Thank you, Bill, for a very thorough explanation. It honestly makes me value my records even more. I have a converter machine from Hammacher Schlemmer that will transfer them to CD, but from what I'm gathering here, that result will not be as durable as an original commercially produced disc.

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The mind is a weird and mysterious place

Thank you, Bill, for a very thorough explanation. It honestly makes me value my records even more. I have a converter machine from Hammacher Schlemmer that will transfer them to CD, but from what I'm gathering here, that result will not be as durable as an original commercially produced disc.

If the conversions go onto writeable disc, you have about a decade - if you are careful. I have a few of those, burned off records, and I am transferring them all to hard disc. With my regular backup scheme, I'm hoping they will last as long as I do.

I still have just over 300 LPs, with a few new ones bought each month (only because second hand LPs are cheaper than new CDs). I love the sound, but they are prone to mechanical wear. Even on the best record players, you can hear a slight degradation after a few playings. I know a lot of people hate CDs, but they just have different shortcomings compared to LPs, and a lot of us are just used to the LP shortcomings. I'm getting into higher resolution digital formats (24 bit 96 kHz for now) and I think that is the best compromise between playback quality and longevity (again with regular backups).

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Bill, you make a couple of good points. I think what I should be doing is making copies of this stuff onto my computer and backup drive, too.

I also agree that I may just be more used to the shortcomings of records, and so CD's sound a little sterile to me.

Part of the romance of the record sound for me is the analogue nature of it. My theory is records have the ability to render the fractions between ones and zeroes that binary code on a CD cannot.

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The mind is a weird and mysterious place

The problem of all digital backups is bit rot.

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The problem of all digital backups is bit rot.

Well, that's disconcerting.

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The mind is a weird and mysterious place

The problem of all digital backups is bit rot.

Well, that's disconcerting.

It is why you need to find a backup program that also uses error correction so that errors can be corrected. That isn't going to be your garden variety backup software (but it should be)

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I once had a 78 of Elvis doing Mystery Train.
I forget what the flip side was.
Sadly, it was dropped and shattered years ago.

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"Freedom is just Chaos, with better lighting." Alan Dean Foster

I once had a 78 of Elvis doing Mystery Train.
I forget what the flip side was.
Sadly, it was dropped and shattered years ago.

Yes, I accidentally chipped one. They are very fragile.

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The mind is a weird and mysterious place

I once had a 78 of Elvis doing Mystery Train.
I forget what the flip side was.
Sadly, it was dropped and shattered years ago.

Mystery Train
Sun record# 223. Flip-side is "I Forgot To Remember To Forget".

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I once had a 78 of Elvis doing Mystery Train.
I forget what the flip side was.
Sadly, it was dropped and shattered years ago.

Mystery Train
Sun record# 223. Flip-side is "I Forgot To Remember To Forget".

YES.....
That WAS it....thank you for the reminder.
I forgot........
And a wonderful song..........................

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"Freedom is just Chaos, with better lighting." Alan Dean Foster

This came out not much later..............
Lawdy, Miss Clawdy.
I am aging myself by admitting that I know this from my youth.

The nurses at Theda Clark dubbed me Elvis when I was born due to my shock of black hair upon arrival. Yup.

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"Freedom is just Chaos, with better lighting." Alan Dean Foster

And you do know that whilst I was on walkabout, Scotty Moore passed on.

As a young lad, I always thought that Elvis could play. He could, a little.
Not this time.

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"Freedom is just Chaos, with better lighting." Alan Dean Foster

I find it interesting that everybody digs up info about deterioration of digital data when we discuss backups, but they never offer an alternative. I've recently gained access to original paper records dating back to the 1920s in government archives, and some of them are in rough shape. Paper deteriorating and crumbling, ink and pencil fading, etc. Even stuff as recent as the 1950s can be borderline useless. My Kodachrome slides from the 1960s and 1970s are fading.

Nothing is perfect. Any form of record keeping requires regular production of new backups.

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The early developers [no pun intended] at Kodak really did not see their medium lasting more than about 50 years into the future.
They wanted just to make memories survive about one or two generations.
It was NOT supposed to be an archival thing.
Kodak was envisioned as a period piece. Much like Polaroid, which had a much shorter shelf life.

In it's inception, Kodak knew the chemicals required to expose and make available saved images to the masses. It was all simple thereafter.////////////////////

At least until Kennedy got gunned down, and then what was once an art became a science. No other photos in history have been looked at so closely, grain by grain//.-

Whether you know it or not, Kodak has been behind the scenes for years, lending technical expertise to those of us who still believe there was something to find on the grassy hill just beyond Dealy Plaza. And somewhere, in that historical archive, we believe we shall one day find those few pieces of missing chemical elements that may redefine out history.

Mind you, I do not call them pixels, as they did not exist at that time.
What might save us is the fact that at that time, life did not exist in one or two byte increments, but in an infinite range of data.
And that is the most amazing thing.
There is no middle range between a one and a zero.
BUT, between black and white, a million infinates exist.
And while the secret of just who and how remains hidden, they shall one day come to light between the lights and darks of the cjemical proof that Kodak provided.

There is infinite difference between black and white/.
And more than enough resolution to finally prove who killed Kennedy.
This shall be proven in my lifetime.

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"Freedom is just Chaos, with better lighting." Alan Dean Foster