so that it is smaller. You can’t get the original file back after it has been compressed so you can’t use this sort of compression for anything that needs to be reproduced exactly. However it is possible to compress files to a lossless format, which does enable you to recreate the original file exactly.
In our day to day lives however we encounter far more compressed digital information than uncompressed.
There would be no HD TV, no satellite TV channels and no ipods/ MP3 players without compressed digital files. The main point of compression is to make these services affordable. It would be incredibly expensive, and it would take up so much data space, if the digital files that were streamed to televisions were uncompressed.
‘Every so often I’ll get the proper CD version of an album I’ve fallen in love with as a download, and I’ll get a rude shock when confronted by the sense of dimension and spatiality in the music’s layers, the sculpted force of the drums, the sheer vividness of the sound. The difference between CD and MP3 is similar to that between “not from concentrate” orange juice and juice that’s been reconstituted from concentrate. (In this analogy vinyl would be ‘freshly squeezed, perhaps). Converting music to MP3 is a bit like the concentration process, and its done for much the same reason: it’s much cheaper to transport concentrate because without the water it takes up a lot loss volume and it weighs a lot less. But we can all taste the difference.’
As a society we are slowly coming to terms with the double challenge of hyper consumption and conservation thrown up by the mainstreaming of digital technology. Part of that challenge is to understand what happens to the digital data we use when we click ‘save as,’ or knowing what decisions need to be made about data we want to keep because it is important to us as individuals, or to wider society.
At Greatbear we can deliver digital files in compressed and uncompressed formats, and are happy to offer a free consultation should you need it to decide what to do with your tape based digital and analogue media.
For a while now we’ve been working with film maker Jeanie Finlay on various projects, digitising archive video footage in varying tape formats and standards.
Her latest project, soon to be premiered in the US:
…is a film about truth, lies and the legacy of faking everything in the desperate pursuit of fame. The American dream, told by people who’d never even been to America.
We digitised a collection of VHS and Hi8 camcorder and full sized tapes and delivered Apple ProRes files for the edit.
See the trailer here:
The main work of Greatbear is to make analogue and digital tape-based media accessible for people living in a digital intensive environment. But once your tape-based media has been digitised, is that the end of the story? Do you never need to think about preservation again? What issues arise for information management in the future, and how do they relate to our actions in the present?
This year (2013) the National Archives in the UK are facing a huge challenge as the ’20-year rule‘, in which the government will be releasing records when they are 20 years old, instead of 30, comes into effect. A huge part of this process is the digitisation of large amounts of material so they can be easily accessible to the public.
What does this have to do with the digitisation of tape you may be wondering? Well, mostly it provides food for thought. When you read the guidelines for the National Archives’ digitisation strategy, it raises many points that are worth thinking about for everyone living inside an information intensive environment, professional archivist or not. These guidelines suggest that many of the problems people face with analogue media, for example not being able to open, play or use formats such as tape, floppy disks or even digital media, such as a cd-r, do not go away with the move toward wholesale digitisation. This is summed up nicely in the National Archive’s point about digital continuity. ‘If you hold selected digital records that are not yet due for transfer, you will need to maintain their digital continuity. This means ensuring that the records can be found, opened, understood, worked with and trusted over time and through change’. This statement encapsulates the essence of digital information management – the process whereby records are maintained and kept up to date with each technological permutation.
Later on in their recommendations they state something which may be surprising to people who assume that digitisation equates to some form of informational omnipotence: ‘Unlike paper records, digital records are very vulnerable and will not survive without active intervention. We cannot leave digital records on a shelf in an archive – they need active management and migration to remain accessible in the long term.’ These statements make clear that digital records are just as vulnerable as their analogue counterparts, which although subject to degrading, are in fact more robust than is often assumed.
What is the answer to ensuring that the data we create is usable in the future, is there an answer? It is clear on whatever format we choose to archive data there is always risk involved: the risk of going out of date, the risk of vulnerability, the risk of ‘not being able to leave them on the shelf’. Records, archives and data cannot, it seems, simply look after themselves. They have to adapt to their technological environments, as much as humans do.
Over a several years, Greatbear has been collecting and restoring old audio and video tape machines. By trawling through the online car boot sale that is ebay, or travelling round the country to visit real ones, the collection has built up over time and now constitutes over seventy working machines and forty other machines that are used for spare parts and testing.
Amazingly, a good amount of the machines we have acquired have cost absolutely nothing: its all about having the canny knack of being in the right place at the right time, and knowing the right people. On several occasions we have been given fully functioning machines by film production houses who have been forced to make the latest technological transition because of changing industry standards. So what happens to these machines when their built-in obsolescence comes home to roost? They are either chucked in a skip, sold on ebay to a limited and sometimes lucrative market, or they are given to people like us who are continuing to make good use of them.
To give you a picture of how quickly technological and, consequently, monetary value changes, consider this brief example. In 1991 the value of a Sony BVW D75 was $32,000 (or $52,037/ £32,920 in today’s money), but today it is worth absolutely nothing. Despite their lack of monetary value in today’s market economy, videotape machines from the 70s, 80s and 90s are exceptionally well made. They were built to last and were designed for heavy use in editing suites, where tape was freeze framed, rewound and played back again and again on a daily basis.
Yet as technology develops, there is no more need for the AMPEX BVW 75, Panasonic MII, Sony U-matic VTR BVU-800 and others like them. These machines become inoperable artifacts, casualties of a market and quality driven, technological evolution .
We have recently completed a job for Quarry Faces, the Mendip Hills Community Heritage Project which has been funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund. Quarry Faces gave us 20 U-matic video tapes that were commissioned for a corporate video in the 1980s.
The Quarry Faces project aims to tell the industry’s story, produce teaching materials for both educational purposes and general interest, and create an archive to preserve images and memories of quarrying over time.
This video we digitised was shot by Coloroll Films of Kilmarnock in 1985, and was delivered to us on U-matic tape. It features a giant walking crusher at Foster Yeoman’s Merehead Quarry (Torr Works).
The video tapes we were sent were high band recordings, rather low band and of very good quality. One AMPEX U-matic tape however was problematic as the tape shell / mechanism had degraded over time and needed careful hand rewinding and reshelling in a known good and newer cassette shell.
When faced with damaged tape, often people automatically assume it needs dehydrating, a process that forces the moisture out of the tape through stable, precise, low temperature baking. However if this is not what is wrong with the tape, dehydrating or ‘baking‘ as it is more commonly called, may in fact damage the tape. If you bake acetate tape that was commonly used in the 1950s and 1960s for example, it would be destroy it.
Ampex filed for a patent for the correct temperature to recover Ampex tapes. The patent referred to “a typical temperature used is 54’C. and a typical effective time is 16 hours”.
The simple truth is, there is no all encompassing answer to know what happens to tape when it degrades, or when the cassette shell mechanism malfunctions, and each tape that is sent to us is of course individual. Digitisation and the art of restoring old tape is a relatively new area, and no one has yet made a machine that is able to precisely diagnose what is wrong with each individual tape when problems occur. Is the tape suffering from sticky shed syndrome or binder hydrolysis, or is it ‘vinegar syndrome’, a condition which afflicts acetate tape? Only through careful diagnostic work, which at Greatbear includes using our range of in-house test tapes, can the correct remedy be found.
From U-matic to VHS, Betacam to Blu Ray, Standard Definition to High Definition, the formats we use to watch visual media are constantly evolving.
Yet have you ever paused to consider what is at stake in the changing way audio-visual media is presented to us? Is viewing High Definition film and television always a better experience than previous formats? What is lost when the old form is supplanted by the new?
At Greatbear we have the pleasure of seeing the different textures, tones and aesthetics of tape-based Standard Definition video on a daily basis. The fuzzy grain of these videos contrasts starkly with the crisp, heightened colours of High Definition digital media we are increasingly used to seeing now on television, smartphones and tablets.
At Greatbear we always have one foot in the past, and one foot in the future. We act as a conduit between old and new media, ensuring that data stored on older media can continue to have a life in today’s digital intensive environments.
In 2012 Greatbear digitised a selection of audio and audio-visual tape for the Heritage Lottery Funded exhibition, Music & Liberation.
The first job was to migrate a short film by a feminist film making collective called Women in Moving Pictures who were based in Bristol in the early 1980s. The film shows how the Bristol Women’s Music Collective were using feminism to politicise music making and includes footage music workshops, group performances interspersed with self-defence classes and intimate conversations.
Film still from ‘In Our Own Time’
Several copies of the film had been stored in the Feminist Archive South, including the master copies. Out of curiosity the U-matic copy was initially digitised, before the original was migrated to high definition digital format.
Film Still from ‘In Our Own Time’
Another job digitsed a series of rare recordings on tape, donated by Maggie Nicols. This included rare footage of the pioneering Feminist Improvising Group, whose members included Sally Potter, Georgina Born and Lindsay Cooper. One of the tapes was originally recorded at half speed, a technique used to get more recording time. We used the Nakamichi 680 Discrete Head Cassette Deck to play back the tapes at the correct speed to ensure the highest quality transfer.
We also digitised a series of tapes from the open improvisation collective Maggie co-founded in 1980, Contradictions. This included the performance ‘Madness in a Circle’ and many other creative experiments.
Music & Liberation re-opens at Space Station Sixty-Five in London for the last four days of its UK-wide tour on 10 January, so if you want to listen to the music or watch the films make sure you catch it.
With the work we are involved with we have to use, keep working and store a large amount of old and usually large tape machines and other electronics. With a couple of machines it’s easy to store and easy to connect but as you grow and the variety and scope of machines develops it can soon become a wiring and space nightmare.
Racks and patchbays are the answer and the time’s come to rewire our racks as many new / old machines have joined our collection as has different types of digitising work. Key to this is the need to accurately monitor and digitise several sources while having the flexibility to change the workflow quickly whenever.
Richard from westent is providing support in this video redesign and it will be an interesting challenge mixing the old with the new to get the highest quality transfers with the most efficiency.
