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Tape Trail Reel to reel, cassette and other analogue tape formats. |
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Tape Trail Reel to reel, cassette and other analogue tape formats. |
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In Reply to: Master tape resources? posted by goodrudedog on December 16, 2006 at 11:33:26:
I've had and have friends who have acquired MANY master tapes/dubs from a lot of different sources/labels and the issue of "rights" never came up. Depends on the situation - some were from defunct labels, some were from studios going out of business, etc. I've bought some on Ebay. The "storage situation" of many MANY masters was tenuous at best. One fabled "stash" was of Decca Recording Masters sent to Ampex in Elk Grove and used to make their "reissues" of 4-track tapes. Talk about great sound (but with AME equalization). This pile was sitting on a dryer in someone's washroom for years. A Westminster collection, supposedly including some masters, was on the market within the last six months.Many masters from the larger studios did have a playback chronology on the back. Also, they had a series of test tones spliced on the beginning. Depending on the label, some were Dolby A (and some B) encoded. Gotta have a 360 in your arsenal.
As mentioned, there were different kinds of "masters" depending on company practice. Realize that there were very few recordings done in one "take", so the performance parts existed perhaps as many as four reels. In the case of Mercury, these pieces were edited to one "master", and that used for making the mother records, which meant that they could be played a number of times Other companies didn't want the original edited master to be used any more than necessary, so a dub was made of that and the master locked in the vault. Dubs were then made of it for subsequent record production which I believe were called the "recording masters". This was especially common where the record pressing plants were a distance from the studios. So some tapes called a "master" could be one or two generations from the recording of the original performance - and we are not even getting into the many tape generations (and what they could be called) used in multi-track recording.
Since the early recording industry was centered around New York City, it appears that a number of the early recording engineers made duplications of their products and shared them with their friends - which became the source of many of the "master dubs" of name (RCA/Columbia/Merc) tapes in circulation - how other to describe the fascinating outtakes from "Sketches of Spain" floating around.
There is NO WAY to determine the actual provenance of a tape - I would however suggest being wary if someone offers you a Westminster Master on back-coated tape. The only thought I had would be to do a spectrum analysis of the tape and determine the frequency of the (recording) bias oscillator - early tape machines had lower bias frequencies than later.
Sorry, Got to go - to New Jersey to visit an acquaintance that has 200 old stereo acetates that he got from some retired RCA engineer.
"Keep your heads clean and your tails out" - Merry Christmas
Charles
One way to determine true masters, especially from the major lab
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Follow Ups
- Master tape resources - interesting discussion - stellavox 06:02:11 12/20/06 (0)
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