Meet the newest member of the Airshow Mastering tape machine family: Ampex ATR-104 #2. Like its sibling, it has four channels of electronics and a 1” capable transport, and it was fully rebuilt by the late Mike Spitz of ATR Services, with additional modifications by Dan Labrie. Along with the new machine, we welcome two […]
You’re Not Alone – Millions of Analog Audio Recordings Await Digitization
Report from ARSC – Everybody Has Something Ann Blonston represented Airshow’s Restoration Center at the 2015 ARSC conference in Pittsburgh in late May. She describes the event as a entertaining mash-up of archive professionals and obsessive collectors. In these modern times, we have hundreds of thousands of recorded media items available to be listened to […]
Keep Your Recordings Safe: Best Practices for Analog Media Preservation
This post offers some simple tips to help collectors extend the life of analog recording media and prioritize their preservation for the long term. We live in a lucky time: we have sound recordings available to us at our very fingertips. Recorded sound surrounds us, and recordings – spoken or sung – are an almost […]
Paramount Records Press Updated
David Glasser and Anna Frick worked to restore and master a unique catalog of music — The Rise and Fall of Paramount Records 1917-1932, Volumes One and Two. Each volume holds 800 tracks. Volume One, covering the years 1917- 1927, was released in fall 2013 to great critical acclaim, and we collected some of the […]
What To Do About Flood-damaged Audiotape or CDs
Updated October 2014 The Restoration Center @ Airshow received inquiries about media damaged in the September 2013 flooding in Colorado. While we do transfer analog to digital media and we do provide sonic restoration, we do not provide media recovery service. Media recovery involves cleaning off and drying magnetic or optical media, with the goal […]
Naropa Archive Reaches Milestone
This month, Airshow completed the transfer of Naropa University’s complete analog tape collection: 4,148 recordings from the 6,000+-piece archive were transferred by four audio techs over 2+years, resulting in over 4,500 hours of digitized audio ready for online storage. Naropa was founded 40 years ago, during a wave of Western interest in Buddhism. Over the […]
Oral History: Capture the Best Interview
When I conducted oral history interviews as a college student, I knew something about interviewing (but not much!) and nothing about audio. Armed with a portable cassette recorder the size of a textbook with only a built-in microphone, I worked to gather recollections from elderly union members about events 30 years in the past. As […]
Want to Get Paid? Track Your Tracks with ISRCs
Everyone wants to get paid for their music, and with most releases widely available and streaming from all corners of the web, ISRC codes are the key to making sure you get your money. The ISRC, or International Standard Recording Code, is an electronic tag that tells a story about the track to which it is […]