Hello everybody--I am brand new to this forum, but may have some information that will be of interest to you. Let me first start out with a paragraph with which you are all probably familiar.
Barclay Crocker's Farewell (Last) Bulletin, written in 1987
"It was a sad and poignant sight to see our much-pampered pieces of machinery- the core equipment of our Barclay-Crocker enterprise- being shouldered like livestock up the ramp of a rental van amid so much panting and cursing and carried off into the night by their new owner. We like to think that the ghost of Howard Kovner (our engineer for so many years) was lurking vigilantly in the leaves nearby to make certain that his precious Ampex 440s and Ampex duplicators were being treated with the same reverence and loving care that he had lavished on them from the beginning. There may have been a whole host of spirits in that parking lot behind our building- customers, employees, suppliers, record company executives- gathered for one last time to witness the fall of the final curtain on the long-running road show of prerecorded open reel. Like a lot of respectable acts, it closed out of town."
I happen to be that new owner, who took the equipment away in the night. For the last 22 years, it has enjoyed a good home and excellent care. You may be interested to know that those same Ampex machines have been used to transcribe and restore the CBS Radio archives, including much of the material from the WNEW, New York vault. So the final curtain has not fallen yet, and really, it is alive and well only 20 miles away from its former home.
In addition to the electronic equipment, we also inherited almost all of the production master tapes, and maybe half of the original master tapes from which they were made. We could not bear to destroy them. True to my word, I have never tried to mass reproduce any of them. They have only been used for the listening enjoyment of my wife and myself.
Unfortunately, while most of the B-C 7" tapes still play fairly well, they used Ampex 406, 407, and some Grand Master tape for the 1/2" production masters. Those tapes hydrolyze badly, and even notes in the boxes, written by Harold Kovner, refer to many of them as "shedders". Proper dehydrating restores most of them to excellent playable condition, but, unfortunately, there are a few that have dropout issues.
As you may know, the way the process worked was that the master tapes were 1/4" encoded Dolby A. They were decoded, and then transferred to 1/2" Dolby B, which was the production master. That was the tape used for duplication. The production masters sound remarkably good when played back on the original machine that recorded them, through the original Dolby units that encoded them.
That being said, trust me when I tell you that the original masters sound even better.
Because the tapes may eventually become unplayable, I have started to digitize them, if only for the fact that I can have access to the music on my boat. I hadn't done this before, because frankly, digital was not up to the task. 24 bit, 192K sampling now gets rid of a lot of digital ills.
So, after such a long diatribe, I will finally get to my point. I do not have enough tape stock left to duplicate this material on reel to reel, but I can make a few copies available in digital format. And since what we primarily do here is tape restoration, much of the original noise can be eliminated (or not), with little or no degradation. I am not trying to get rich quick or flood the market with cheap copies. It seems that here you have a group of people really interested in quality sound and production values, who might appreciate access to material previously unavailable. Please let me know if there is any interest, or if I am just being a blasphemous devil. David
PS: We also still have the original duplicators; and yes, they work.