The story was first told on Public Radio about a month or two ago.
Basically what they are doing is tracking the disk optically (non contact) then cleaning it up digitally.
This has been tried many times in the past over a 25 - 30 year period with some success.
In the early days of recording (before the early 30's or so) the orchestra was very bad as they did not have electronic pickups (microphones) & all the high frequencies of all music was very dead & almost totally missing in the early shellac & acetate recording. Also, stereo sound had not been invented.
In the late 70's, I heard (on Public Radio) how an old Valentino recording from the early 20's was digitally copied to a computer. After digitizing the Valentino recording they then removed everything EXCEPT Valentino's voice & added a new modern orchestra in stereo. The before & after was simply amazing. It sounded like it could have been recorded just yesterday in a totally modern recording studio.
The technique holds great promise.
Another side note:
The National Library of Congress has been searching for many years for a standardized method to store recordings that will not decay or become obsolete over very long times (100 plus years).
The needed a playing medium that can be played 100, 200, or 500 years from now.
They want to record native languages that are dying out at an alarming rate before all those who know how to speak them die out.
They also want to preserve old archive recordings, of which they have millions that are being lost by the thousands each year due to deterioration.
* CD's are out because of the delaminating & fungus problems they are showing after a few years plus current CD's will not be playable in years to come due to ever changing standards.
* Digital of any kind is out because there is no real long lasting standards.
* Vinyl recordings are out because of fungus & other problems inherent in vinyl.
After years of extremely intensive research & testing, what they finally came up with is simply amazing... Shellac disk. Yes, shellac; a very old disk type that goes way back to the very early days of recording.
It seems that shellac is impervious to fungus & other nasties that destroy most other recordings over time. There is no delamination problem with a shellac recording. Also, a shellac record with a groove can always be played as any first year engineering student can make a simple turntable to play the record regardless of where technology takes us in the future. Plus, it is felt that although the shellac record does not have the overall quality of sound of digital that that is not a concern because future technology will be able to recover the quality from the shellac similar to what is now being done to very old recordings.
Soo... what is old is now again.
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Topic: Cleaning up old recordings - OT (Read 911 times)