(Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai. Go Unlimited to remove this message.) Y'all ready to be history? Get started. Welcome. Hi. Hi. Hi. Hello, everyone. To the Pro Audio Suite. These guys are professional, they're motivated. Thanks to Tribooth, the best vocal booth for home or on-the-road voice recording. And Austrian Audio, making passion heard. Introducing Robert Marshall from Source Elements and Someone Audio Post, Chicago. Darren Robbo-Robertson from Voodoo Radio Imaging, Sydney.
Tech to the VO Stars. George the Tech Whittam from LA. And me, Andrew Peters, voiceover talent and home studio guy. Line up, man. Here we go. And welcome to another Pro Audio Suite, thanks to Tribooth. Don't forget the code, T-R-I-P -A-P 200. That will get you $200 off your Tribooth. And Austrian Audio, making passion heard. This week, we're talking archives. Archiving your material, very important. And we're joined by a couple of guests.
We have Ben Chesterman and Craig Field from the National Australian Archives. Or the National Archives of Australia. I'm not quite sure. Which way around is that, by the way? National Archives of Australia. Good. Excellent. We cleaned that one up. Now, archiving is something we don't normally think about until we've lost something. But just give us a bit of a background on the National Archives that you work on and some of the things that you actually have to work with.
And also, who the heck are you? We'll start with that. My name is Ben Chesterman. I'm the Digital Audio Visual Preservation Manager, which is a proper bureaucratic handful of a title. So my team takes in audio, which is obviously something we're all familiar with, but also film sound, 35, 17.5, 16 mil film. And then the video side as well, which we won't talk about on this podcast. It's a dirty word, I'd imagine. Within my audio team is headed up, I guess, by Craig Field.
Yeah. Hi. My name's Craig Field. And like Ben, I'm part of this team here at the National Australian Archives. And yeah, I head up the audio department here. And we look after lots of different formats, things that we can discuss later if you like. But yeah, it's an interesting thing. Both Ben and I come from the corporate world or come from music production and post -production, and we're both quite new at the archives. So we're quite young archivists, but keen nonetheless, all right?
So let's start with this then. To give us an overview of what you guys do, if someone said to you, what does the audio department of the National Archives of Australia do, what's your answer? The remit of the National Archives is to deal with all government agency records. And that could be anything from the Department of Defence. It can be Royal Commissions. It also includes the broadcasters, Film Australia, ABC, SBS.
But unlike, say, the National Film and Sound Archive, our priority is not, I guess, the cultural significance of a record. Any record. It could be something as dry as The Wool Board or the Bicentennial Authority's backstage stuff at Rose Tattoo in Akkadak. Or it could be some Royal Commissions and really significant records like that. So there is a lot of cultural tags that come into it, security as well.
But obviously the primary remit is to make that material safe and accessible to the researchers, the public, and those agencies in the future. I guess the U.S. equivalent is the Library of Congress? Yeah, absolutely. That's correct. And we very much engage with them in regards to what our specs are and TCO6 and all these sorts of specifications. And that stuff is done with the Library of Congress and also, I will add, within the agencies here. So NFSA and us work quite closely together.
So the Film and Sound Archive, to be clear though, is separate to you guys, obviously, but does a similar thing. But it's sort of the archive of Australian treasures, I guess, isn't it, in terms of recordings? Yeah, that's right. There's definitely a sort of lens of cultural significance that they put onto whether they accept a transfer. With us, we probably accept everything. And then there's a lot of crossover. They'll contact us because they may only have a low-res copy or a dub of something.
We may have the original source. So we do a lot of that. Oh, wow. So you're sort of backing each other up as well, almost, then archiving each other. Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. And the ABC too. We do almost daily transfers back and forth between ABC Radio, Archives and us when they have things that we need and vice versa. The ABC is the Australian Broadcast Commission, guys, for you guys in America. That's what the ABC is. So let's go through the process then.
If something comes in to you guys, how do you sleep soundly at night knowing that it's securely archived then? What's the process? What happens? So I guess on the physical side, you'd start with a transfers team. So they would engage with the agency to make sure that's packed properly and all the rest of it. Obviously the first part of it is getting the material to our repository safely. Then everything is stored in the proper conditions depending on that format.
And there are vaults here in Sydney as well as in Canberra, probably the largest one in Canberra. And depending on those formats, so film sound needs to be dealt with much colder temperatures generally than, say, an optical format like CDEC. So that's part of it. And then also there's an accessioning they call within the archives.
That's where a team will sit down with the paperwork or the files that come from the agency and record that in our database so that we actually describe that record, as it's called, and make sure that that's accurate. Then in terms of what we do digitising, I'll hand over to Craig for that side of things and treatment and so on. Well, again, I guess the first thing we do is have a look at the format and see what there is. There's a wealth of knowledge here at the archive, as you can imagine.
There's a lot of people like Ben and myself who've had pretty extensive professional careers and find themselves at the archives. In my second week here, someone who's been here a long time put his hand on my shoulder and said, don't worry, son, everything old ends up at the archive. Thank you so much. There's a lot of grey hair in the room right now. I haven't been offered a job yet, but maybe my time is now. Your time may be coming.
So that's one of the first things that we do, obviously, as Ben mentioned. It goes to lending. It's very well cared for and put in different spaces. At our repository, for example, we've got cold rooms that are, you know, supersonic temperatures that are climate controlled, so to speak, where the air is refreshed every X amount of time. When there's certain amounts of particles in the air, the air is extracted and then put back in so that canisters can be kept at the best condition.
We've got dehumidifying ovens and things like that for analog tape. Obviously, it's just best practice, really, and all those different formats require different techniques and different things, you know, right down to a HB pencil and a cassette tape. So some of it's preserving the actual original format and the earliest, most original format possible physically for as long as possible, and then part of it is transferring this to a medium that can be replayed over and over. Yeah, absolutely.
Some things can't be shared from our particular archive, the National Archives. Some things are kept for under government policy and some things are available for public research and public access.
But ultimately, what we try to do is, and again, I'm quite new at the archive, but it is a complete surrogate copy of the content, as pristine as humanly possible, and that obviously, say, in the, if we're talking a quarter-inch tape that's 40 years old, that can require a fair bit of care and understanding about what the format is and preparation before you do the recording because you might only have one shot of it. That's right, one shot. It's a one-take thing. Yeah, one shot.
Which is, you know, when we were talking earlier about DSD and things like that and no editing, that really motivated me professionally as an engineer that you've got one shot at this, man. You've got to get everything set up, get it right, get it done. Why is that? Because a lot of people listening may not understand that the process of, we call it baking the tapes here in the US, but why is it you get one shot at that?
Is it because after the tape is baked and then it is played, it falls apart, something like that? Not necessarily. In fact, if you don't bake it, it'll fall apart more possibly, I think. Yeah, that is right. The baking is to try and minimize the shedding, but you will get some. But the baking does affect the emulsion, so you are wanting to try and digitize well on your first pass. You have to know, I guess. Right. Do you know what we found that works great for baking? Do you remember?
I mean, they're even perfectly sized like the reals. So do you remember back in the day they used to have these, like, get all your bananas and slice them and slice your strawberries and then you dehydrate them? Food dehydrators. Yeah, and really you're dehydrating the tape, and that works better than tossing it in the oven at 150 degrees, I think. But what do you guys do as far as baking tape? We've got a microwave downstairs that is thrown in every five seconds. That's right.
It's in the kitchen. I don't know about rust in a microwave. Yeah, yeah. Look, technically, don't use the term baking, okay, because the last thing you want to do is have a baked tape. Well, hang on. When you're recording to tape, we call it baked. It's baked in once you've recorded it to tape. You certainly can have it. Yeah, yeah, it is. And most of the people in the studio are baked. That's not a problem. I don't know about that. That's a given.
But when you're getting there, you don't want to bake that tape, okay? You do want to dehumidify it. Dehydralize is the term they use. Dehydralize. And as Ben stated, what they've found, and it was the Library of Congress that came up with some of the disciplines that they use in these ovens, they used to use a process where the ovens were set to 38 degrees and they would put a tape, two-inch, quarter-inch, one-inch, they would put in there for four days.
And they used that standard for many, many years, and it's only recently after extensive tests that they've now changed that temperature to a standard of about 48 degrees and a constant, and they give it 48 hours in there. And they have found that that helps the emulsion, you know, pretty much just rejoin the tape so that it's solid, so that you can play it back.
Because after a period of time, there was a lubricant that was commercially applied within the manufacturer of the tape, and that lubricant amongst other chemicals slowly starts to break up and causes the emulsion that's on the top of the tape that we would magnetize to lift and shed and break up. And the warmth and the constant warmth and that constant temperature helps that emulsion just join back to the back of the tape and can give you a chance of...
So it's still only one pass, though, by the sounds of it. It's not necessarily one pass. I mean, after you bake it, it's been through trauma, but it's not necessarily completely dead. But every playback, I mean, technically every playback of a tape is wearing off, you know, it's friction. Yeah, that's right. It's like a record. No, you're right, Robert. It's not always one pass, but generally the archival way is to try and get a single pass in, so you're not doing edits and anything like that.
But I would add to that, the ovens that are used by us and vendors, I should add, there's digitization vendors that do work for all the archives, basically scientific medical ovens because they're required to be at those really low, essentially, low but stable temperatures. And I have worked on a project, I won't name names, but someone had an oven that completely malfunctioned. The thermostat went up in the middle of the night and came in the morning.
They had some lovely sculptures, but not great. We took a melted quarter-inch reels. It was quite a sight. That's when it's baking. That's when it's baking. It's literally baking. That's right. And I would add as well that a big part of what Craig and the team do here is to evaluate the issues with that source before they even start. You might have other issues that aren't related to hydrolysis or sticky shed syndrome as it's often called.
There's another one which is known as loss of lubricant where the actual lubricant on the tape is worn off and then you get this quite noticeable squeaking as it goes across the reels and the capstans. And that's a different issue. You'll actually deal with that in a different way by using solutions drip-fed onto the tape as it's heading over the heads. You can use other… What's the stuff the NFSA were starting to play with? Hydromethazone. Yeah, hydromethazone is a new product.
I'd like to try some of that. That's almost like a silicon-like solution. It's used to help with that loss of lubricant. They found that on old cassettes as well that that's worked really well. Well, I was just going to ask, you mentioned it before, has anybody come up with anything better than the HB pencil on a cassette yet? I mean, really? Look, there were originally in the 80s, funnily enough, there were winders. They were commercially available. Yes, they were. I remember.
And they're very hard to get because after you've… We're looking down the barrel of one particular project soon that's got about 500 cassettes and they all need analysis, they all need checking, they all need revision, tightening, and ultimately, as Ben sort of insinuated, when we're archiving something, it needs to happen in one pass without any editing. So it needs to be one complete recording or it stops being a legal document, it stops being a surrogate copy.
So if you put a cut in there or you put an edit or you have to stop for some reason, and this includes if we're doing top secret things, if someone enters the room, that recording is no longer a legal document. Wow. And you would find that with archiving throughout the world so that when you're doing certain things, it's just like engineering, it's the preparation and the means and the communication prior to it and then the actual function of the recording. So there's a few elements involved.
No, the HP pencil is still pretty important, I think. And if anyone knows where there's a whole stash of winders, old stock from the 80s, please write to Craig at the archive. Craig, I think I do actually have one. I have a cassette repair kit. Name your price. Well, it's my birthday in July, so you can let me know. Send us a box. You've just beggared one more question for me.
Given the high stakes that's going on, what has more pressure involved, recording an orchestra or a three-meter piano or sitting down to dub a cassette? Oh, look, you face all of the problems just like we did our technical problems this morning, just hooking up all these sorts of lines. You just face them as they come as an engineer.
And I think you get so used to things not working and figuring out problems that you either embrace that in your career and realize that that's one of the largest parts of the career is you plug something in. I came this morning, plugged something in, and one of my leads isn't working. Now, it's like, come on, one of the leads. I just couldn't believe it. And so it worked yesterday. Yeah, of course it did. I mean, that's the old set up the session the night before and you leave it open.
You don't close Pro Tools. You don't do anything. You come in the next morning and two mics aren't running or something's not working. What the hell is going on here? Exactly. Yeah, that's it, right? That is the law of it. So I would say to answer your question, when, say, you're recording a small ensemble, no one really knows.
When you're the engineer and the technician, even if there's a producer with you, maybe the producer understands, but few people really know what's going on, especially with trying to capture the dynamic and the room and capturing the air and the performance and all of those sorts of things that you're trying to oversee. Mostly the musicians are very focused on themselves and their performance.
I've found, coming from that and working at the archives, that you're surrounded by a whole group of really professional people who are totally kind of with you. So there's a great deal of support. There's a great deal of knowledge, and we can go down to Canberra or call up someone who's got 20 years' experience with a particular format, and they'll talk you through it over the phone, hold your hand, and if it does go wrong, they'll probably buy you a coffee at the end of it.
It's a different world, but it's a very supported environment to work in, and it's great being there's just so much knowledge here. It's fantastic. What's one of the most difficult formats that when you're presented with it, you're thinking, oh boy, what's one of the challenging ones? In audio land? DAT tapes. DAT tapes that decide to crap out. DAT tapes. DAT tapes that fuck up. Anything with a spinning head, right? A spinning head tape.
We were all of an age that we used DATs back in the day, and they were bad even then. If you were recording a TASCAM, you couldn't play back in a Sony, all that nonsense. So that continues. We have to have a range of machines, and we have a bunch of different brands. Yeah, DAT tapes. I used to carry around a little portable to do some production sound mixing for a film, real low budget. And you would just pray that that thing wasn't going to drop bits and drop out. So here's a question.
First of all, actually one quick question. Have you ever had to bake a DAT tape? Well, yes. You should bake DAT tapes. And then the second question, which is something I've noticed, and I'm wondering if you've noticed yourself. I've done a few projects where someone brings me all their old tapes, and you dry them out, and then you get your one playback. And I have seen it. If you guys haven't seen this, it goes through the pinch roller, and it plays back.
And coming off that pinch roller, one piece of tape becomes two. And the second piece of tape just disintegrates because it's just literally the oxide. And the funny thing I've noticed is that sometimes when people bring these projects, the cheap tape from Radio Shack doesn't mess up. And the expensive Ampex or BASF tape, that stuff delaminates. And you really have to make sure you bake that stuff.
But the old crappy tapes, whatever they did differently on them, those seem to deal with the age better. I think it's the additional cheap uranium content in the Radio Shack. It just seems to go forever, you know? You don't rub it. You're putting the radiation in Radio Shack. Is that what we're saying? Yeah. I really think you're right, Robert. It's funny. I came here and was surprised to learn that Ampex 456, which when I started out was like, that's the tape. That's what you use.
It does not age well at all. There are other brands that weren't as well considered back in the day that just, for whatever reason, they just hold their condition better. And so they'll require treatment. I was thinking another format that's a nightmare are optical CD-Rs, you know, the ones you record. I was going to say DVDs. Don't they have a shelf life and they just start to eventually start throwing errors?
In regards to your guys' audience, a lot of us would have those DVD-R backups, CD-R backups of our sessions. Those are my archives, by the way, for a lot of my media. That's it. Disc rod is very real. I think we're all probably familiar with it. You pull out a disc and it's got those big holes in it. It's where the reflective layer just breaks down, and that can be anything from light-related chemical breakdown. So, yeah, they're one we'd really want to be getting off.
Just on that, a really cool approach, and we were talking about the HP pencils before, but what we've really liked coming into this is some of the novel approaches that are really starting to come out now. People are using 3D printing to build new machines, essentially new components for these old machines.
At the same time that Craig and I have come in here and we're digging back into old machines that we haven't used in 40 years, there's that element of finding obsolete equipment, as it's called, and cleaners, the old bow cleaners that you string up a tape and run it through first. There's also some really novel stuff being done with 3D printing, using new machines to be able to take a tape out of its case, roll it around, have a look at it, really kind of judge it.
And with DATs, I've seen people using the old data DATs that we would use to put data to in the old day, and they're actually extracting the audio data from that DAT using an old SCSI setup, and so they're not actually having to run for an old Sony or a Tascam machine. So like Craig said, around the world there are archivists, they're very sharing, there's no sort of competition. It's a special DAT drive that reads data and audio.
Yeah, that's right. Because Mark Gilbert used to use those, I think they were the Connor drives, and he had DAT Studio, and you could load DAT tapes in at double speed via data instead of via as audio playback. Yeah, that's right. But you had to find those special DDS, what was the DAT format, DDS3 was that? DDR3? DDR3 was it? Yeah. Yeah, and then you also have to find an old SCSI card and something that can run that. And an old computer that can run the software.
I like to ask the audience questions that somebody would love to ask. So what's the oldest piece of audio medium that you had to archive? A wax cylinder. We're both pretty new, but down in Canberra, we've both been down there. They have some wire recordings, they've got quite a substantial. And I can't remember the technician's name down there. Aren't wire recorders after wax cylinders though? I think wax cylinders predate wire recorders. Yeah, they've got wax as well.
They've got wax as well, but because of Australia being such a broad country and those wire cylinders were easy to transport, there was quite an industry here in Australia at that time. So people were sending them out to sheep stations and different places like that. They were quite robust. And when you see what happens if you take the spool, there's two kilometres of very fine wire on that thing. And when it comes off badly, it looks like steel wool. Like an afro. It's a mess. It's terrible.
And listening to their stories of having to detangle those and put them back, but they've got quite an advanced understanding of that. And their technician down in Canberra has actually gone over to university in America and lectured on it. And they've developed, just so they could get an understanding of the magnetism techniques, they've used a horn and done their own wire recordings.
So they've actually recorded through old machines just so they could get a better understanding of how it was originally done, so they could also do the transfers because there was so much significant content. Now I would say with some of the formats, what's interesting is some of the older formats, including wire recording, some of the early shellac and vinyl, they're really at very low risk because they're still functioning quite well. And they come off and they work and sound great.
And I would say the same for tape and quarter-inch, if it's been stored well. And there were very good technicians back in the day when people were recording. The stuff that we get obviously comes from the National Broadcaster and things, so it's really well recorded. The sound that comes off them is fantastic, even on a 40-year-old Studer. And at least compared to film, it doesn't catch on fire if you store it wrong. Yeah, yeah, that's right.
I guess film sound's probably a little out of the scope of this podcast, but some of the guys, I think you've probably heard of vinegar syndrome, where the acetate breaks down and you get a very strong smell of vinegar. And Tony Ravichow, head film sound guy, calls them hockey pucks when they get so bad that you pull out these reels of mag and it's just a solid lump. Just solid, yeah. He will sit there. An old drummer, he's a drummer, so he has an old drum mic stand set up.
It's almost like a hairdryer. Yeah, it's like a little hairdryer. And then blows that onto the reel and bit by bit just pulls it out. Pulls it apart. Wow. And then he can actually get a transfer. Porno mag syndrome. And we use these big old... You must really, really want to see what's on or hear what's on that. Yeah, totally. Well, it's our job. It's not about something we really need to hear it. It's our job.
So we get given these things and some things have been stored really quite poorly or they've been moved around or government departments have closed down. They've been put in boxes and stored and left to the elements and they come to us and it's not so much, oh, we really want to hear it. We have to hear it. It's our job to get it off. We need it stashed away. We need to find what it is and then we need to record it. And it's really exciting. That's a really... We get given the resources.
We get given the support and the time to do it. It's like archaeology. Yeah. I'm sure there's a bunch of top secret stuff along the way that you can't talk about, but is there anything that's come through that you've gone, wow, they recorded that? That's really great. I recently got to listen to a fantastic Nick Cave recording that he did when he was quite young and he was still living in Berlin, but he'd come back to Australia and he was sitting into...
It was a program for the ABC that ran for a very long time and he read from a book and also sat and played at the piano and sung. It was beautifully recorded. The tape looked pretty damaged and we did some work to it and we cleaned it and we ran it through our cleaners and we rehydrated it and then we did a take. And just hearing a great recording, a young prolific artist coming from this beautifully recorded and engineered process and just hearing it from tape, it just sounded fantastic.
Do you ever improve the recordings? Like if the original deck had Wow and Flutter on the input, do you ever try to go in and take out the Wow and Flutter from what would have been a flawed recording? Not the Preservation Master, no. So I guess probably should go to that. We create a Preservation Master, which is just the transfer that I mentioned, the straight in.
And then if a researcher or a member of the public wanted to access that and that was approved, we might then do some treatment, some editing even. Some restoration to it. To make it more... But generally as a rule, restoration is not part of what we're doing here. Where the brick lays. Way back before wax cylinders, I forget who it was, he came up with a system called audiograms and he was able to take a sketch of the waveform, but there was nothing to play it back.
And then I think around 2000, early 2000s, I began taking these photographs or these audiograms, however he captured them, they would load into the computer and convert it back to a waveform. And it was literally captured in 18 whatever, 60, and never played back until 2005. That's quite special, isn't it? That's amazing. Well, some of the broken... They now have a laser technology where they can look at broken shellac and they can grab the pieces.