Early digital Decca and Philips - how were they archived?

[Fiddle Faddle]

This is a long shot but worth asking. As we know, Decca in the early years of digital adopted their own bespoke system for recording and editing. This system ran at 48 kHz and I believe utilised bitrates varied from 13 bits during the earliest experiments to 18 or 20 bit.

I am curious as to how all of the early Decca classical digital recordings have been archived, if at all? For instance, their analogue ones were archived to 24 bit, 96 kHz digital a couple of decades ago I believe, though of course the original analogue tapes still exist for the most part. And modern digital recordings simply exist in their native recorded format.

But there seems to be a large hole where the digital and analogue eras overlapped and most of the digital stuff from that time only seems to exist (at least from a consumer perspective) as plain 16 bit, 44.1 kHz material.

So does anyone know exactly what became of these (surprisingly good) recordings? The reason I ask is that Universal are releasing quite a lot of back material on vinyl these days and whilst some of them are true "AAA" remasterings onto vinyl, many of them are sourced from Universal's "Masters", which means the digital archives - and high res if it happens to be available in that format. And an increasing amount of material they are releasing is early digital. It would be a shame if this material is sourced from the 16 / 44.1 files as they would lack quite of lot of resolution and quality compared to Decca's original 18/48 material for instance.

And as regards Philips, an even more basic question is what did they do for classical in the early digital era? There is not much info on the net if any compared to Decca. And they are doing the same thing - reissuing early digital onto vinyl. A good example is an upcoming boxed set of Arthur Grumiaux playing the Mozart Violin Sonatas (digital, 1982).

 

[astrotoy]

In my almost complete collection of Decca stereo classical vinyl (around 3000 titles) I stopped at the transition to the digital era. However, a couple of years ago I was visiting Mike Mailes, one of the engineers I interviewed for my Decca book, and he presented me with a gift of more than 100 of the Decca digital records that he had in his personal collection from the 1980's (almost all were ones that he engineered). I was very pleasantly surprised at the high quality of the sound. I got more from John Dunkerley (another Decca engineer I interviewed) including many of the fine digital recordings he did with the Montreal Symphony and Charles Dutoit during that era.

http://theartofsound.net/forum/showthread.php?8386-The-Decca-Digital-Audio-Recorder&

Don't know whether you saw this. I also interviewed Tony Griffith for my book. I was focusing on the analogue era, but Tony provided me with information about the transition to digital. I also interviewed Raymond McGill who is responsible for most of the recent Decca Classical CD box reissues. I am guessing that he knows what happened to those early Decca digital tapes and whether they were transferred intact to digital files. I know they gave some of their Decca digital tape machines to Polygram to make the CD versions of the albums back in the '80's, since Polygram (Philips/DGG) didn't use the machines for their recordings (they did 44/16 with a standard Sony system). They had a converter that went from the Decca standard of 48/16 to 44/16.

Tony told me of the big battles the had early on when Polygram wanted to use 14 bits, and Decca wanted 16 bits. That was a time when storage was very expensive. Fortunately Decca won.

I can email Raymond to see what he knows about the original files. I know the analogue tapes were moved to Germany. Winston Ma (who published my book) got original analogue tapes from Decca 10 years ago or so when he remastered a bunch of their albums on his FIM label. Not all the tapes were in good condition - some were worn out from overplaying.

Larry

 

[Fiddle Faddle]

Hi Larry,

Yes I had read that thread you linked to plus there is quite a of lot of information about the early Decca digital recording process elsewhere. But hardly anything about Philips except one reference that indicated they were using the Soundstream technology (which again raises the question of what happened to those given that system ran at 50 kHz and - like Decca - I have seen nothing of those early digital recordings apart from 16 bit, 44.1 KHz versions).

I would have been hopeful that these old 48 kHz and 50 kHz recordings might have gotten the same sort of remastering / archival treatment of the early Telarc recordings (that went to DSD) however I am not holding my breath. I did know about their 48 to 44 converter which makes me quite concerned the recordings only exist in that format. Back in those days, even notwithstanding the loss in quality (even today) of 44 versus 48, the converters were not up to the same standards as the best algorithms around today - some of which are sophisticated to the point where it takes a very modern machine to facilitate the resampling in anything resembling a reasonable amount of time.

Anyway, I will be interested to receive any feedback if you email Raymond McGill. As I say, there is an increasing amount of vinyl content coming out of the early classical digital catalogue Universal stable under the Decca, Philips and DG labels, but getting any information about the exact nature of the sources used is like getting blood out of a stone.