That audio sample above is
representative of the quality of the entire half-session. All of
Session 41A contains the same kinds of skips/jumps/glitches, from start
to finish. This is the worst one I've heard so far, but there is at
least one other that is almost as bad. I have not had any reason to
listen to all of the sessions Michael digitized, but all of the others
that I have heard have the same problem to one degree or another.
The results are most
disappointing, of course. I do understand that Michael is not a
professional audio engineer, but I frankly expected him to do a much
more thorough and careful job.
None of this speaks to the overall audio quality, which I do not
consider to be acceptable for a digital archive, much less as the
soundtrack for a DVD. For example, you will notice that the audio has a
great deal of noise (hiss), and has an unnaturally bright and harsh
tone. There are other problems with the equalization, as well as with
distortion and dynamics, all of which would have required quite a bit
of effort in applying automated digital signal processing (DSP) to make
the audio presentable at the level of quality I think it deserves. But
those are separate issues.
The more fundamental issue is this:
There
is no method or amount of DSP that can repair the glitches in the above
sample. The only remedy is to redo the analog-to-digital transfer.
...which of course is precisely why there was no other alternative than
just doing it the right way, from scratch, if we wanted to ensure the
job was done right.
When I spoke to Michael about this matter in June 2007, he stated that
the glitches were a result of the tapes sticking to the playback head.
He said it was a problem he encountered in the early going, and that he
ultimately solved it by lubricating the tape head. I interpreted that
to mean that the glitches I heard in Session 1 (which
immediately disqualified Michael's work as a suitable soundtrack for
the V-201 DVD) were not present in later sessions. Obviously,
that didn't turn out to be true.
The glitches you can hear in the sample above are NOT due to tapes
sticking to the playback head. They are caused by a poor quality
analog-to-digital conversion process. It can result from any one of
several factors—cheap A/D converters, underpowered CPU, or insufficient
I/O buffer size, among others.
At this point, the cause doesn't matter. The fact remains that the
entire archiving process was a bust. It's difficult to imagine how
Michael could have possibly listened to the work product. I think he
just ran the tape into his computer, started the transfer, walked away,
and never bothered to check it after the transfer was done. How else
can one account for an entire half-session sounding like the sample
above?
I don't know whether Michael ever discovered the problem. I have
difficulty believing he would have delivered the audio files had he
known about it, but I admit I'm speculating. I honestly don't know; the
whole thing baffles me.
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