16 bits sound fine to me, so I can understand nameloc1 sticking with his Hi-MD recorders because they are small. Hi-SP even sounds as good to me as PCM.
[snip]
I also don't get the need for hard copies of masters-I wouldn't even want to have to store them or try to find a particular recording. I'm happy just saving the digital file to a hard drive and backing it up to another drive. And I take it buying blank DAT's is getting expensive now.
Interesting.
So you are saying that, like the future of everybody's record collection (which will one day simply be a searchable database in iTunes, with no cases or media, but just a bank of hard drives), the shows you tape will be archived on a bank of 1TB drives, that you will eventually expand as you make more tapes.
That is a pretty cool thought. I have about 1000 master DATs. They are currently stored in 4 large bins and labeled (as best as possible and sorted by date) because, lets face it, I don't need them on the wall to browse through. That is way too much. I listen to quite a few of them regularly, and can find what I am looking for pretty quickly with a few exceptions.
Invariably, if I listen to one, I transfer it at the same time, edit it that week and archive it to DVD.
DVDs have proven to fail on me, but not as much as CDRs. MAN, I hated CDRs, esp when someone would send you one with a label on it that would eventually warp and not play. But there was a period of 8 or more years when that is all anyone would send you. The majority of traders were CDR-only...
I really like the idea of thinking that every recording I made was archived on a searchable hard drive, but that is a librarian's full time 3-year job at a time when we all have to work twice as hard just to stay employed.
I really like having hard copies of my masters, though, so I'd bet, for important shows, I would probably still run backup DAT while the medium lasts.
Don't you miss labeling all those J-Cards when you'd mail out copies to your friends?
;-)