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In Reply to: RE: Good luck with that. posted by Dave Pogue on August 07, 2014 at 05:34:58
Michael22 mentions, "But I'd be really skeptical about a so-called "safety master" made on a modern tape like Emtec".
All modern tape means is the tape is likely a copy of a safety master, or was run off by a studio in recent times (the last few years) on EMTEC, since almost all studios using analog tape are now using EMTEC. The supplies of 3M 996 or any of the Quantegy formulations are long gone (have been comsumed or used up), let alone any of the older scotch formulations such as 206, 207, 226, 227, 208 and 250. And even if the copy was not run off by a studio, but run off by a private individual, as long as he used good equipment the sound quality should still be fantastic.
As most of you likely already know, the older 3M formulations mentioned should all be still good except the 226 and 227. If you buy a safety master on those scotch formulations, you will have to bake it, and them make a copy on fresh tape.
Almost all of the time, a safety master is a copy of either a dupication master, a production master, or a broadcast master; never a session master, and seldom an EQ master since the session parts seldom fit on a single reel, and would include all the outtakes, partial sessions etc, that a typical audience would not want to hear.
Detemining the production on a given safety master is really tough if not impossible to do. As Dave noted, your best bet is to give it a listen and see how it sounds, but even then, since you don't have the session master or production master avaiable to compare it to, still a very tough call to make.
Besides being the 1st gen, and having the excellent sound, the session masters can be good fun to listen to since its not cleaned up through production, so it "beams you back Scotty" to the time when the recording was made. You hear all the wise cracks, the partial takes, the joking between musicians and the producer etc. all captured on tape at that point in time, usually long ago. If you have a single malt, it can transform you back in time for a short while. Every once in a while, some of these partial takes or outtakes do make it to commercial release, but not often.
Having said the ablove, even having a 4th gen copy of a safety master is still going to give you better sound quality than any commerical release including most of the hi rez down loads.
This now brings this full circle since there is a bit of a chance you are taking buying these safety masters. The chance has to be minimal though, otherwise folks would not continue to buy them.
Now if we can get more studios to unplug their compressors, and effects boxes from the signal chain, be it analog or digital, we would get that much closer to the sound of the actual recorded event. But that is a topic for another time.
Happy listening.
J
Follow Ups:
i'm not going to bid on one because 1) i have too much stuff already; 2) the tapes are beyond my budget; 3) the provenance of these tapes has not been verified; and, 4) i haven't heard convincing feedback on the quality of these tapes.
somewhat off-topic: an audiophile friend just added an Esoteric SACD player to his system, and, frankly, the sound quality is extremely good. one of the disks i played was a copy of the great 2-track Westminster tape of Stravinsky's L'Histoire du Soldat. amazing sound quality, even on the CD transfer.
Was that the High Definition Tape Transfers release? HDTT works from 4-track and 2-track 7½ ips commercial releases, and sometimes from 2-track 15 ips copies, such as the Klipsch recordings. They do an excellent job.
The Westminster 2-track 7½ ips commercial release pops up on eBay from time to time. Grab it if you can. It was recorded in Carnegie Hall. I would love to hear a 15 ips release of this recording.
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