Recovery and Preservation of sound recordings from old and vulnerable grooved and tape media.

Precision Analogue to Digital transcription and Re-mastering

Audio Archaeology

There are some archives and sound libraries, and even small treasured collections made on 'the family Grundig', whose keepers are probably unaware of the vulnerability of their holdings. Because of the physical and chemical nature of materials used for certain disc and magnetic tape recordings, in particular those which were made more than 35 years ago and in some cases less, are by now starting to decompose and are at great risk of being lost forever unless steps are taken to transfer them to new media without delay.

Sound Transfers specialises in retrieval, preservation and re-recording of ancient sound recordings on grooved and tape media. The most popular new and affordable digital host is CD, which according to makers of the best quality discs, can be expected to last for up to 100 years when stored in the right conditions. Sound recording technologies continue to advance at an incredible rate and with the new equipment, together with knowledge and experience, it is now possible to retrieve more audio information than it was at the time the records were first made.

The policy at Sound Transfers is to recover sound from analogue carriers unadulterated, with a high a degree of fidelity and to preserve as close as possible the sound the original engineer intended. It is important also to remember that in this respect, future engineers will have even better equipment and technology at their disposal than we have.

Old and original recordings are sometimes accompanied by valuable hand-written notes on or within the sleeve, or on the disc or tape labels. It is our normal practice to preserve these by re-writing them and if requisite, as spoken announcements on the new host media.