MANUAL OF ANALOGUE SOUND RESTORATION ... - British Library

(unfortunately) several “standard” proposals for storing such “metadata” in digital form.
And the end of Section 3.7 will warn you of potential problems with this idea.
As we proceed through this manual, we shall see that technical documentation
could also become very complex, and the strategy for your archive will largely depend on
what has gone before. My former employer, the BBC, always had a paper “recording
report” accompanying every radio recording. It was useless without one, because it had
to have the producer’s signature to say it was ready for transmission before the network
engineer would transmit it. But my current employer, the British Library Sound Archive,
does not have such a system. It’s probably too late to introduce it, because the idea of a
recording-report can only work if alarm-bells ring in its absence.
By adding technical documentation, I don’t wish it to take even longer to
document a recording. This is especially important, because a technical report can only be
completed by technical staff, and if both the operators and the equipment are
unproductive while this goes on, it is very expensive. My suggested alternative is to
establish a standard set of procedures, called something simple like “X1”, and simply
write down “Copied to procedure X1” followed by the operator’s signature. (I consider
the signature is important, since only the operator can certify that the copy is a faithful
representation of the original).
This implies that “Procedure X1” is documented somewhere else, and here we
must face the possibility that it may become lost. This actually happened to both my
employers. When I was in the BBC the change from CCIR to IEC tape-recording
equalisation at 19cm/sec took place (section 7.8), and was implemented immediately on
quarter-inch tape; but not immediately on 16mm sepmag film, which happens to run at
the same speed. For the next year I got complaints that my films sounded “woolly” on
transmission, despite rigorous calibration of the equipment and my mixing the sound with
more and more treble. When the truth dawned I was very angry; the problem (and
damage to my reputation) could have been avoided by proper documentation. I was
determined this should not happen when I joined the Sound Archive. Unhappily, a new
director was once appointed who decided there was too much paperwork about, and
scrapped most of it. The result is that, to this day, we do not know how-and-when the
change to IEC equalisation took place at the Archive, so we often cannot do objective
copies.
The two problems of “technical rehearsal” and “time to do the documentation”
might both be solved by a system of rehearsals before the transfers actually take place.
Thus, a working day might consist of the operator and the discographer working together
in a low-tech area to decide on such things as playing-speeds, the best copy or copies to
transfer, and whether alternatives are the same or not. The catalogue-entry can be started
at the same time, and perhaps spoken announcements can be pre-recorded. There is also
time to research anything which proves to need investigation. The actual “high-tech”
transfers could then take place at a later date with much greater efficiency.
The advantages and disadvantages of converting analogue sounds to digital are
the subject of the next chapter. We shall learn that there are some processes which should
always be carried out in the analogue domain - speed-setting, for example - and some
best carried out in the digital domain - various types of noise reduction, for example. Thus
the overall strategy must take the two technologies into account, so that the appropriate
processes happen in the right order. Also digital recordings are often inconvenient for
“service copies.” It may be necessary to put service-copies onto analogue media to make
it easier to find excerpts, or because analogue machinery is more familiar to users.
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