ebeam wrote:

megathor wrote:Hey, this wouldn't cost a few million bucks. It exists; its called ROM. Its routinely used in chip design every day.

Sure, but that requires a mask for the photolith and can't achieve the same density. This could be directly written from your digital audio file.

Its surely a pain in the ass, and completely unsuitable for real-time storage. Density for these, as you mentioned, is not limited by the minimum achievable feature size for the memory cell, but by the read transistors. Modern mask ROM gets like 4X the density of SRAM, which would store a lot of music, but...
Tape sure seems easier.

zom-zom wrote:There's always the human element in these problems.

Yep, Chicago Mastering has some 1/2" mixdowns of mine that were stored upright, sealed and climate controlled - next to a Celestion Greenback in a box, facing the magnet- GACK. Ugh.

Oh geeeez.

otisroom wrote:Steve is right. But digital recording isn't going to go away because Steve's right. In fact Steve owns one of them devils machines now. So it's every bodies problem now isn't it?

Yes, it is a problem for many of us.

What do you do with the session files that are created at electrical on your devil machine?

Personally:

The last record I made was recorded on an Apple.

We archived the entire thing to 24tk, submixing where necessary.

I like to think the music may be relevant in a decade or two. It's already been 20yrs since my first-ever studio recording was done. I have multitracks of everything my bands have ever recorded in a proper studio.

Mixing was off the laptop, through a regular mixing board and outboard gear. Some plug-ins, every now and then, but mostly not.

Mixed two songs to 1/2", two to hard disk which were then dumped to 1/2".

I think 24-bit digital sounds fine. But you can't archive it once and expect it to be there if you want to come back to it. You can do that with tape, with a far greater degree of certainty as to the outcome.

If I didn't think it was worth archiving the master properly, I wouldn't bother releasing the music on it.

ebeam wrote:storage idea

If you use imprint lithography you could cut down on write time and make multiple copies, thus allowing for release. You could start a whole new long term, high quality format.

I also think you are selling your abilities short with the 50nm estimate. 100 angstrom bits. You can do it.

You could also possibly use a modified AFM to read in the data, although it would take forever and alignment would be a pain.

Jon

Yeah, once you've got the etched Si, you could use it as a master and cast PDMS for imprint lithography and then mass produce from there. I think you'd want to avoid contact methods for reading. I'm thinking coat the whole thing in a thin, transparent, protective layer and use a multiplexed near field scanning optical microscope to read it.

There are quite a few areas where analog recording trumps digital recording. I don’t know if “ease of storage” or “reliability of storage” even qualifies as a valid debate, however.

The idea of permanence is being tossed around a lot, without much validation. The permanence of an analog recording can’t merely be established by saying that, unlike digital media, which can became un-readable unbeknownst to the user, tape must be physically destroyed in order to be lost.

It’s not about the storage of the music or the data that we ought to be concerned with, but the recovery of it. However you record or store music, it’s going to be in a format that has to be recovered in order to hear it. It doesn’t matter whether it’s digitally recorded music or not, and I hear this argument a lot—that analog recording somehow doesn’t have this precarious recovery step, which it does.

Also, I think a lot of emphasis, too much, is being placed on ease of backup, but what about cost?

It’s easier and faster right now to simply stick the tape reel in a box when the session is over, as opposed to archiving digital files (which is a huge pain in the ass), but it isn’t cheaper, and it will only get more expensive.

Here’s what we know: the machines required to play back magnetic tapes are not produced in the numbers they once were. This recovery system for analog tape will one day become extinct to all but a few people, just as CDRs and the optical readers we use to read them will one day die.

The fact that new technology, digital technology, expires at faster rate than older, mechanical technology might be causing some to assume one is more permanent than the other. Neither is permanent.

The (very good) argument that it would, in theory, be much easier for a person in the future to find a way to recover something recording via mechanical means, versus something recorded digitally, doesn’t have anything to do with the fact that there is no such thing as a permanent archival method.

Taking the argument away from music, generally, the more ways you have to reproduce information into lots of copies, cheaply, the better the chances that the information will not get lost forever.

I archive audio for a living (well, near enough ), and I think you nailed it stephensolo.

I don't think there is a massive difference between archiving digital and analogue. If you have a 2" you are dealing with an obsolete format. No-one has made a machine that can play one back for ten years or so (AFAIK?). The carrier (tape) will degrade over time and any copy you make will degrade the quality to some degree.
Digital has some of these problems but at least copies can verifiably be perfect clones.
If you gave me a 2" and a bunch of Bar1 WAVs I'd have to put my money on the WAV files having a better chance of surviving or being recoverable in 30 years from now.

Marky wrote:I archive audio for a living (well, near enough :D ), and I think you nailed it stephensolo.

I don't think there is a massive difference between archiving digital and analogue. If you have a 2" you are dealing with an obsolete format. No-one has made a machine that can play one back for ten years or so (AFAIK?).

There are brand new, unused Studer machines still available, and the ATR Aria system is in current production. Regardless, tape machines are simple enough that one could be built from scratch.

The carrier (tape) will degrade over time and any copy you make will degrade the quality to some degree.

The first part of your sentence has been addressed a few times already, and the permanence of analog tape means you don't need to make copies unless you want to. You get to use original master tapes, because they have survived.

Digital has some of these problems but at least copies can verifiably be perfect clones.

Digital "archiving" requires the constant copying and recopying of the material. When active participation in its longevity ceases, the material disappears. Analog recordings require no attention to last... well, we don't know how long because the oldest ones are still playable. 100 years is a minimum, I'd guess.

If you gave me a 2" and a bunch of Bar1 WAVs I'd have to put my money on the WAV files having a better chance of surviving or being recoverable in 30 years from now.

How much money? I will book considerable action on this. Thirty years? Pfft. I've worked on tapes older than that. Hell, I'm on tapes older than that.

steve wrote:There are brand new, unused Studer machines still available, and the ATR Aria system is in current production. Regardless, tape machines are simple enough that one could be built from scratch.

Hi Steve. Yeah, I'm aware of the Studers still under wraps but hadn't heard of the Aria till now. I shall investigate.

I also deal with tapes well over 30 years old regularly. Some hold up pretty well (mainly the older ones strangely) but there are plenty that don't.
The most popular brands of the last 25 years, Ampex and Agfa are often pretty awful to handle if they haven't been properly looked after.
Degradation of both tape and recordable optical media are entirely down to unavoidable chemical processes which means migration of the content is inevitable whichever medium you choose.

If you open a WAV file in a text document, once you get past all the header information you can see the waveform described in ones and zeros. If you do it with a sine wave its pretty easy to see the pattern as you scroll down the file.
So I could stamp that into a rock or a piece of metal or even punch the holes into paper, put those into a bank and come back in 200 years time, good health allowing, re-input the ones and zeros and have a perfect representation of the audio.

I lament the demise of analogue formats for audio but truly believe digitisation is necessary for long term storage.

I'll take that bet with the caveat that accuracy of data retrieval is taken into consideration. What's the wager?