Wild Sanctuary wrote:
>
> Good points, Walt. Especially the one(s) about Cornell. Their tech
> advice is all too often at odds with the experience of serious
> professionals in the field, and is not given much weight by those who
> really know.
>
> We're looking into MD and solid state formats having moved and stored
> our entire library to the digital medium and want to continue in that
> vein.
I'm not sure how you'd find MD, I've listened to how picky you can get,
but I do recommend you try it. You'd certainly probably want to try it
in the form of the Portadisc, which is probably the top end recorder for
field work with it.
I believe the solid state or optical disk technology are the way of the
future. Magnetic media in any of it's forms just carries more risk.
Optical disk technology is still evolving, but it's reliability is so
high and it's history long enough it can be considered proven
technology. Some form of it is the archive medium of choice. Solid state
is on less clear footing. There are lots of ways that are not that
uncommon for it to be compromised. And it should be considered only a
short term storage medium. It really needs to develop a body of
experience in nature recording to find it's problems. It's other problem
is that the media is expensive, meaning that long field forays with it
will be a problem, for shorter stuff you can copy off to computer and
recycle the media.
Right now, to my mind the ideal, if it was available, would be the
640meg minidiscs used in video cameras in a recorder that recorded
uncompressed. Those disks are as cheap to make as current audio
minidiscs and your original would be on a archival quality medium. For
most uses the CD standard 44k 16bit sample rate is just fine for field
recording. Such a recorder was expected back when I first got into
minidisc and the 640 meg disks were due out. I think what stopped it was
the mp3 "revolution". The main thing that revealed to the manufacturers
was the people were happy with much lower sound quality, in fact could
often not tell the difference, and it was more important in terms of
sales to have long playing time. So, Sony and others went to higher
compression instead of uncompressed sound on bigger disks. They could do
this and still stick with the 140 meg minidiscs, leaving compatibility
more or less intact, rather than trying to build market share on a new
disk. Research on larger minidiscs still continues, and it looks like at
least 2 gigs is possible. But, so far that's all focused on video cameras.
The end of quality sound recording is being somewhat neglected. There
are a number of possible choices in how it will go. Right now I'd not
expect much standardization. I only hope it's not entirely forgotten in
the rush to more play hours. I believe there is now only a single
factory left actually producing new magnetic tape. A indication of the
future of DAT and other tape based systems. MD continues, but a awful
lot of the new push is around increased compression, lower sound
quality. We are badly in need of some new commitment to a standard high
quality audio recording method. In some ways it resembles when digital
recording first arrived, except then there was still a clear commitment
to improving audio quality.
I'll be real interested in what you end up doing.
Walt
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