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There was a Woody Guthrie recording (that I have not heard myself) on wire spools that was released in the 2000s. If I recall correctly, the audio restoration
by nitrogen 5y ago
There was a Woody Guthrie recording (that I have not heard myself) on wire spools that was released in the 2000s. If I recall correctly, the audio restoration process was only possible by recording the audio with a 384kHz sampling rate, because the wire spools had picked up ambient EMI that could be used to correct for speed variations. If the only available samples were MP3s, then the audio restoration could not have been done.
Similarly, other historic audio recordings might contain forensic clues outside the ranges of human hearing that will be useful to future historians.
Finally, storing lossless formats makes sense for an archive, because raw bits are likely to be easier to recover if knowledge is lost, and localized damage to the data will result in only localized damage of the output.
- WalterBright 5y agoI know the professional archivists strongly disagree with me on this. I know there are cases like the one you mention where higher precision turned out to be useful. But I also know of the HP archives that burned down while awaiting funding for a pixel perfect proper archiving of it. The result was there's nothing left for future historians. The Vatican Library is another. It's full of one-of-a-kind documents. They can't afford to do a pixel perfect archive of them, so nothing gets done. It's all at huge risk of fire. An imperfect copy is infinitely better than ashes.