The time I realized I was archiving audio files wrong for years

I've been collecting old radio broadcasts and local band demos since like 2015, ripping them to MP3 at 128 kbps because I thought that was good enough for stuff that already sounded rough. Then last month I found a forum post where someone pointed out that you're basically compressing already compressed garbage and losing even more data. I went back and checked some of my earliest rips from a 1997 college radio show I found on cassette and the difference was night and day when I re-did it at 320 kbps. Made me wonder how many other lost media hunters out there are doing the same thing without realizing it. Has anyone else had that moment where you found out your preservation method was actually destroying the quality instead of saving it?

2 comments

2 Comments

oliverbailey7d ago

Read a blog post a while back from some guy who archives old radio dramas and he was saying the same thing, that 128 kbps is basically throwing away half the recording on stuff that's already been through a tape deck and a radio signal. He compared it to photocopying a photocopy until you can't read it. I had the same rude awakening with some live recordings I did years ago, went back and listened and they sounded like someone talking through a pillow. Makes you wonder how much of the stuff people think is "preserved" is really just a ghost of what it used to be.

stellac977d ago

Wait, isn't that the same feeling you get when you find an old photo that's been scanned and then scanned again and it's all blurry and weird? @oliverbailey I remember digitizing a bunch of my grandpa's reel-to-reel tapes a few years back and thought I was doing a good job with 128 kbps. But when I played them next to the original tapes it was night and day, all that warmth and detail was just gone. It's like you're preserving the outline of a recording, not the real thing. I spent a whole weekend redoing them at 320 kbps and even then I'm wondering if I lost something. Makes you think all this "preservation" we do might just be making fancy ghosts.