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مدونات يوجد بداخلها معلومات وأراء شخصية من أعضاء GRN حول العالم

From archives to fingers

Anton Meyer - Friday 10 October 2014

The moment people talk about archives, I get that damp, musty smell in my nostrils and I usually start to itch. I always tend to think that it is a little like a graveyard. You feel sad because a friend has passed away and you invariably remember the good times. Sometimes you feel that you would rather forget and not recall the past. After all it the PAST!

We have been making recordings for the past 75 years and that stacks up to a lot of recordings and no, we would rather not forget about them. We would rather pick them up, dust them off and have them available to all and in that way, their original purpose will be fulfilled. We think of the care and dedication that has gone into these recordings and realize that there is no way that we can just let them go to seed.

Restoring these old recordings though comes with its own set of problems. We tend to get used to our modern environment and forget what went before. We live in the age of semi-conductor storage and have almost no recollection of paper based, back-coated and plastic based analogue tapes and the variety of forms that it came in. We have forgotten about the progression from open reel to cassette and then ultimately to digital tapes. Even more frightening is that some of us have never seen a 78 R.P.M. Bakelite record and very few even remember or think about the later vinyl versions that played at slower speeds and were capable of giving us an increased number of tracks.

Many of our younger generation have never seen our old 8 track continuous tape players that provided the “ultimate stereophonic sound” in our cars. CDs are still in plentiful supply, but increasingly, the trend is to download recordings from the Internet and store them electronically. We reproduce the sound electronically on telephones and small players and walk around with “in-ear” headphones that makes a mush of our delicate inner ears. Even our cars are regarded as old fashioned if the radio in it is not a “sound system” which plays micro SD cards and has Bluetooth capability to play music from a variety of external devices.

Many years ago a very good friend said to me that our development in electronics will be governed by the size of our fingers and for many years I believed that. Not any more though! Nowadays we can talk to our electronics and achieve the desired result that way. Praise God that He has given us this as a means to talk to our neighbour and share the Gospel with him by means of this amazing thing called “Electronics”.

Thank you Father
Anton