Monday, 16 May 2005

Final Words on Quality . .  In this issue, we've exhausted the topic of on many different levels, but we'd like to acknowledge that in the end, music is what stirs the soul. [Via Mix Magazine] Quality in the Age of Good Enough . .  It was the late, great Nashville engineer Denny Purcell who, in a moment of frustration and resignation, opined about the audio industry, “We live in the age of ‘good enough.’” Indeed, many people today argue that despite the better efforts of so many throughout our industry, there has been a decline in the quality of recordings, of equipment and of the overall music business climate. Music listeners are settling for mediocrity instead of insisting on excellence. Convenience always seems to trump fidelity. [Via Mix Magazine] Rikki Don't Lose That Number . .  One of the most important collections of recorded material on the planet is managed by the U.S. Library of Congress. According to digital conversion specialist Peter Alyea and Larry Appelbaum, supervisor/senior studio engineer of the LOC's recorded sound laboratory, “Our current baseline format for our master files is .WAV/Broadcast .WAV at 24-bit/96 kHz. We refer to this as our baseline because the majority of our work is archiving analog sources. We have also archived a smaller number of analog sources at 24-bit/192 kHz.” [snip] Audio playback devices come and go, as do data formats tied to a specific platform or OS. Using more universal standards such as BWF, XML and SQL database structures ensures the archive is relatively independent of particular applications, devices and manufacturers. [Mix Magazine] A fine article reviewing current practice. The tape archive solution: PROTECTING YOUR CONTENT . .  Enterprise disk storage is 20 times more expensive than the cost of tape storage. Even a lower cost/performance disk technology, such as SATA, is still four times more expensive per gigabyte than is the cost of tape. Typical storage costs for a high-performance disk storage system run in the $2000 to $4000 per terabyte range. In contrast, storing that same content on data tape can be much less, as little as $400 per terabyte — that's one-tenth the cost of disk storage. This means a data tape can store about nine hours of 50Mb/s video for less than $10 per hour. Tape also excels in terms of storage density. [Broadcast Engineering] Why your next stereo will be a cellphone . .  Gadgets are ‘magnets' for applications [Via The Globe and Mail - Technology News]

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