USEFUL INFORMATION INDEX

Corey Bailey

Audio Engineering

ARTICLES

Transfer Stories In the 1990’s, I opened a transfer business that was closed at the end of 2021. The purpose of the transfer business was to provide services for those who found old media and had no means of transferring it. Before then, I generally avoided consumer formats because almost no one adhered to the instructions printed on the box or the standards that were developed for audio tape. However, that changed when I realized that there was a lot of family history that needed to be transferred. I worked long and hard on each transfer and I made sure that the end result would be listenable. When it came to records, I would often make several transfers using different size styli and picked the best sounding one. I didn’t charge for the extra work because it was my way of giving back some of the knowledge and expertise that I had gained over the years. Reel-to-reel audio tapes were often a guessing game because so few consumer tapes were properly documented. I determined the length and other necessary parameters while prepping the tape. A lot of reel-to-reel tapes were recorded at different speeds or different formats on the same tape. It was not unusual to encounter a change in speed while transferring a reel-to-reel tape to the digital domain. I always stopped and transferred the section at the correct speed so that the tape hiss that was associated with the speed was kept intact. When the audio cassette was popular, the length was usually printed on the label and the speed was usually constant which, made the estimate process easier since I charged a minimum fee or for the running time. If the running time of the media exceeded the minimum fee, the fee was waived. What I didn’t anticipate, were the stories that were associated with the media and here are some of them: There were so many customers who heard the voice of a long departed relative for the first time that I lost track of them all. Some had lost them when they were very young and some heard their own voice for the first time as an infant or a child. When the final product was delivered, I often received an email thanking me for all of my effort which, was all that I needed. In the 1950’s, an interview was conducted at a radio station and recorded on reel-to-reel audio tape. That tape was sent to me for transfer. However, the recording on the tape was music, not an interview as indicated on the tape box. It turned out, that the tape had been recorded over by the owner when she was a teenager. She had the presence of mind to make a tape copy of the interview, which was later found and sent to me for transfer. One customer, stopped and bought a portable cassette recorder on his way to a family gathering. The purpose of the recorder purchase was to record the stories of the oldest family member who, among his other accomplishments in life, he had worked for Thomas Edison. However, there were a couple of problems with the recording. The recorded level was so low that it was hard to listen to and the recorder was passed from person to person without any regard for microphone techniques. The microphone handling and occasional laughter was the only thing that could be heard on the tape at normal listening volume. The tape was listened to once and never played again. In fact, the tape was never rewound. After transferring the contents to the digital domain, I edited out all of the microphone mishandling and the other anomalies that I could and then reduced the level of the laughter and microphone mishandling that was left. Then, I increased the overall level & filtered out most of the increased tape hiss. When I finally presented the results, the customer was able to listen to the recording for the first time. Voice letters were typically sent to a person in the military who was overseas. In fact, some USO’s used to provide a disc recording and mailing service for free so that voice letters could be sent to military personnel because it was a morale booster. I transferred voice letters that were on a few types of media and I transferred voice letters from the three wars where the technology was available; WWII, the Korean War and the Vietnam War. While figuring out the recording format of some reel-to-reel audio tapes that were used as voice letters, I finally concluded that the parents, who were in the US, had a tape recorder that was a ½ track mono format and their son, who was in Vietnam, was using a ¼ track stereo machine. This had me chasing my tail for awhile as each tape had both formats on it and sometimes the message had been partially recorded over. It took 2 tape decks to complete the transfer. During WWII, a young lady walked into a recording studio in New York City and recorded some of her thoughts. She then sent the disc to her fiancee who was fighting in the Pacific Theater. Her fiancee carried that instantaneous disc (also known as a ‘Lacquer’) at the bottom of his Duffel bag until he returned home. Years later, it was found and sent to me. After a thorough cleaning, the disc played remarkably well, considering what it had been through. Some were not so lucky and the instantaneous discs that were sent to me were in very poor condition. Surface cracks or de-laminating can look like a skate board ramp to a record stylus and cause the stylus to mis-track. Often, the media had been played too many times if it was an instantaneous disc because there’s a limited number of times that those discs can be played at full fidelity. I often used the term ‘played to death’ when describing the disc. I usually observed the situation during the cleaning process. If there was a lot of gray dust in the grooves, I could be sure that the disc had been over-played. It seems that people treated instantaneous discs as though they were the same as the commercial releases in their records. Perhaps they were never warned. However, I spent the time to extract something and that something was always accompanied by an explanation. After all, we’re talking about someone’s family history! One such disc was recorded on a portable machine that was designed to make instantaneous discs. The disc was plastic with a fiber center and it is known as a ‘Recordio’ disc. Fidelity was generally poor for Recordio discs as the frequency response was barely above the human voice and surface noise was always a problem. The person in the recording was a young lady who had broken her leg on a farm and had to be transported across the state, to a hospital where the leg was set. While in the hospital, she organized the other children in the ward to sing the song “Jingle Bells” because it was Christmas. Although the event was recorded, in the years that had passed, the disc was trashed. Now, that young girl in the recording was about to turn 90 and her son wanted to present her with the contents of the disc for her birthday. So, it was up to me to extract something, anything, from that disc. I was able to extract enough of the recording to make some sense. After flattening it, I transferred the disc at 16-2/3 RPM and then sped the files up to 78 RPM using a digital audio editor. When the result of my effort was finished and delivered, I was told that there wasn’t a dry eye in the house. When transferring for one of the museums, I had our son Weston help me. Among the items were several 16” aluminum discs which had been numbered by the museum. Following the number scheme of the museum, we began the transfer. The content was an interview with a lady and it became obvious to us that the discs had not been recorded at 78 RPM. We used our hearing to judge the timbre of the voice and thus, the recording speed. When we got to the end, the last side of the discs had the speed tests by the recording engineer. Not only had the museum numbered the discs backwards, but our guess was correct. Some instantaneous discs were poorly recorded. Usually, the problem was groove depth (lack of it) because the record cutting mechanism was set too high. What you have to do, is to use more weight on the stylus than normal. Recordio discs are notorious for this problem. However, some Recordio’s were cut too deep causing the substrate in the center to show. De-laminating lacquer discs were the worst. They were always very labor intensive. I used paraffin wax to secure the loose parts. If the disc had a crack, I often used a black crayon. I would carefully brush the liquid paraffin in the direction of the grooves while holding a hand held heat gun or hair dryer then play the disc a few times with an inexpensive stylus and I would record everything. Cracked or broken 78 RPM records, known among collectors as ‘Shellacs’, were carefully glued then treated with paraffin. Today’s restoration software does things that couldn’t be done a few years ago and I can only imagine what the future will bring. Return to TOP of page © Corey Bailey Audio Engineering

DO IT YOURSELF? ANALOG TAPE BAKING AUDIO TAPE LUBRICATING AUDIO TAPE MOISTURIZING ACETATE TAPE RECORDS (DISCS) RECORD CLEANING REPAIRING A BROKEN 78 FLATTENING A RECORD