Archiving Analog Masters
During my recent trip to New York City and the event at Battery Studios, several readers wrote asking about the care and handling of analog master tapes. They posed their questions after seeing photos of the ragged condition of some the boxes containing master tapes. Why are such highly regarded recordings in such bad condition? Isn’t there a rigorous system for making sure that masters are maintained well, checked in and checked out, kept in temperature and humidity controlled vaults, and secured by locks and passwords?
Actually, no. Things have certainly gotten better over the years. But back in the heyday of analog record production, the only thing the record labels cared about was getting the master and a safety copy from the mastering house into their vault. Often the multitracks weren’t even tracked and stored. And it was not uncommon for the analog master tapes to be sent to other production facilities…never to return.
Last summer, I moved the tape vault here at AIX Studios out of its existing location. I rented the space to a remixing engineer and therefore hundreds of boxes containing many thousands of individual tapes had to be moved down the hall to another temporary space. Among the collection are thousands of DLTs (Digital Linear Tapes), DATs (Digital Audio Tapes), videotapes (1″, DigiBeta, 3/4″ Umatic videos, 1/4″ – 2-Channel stereo masters, 2″ 16|24 track tapes, and even some Exabyte archive tapes from my Euphonix R-1 deck.
Do I have a complete list of everything that is in my possession? No. Some of the boxes have a printed list taped to the outside of the box, but most of the materials are not in a database. My own projects are contained in individual boxes but even those aren’t rigorously tracked. When I worked as a second engineer at Mama Jo’s Studio back in the 70s, I was in charge of making sure that the tapes were labeled and stored properly. But the system was not computerized (remember we didn’t have personal computers) or efficient.
In my vault, there are master audio and videotapes that were never tracked or returned to the clients. There are various masters of Todd Rundgren and Utopia, 1″ videotapes of The Doobie Brothers, 2-track analog masters of Herb Ellis, and even 2″ multitrack masters of lesser artists. I have about a dozen boxes that belong to Robert Evans (the famous Hollywood producer/director) with masters of his “The Power of Faith” documentary about Pope John Paul (he stiffed me so those materials are likely headed to the dump). Why do I have these things? Because the clients never made arrangements to have them sent back. I have kept them all these years because they are valuable. I won’t throw them away but I also don’t have the resources to hire a person to contact the owners and arrange to have them sent to a proper vault.
So it should come as no surprise that studios and labels have to engage in some major detective work to locate and verify master tapes. The Nilsson analog master was actually a copy made for the release of the album in the UK. The people at Sony tracked it down and it turned out to be better than the ones that they had.
And then there’s the question of playing these tapes. I’ll talk about that tomorrow.
What’s the world coming to when a guy gets stiffed by the Pope? :-))
Sounds like you could benefit from putting your students to work organizing – I’m sure you would run across a couple things that would make you smile!
It wasn’t the Pope…it was Robert Evans that did the stiffing. I worked for months on a really terrible production on the life of John Paul. In the end, John Paul died before the project was finished (Robert couldn’t make up his mind on lots of things)…so Robert never paid the invoice.
Let’s get together on a deal for the Todd Rundgren tapes. 😉
When you started listing them and the names came back to mind, it’s amazing how many and how fast we’ve developed and abandoned digital recording media.
That’s the best thing about analog tapes is that there are still lots of machines that can play them back.
I would had thought you archived all your studio tapes to hard drive or offsite archival service like Carbonite. Just send Robert Evans all his tapes back to him completely erased.
It’s a very large undertaking to restore all of the Exabyte tapes, transfer them and then place them in the cloud. That’s why there is such a huge problem.
It’s genuinely concerning to learn of the disjointed way master tapes are often “cared for” – not so far removed from discovering the original Mona Lisa in a dumpster.
I grew up imagining they were cared for in some underground bunker in Switzerland or somewhere glamorous in temperature and moisture controlled environments. Turns out theses things are all over the place. How many treasures have already been lost.
More than that, there’s the increasing likelihood that rejigged legacy recordings just cannot match, say, something remastered in the 80s or 90s.
History, it occurs to me, may not forgive this generation for taking such little care of precious recordings.
The nature of master tapes and the archiving of both analog and digital tapes is a long and twisted road. Sure there are lots of efforts put forth to do it right…but then how do I end up with masters in my vault that no one will ever ask for?
Yep, I came up believing the same. Now that I know the truth I more fully understand why I’ve read many times about how performer X’s original master was missing and probably lost forever. Or how so many masters are unplayable. I know the tapes base ages and leaches its plasticizers but if they had been stored in controlled conditions the damage would have been minimized.
I wonder how many priceless archives have been forever lost do to neglect.
If only you had the missing multitrack masters from Steely Dan’s Aja’s ‘Black Cow” and “Aja”…
How on earth did THOSE tracks get lost?
Not really a big surprise to me. I’ve been behind the scenes and in the vaults.
How about Mel Torme and Friends? They lost the entire master tapes. The only thing left is the double LP and a handful of CDs released in Japan. Fortunately I have both. But this is without doubt one of his best recordings and the master tapes are lost to the sands of time. A real shame.