Can we finally put Reel to Reel out of its misery? Put it to rest people.

Glupson,

The links are to my scans of the tape labels. The Mary Chain is the original Jugoton distribution master, sent to the former Yugoslavia. As I know Alan McGee, Jim & William Reid well, they have signed my master. The George Michael is a safety copy from a CBS Netherlands distribution/production master.

If you look hard enough, you can find little gems. There are quite a few distribution/production masters in circulation. Don’t forget in the heyday of the vinyl LP, there were lots of countries with record pressing plants. They all needed a tape sent from the record company to cut the lacquer for their own market. When the record plants closed, many of these tapes survived.

Charlie

PS Sleepwalker - the George Michael tape is stunning. My friend Chalkie Davies was his tour photographer in 1982. He said that he was an utterly charming guy. Yes, it’s the polar opposite to the Mary Chain, but I happen to like lots of different music styles.

topoxforddoc,

I, kind of, figured out what that Jesus and Mary Chain tape was but, at the same time, am not sure what distribution master fully meant. If it is any kind of master that certain company (distributor in this case) got to work with, why was it given/sold away?

In the days when tape and vinyl ruled the roost, the record companies would send a production/distribution master tape to Yugoslavia, South Africa, Mexico or wherever, so that records could be pressed for the local market. In due course, they sent hard discs, and now it gets sent over the internet.

When the record pressing plants closed, as everyone went to CD, the tapes got put in a dumpster/skip, or alternatively people took them away. The record companies had no desire to retrieve all these tapes, as they had nowhere to store them. Anyway, the record companies already had the original multitrack and stereo mix down in a vault.

topoxforddoc,

That is interesting. Giving away "originals" seems unusual for a record company when even hobbyists (as your example here shows) are considering them as good as it gets. Could it be that such a tape was, practically, stolen from the company while nobody was paying much attention? That particular place’s vault was not much of a vault, but it was enthusiastically taken care of. Not that you can find it out now, but it would be interesting to know which ways, and when, did the tape travel before it reached you.

This is, it seems, what you are talking about...

http://www.museumofmastertapereels.org/introduction.html

As you mention, it used to be tapes, then it was hard drives, now it may be Internet. As good as tapes may sound, vinny55 may be right, they are obsolete. Not for hobbyists, for everything else.

Thanks for the welcome! On a publication, if I am not mistaken the National Recording Preservation Board, at the beginning of the new millennium it was estimated that about 80% of human knowledge understood as music, data, writings, etc. it was still recorded and stored in analog form (vinyl records, magnetic tapes, etc.). So the problem for RAI but also for the competition is that of the enormous amount of data to be transferred and that is why they have taken all the available machines out of the warehouses. Furthermore, there are many problems of degradation and poor preservation of analogue media that require very slow and delicate technologies to read them and then digitize them.