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“I was driving home one evening – then I saw it – black smoke billowing in the distance – could it be – no please no – my home on fire. Worse, my record collection flaming and smouldering and melting and disappearing; forever. All of those days, weeks, months, years of crate digging, swapping, retrieving from dumpsters, ordering from ebay or discogs. That first edition…..”

I’m sure that every serious record collector has this nightmare, recurrently. A couple of years ago I dropped a CD and a big chunk broke out of it. The CD was old, difficult to replace, but – then I remembered – I had a back up (ripped losslessly to flac) on my server. The history of the world’s digital recording can be stored in a cloud or on infinite hard drives. But analogue, that’s a different story.

You are in a band. You record an album that sells a lot of copies on vinyl. Then it is re-issued on CD and sells loads more. Many years later, it is time for the 25^th anniversary deluxe edition box set. Steven Wilson has been brought on board to do a 5.1 surround mix for the Blu-Ray. He also wants to remix the original and do a flat transfer of the master tapes. The multi-track masters cannot be found. This seems to have happened with XTCs “English Settlement.”

Remember that the “master” tape is a mix down of the multi-tracks, in stereo for mastering to vinyl, CD or cassette. The “original” master tapes are valuable. The multi-track masters are the real gold. An example of this is Sgt. Pepper. Several years ago, as part of the Mono box set, the original mono masters were used to cut new vinyl copies of the record. It sounded great. However, 2 years ago, for the 50^th anniversary, Giles Martin went back to the original multi-track masters, redigitalized everything in multi-track and remixed the album to 21^st Century standards. I though it sounded spectacular.

Imagine if we suddenly lost the multi-track tapes and original masters of a large number of classic albums? Up in a puff of flames. For example – imagine if all of John Coltrane’s fantastic Impulse! albums’ master tapes were suddenly lost in a fire. That would be it: no more remasters, no more “original master recordings” no more remixes; nothing. Imagine if we lost all of Chuck Berry’s masters, or Buddy Holly’s. Gone. Stop imagining – it has happened and they didn’t tell us.

In 2008 a fire broke out in a warehouse on a backlot of Universal Studios. Everything was destroyed – but, we were told, it was only just film stock – advertisements, short flix nothing important. They lied. The warehouse had been sublet to Universal Music Group and it contained a large amount of original master recordings belonging to the behemoth music company. And everything was destroyed. I read about this in an article published this week in the New York Times. Reading the article gave me the same feeling as watching, in horror, as the great cathedral of Notre Dame (in Paris) burned down. They can rebuild, but it will never be the same.

“But don’t they have digital backups (like my CD-flac)?” – you might ask. This is analogous to hanging a photograph of the Mona Lisa in its place, because the original is destroyed. If you have ever watched the “Classic Albums” series – usually the artist and the engineer are seated at a large analogue console- the multi-track masters are loaded – faders are moved up and down – detail is revealed and then buried back down in the mix. The “master” tape or the digital copy of it is merely a reproduction of what the mastering engineer believed, at the time, the listener wanted to hear, taking into account the limitations of the equipment. In the 1950s and 60s, that equipment was likely a Dansette record player. In the 00s it was an iPod, later a smartphone or a car stereo – mastered for maximal loudness. Lose, for example, the multi-track masters (and remember that these may be digital, and stored on tape/hard drive/zip drive etc), of Californication, and you are stuck in loudness hell forever.

I would have thought that the master tapes of Buddy Holly or Chuck Berry or BB King or Billie Holliday or Aretha Franklin or John Coltrane or Bing Crosby would be American National Treasures – these are amongst the greatest artefacts of American culture in the 20^th Century – no less important than Caravaggio paintings or Degas sketches. Keeping them stored in a tinderstick shed in a sunny location with huge amounts of traffic is not just negligent – it is tragic.

My heart goes out to all of those artists whose master tapes were being held (?Hostge) by Universal, whose cupboard is now bare – where even to obtain some copy of the master the company has to go to Japan, or Germany (for x generation master), where the multi-tracks are gone. And then there are all those, lesser, recordings that were never copied, never digitalized – lost forever.

Finally, if most of John Coltrane’s Atlantic and Impulse! masters were destroyed – can UMG inform us of the providence of the High Res downloads that have only been available in the past few years? Was 24/192 used for archiving prior to June 1^st 2008 (I suspect not – as most recorders in those days were 24/96 or DSD)?

Fortunately, in view of the fact that Kevin Gray has been working away on them for years, one must presume that the Blue Note (another UMG company, but then part of EMI/Capitol) masters were located somewhere else.

~ by Pat Neligan on June 13, 2019.

Posted in Digital Music, High Resolution, records shops, Uncategorized, Vinyl
Tags: Universal Music Group Fire