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Mass Productions seems to be on a roll with converting long abandoned formats.  We currently have several customers needing us to digitize  these Technicolor CVC videocassettes. Few people have ever seen these. It was an early compact video format from 1980, but it did not last on the market very long.

Mass Productions was sent a one of a kind rough mix cassette of a band from 1994.    The tape had been damaged by soaking in rusty water in a flooded basement.

The tape was broken and dried up muddy water coated the tape inside.

We professionally cleaned the tape,  repaired it, and transplanted it into the new tape shell ( seen on the right )

Next we carefully digitized it using the best cassette deck ever made,  which features manual azimuth adjustment.

Per our clients request, we de-noised the recording,  did some minor editing, and equalized for a fuller sound.

The restoration of the tape has inspired the band to re-unite,  transfer the original 2″ 24 track multi-track to digital, and finally finish the album!

Mass Productions restores cassette

This reel to reel recording of the Longy School of Music Chamber Orchestra  from 1981 presented us with a challenge.

Apparently two microphones were used for the right channel.   However,  one microphone was wired backwards polarity.

When mixed together,  the mismatched polarities caused phase cancellation of the lower frequencies in the right channel.

We came up with a creative solution to isolate the low frequencies only from the left channel, and mix them back into the right channel.  Thus the low frequencies were recovered and the entire recording was restored!

Today Mass Productions was busy transferring one of a kind wire sound recordings of Dr. Howard Thurman.

This reel was recorded circa 1950 in San Francisco at Fellowship Church.

The Boston Cecilia Choral Society recently chose Mass Productions to digitize and archive recordings of their past performances.

The original DAT masters cannot be located, so we are very carefully digitizing Dolby B cassette copies.

We make sure to manually calibrate the azimuth and set perfect levels for each tape to get the most out of each recording.

The files become high resolution 96khz, 24 bit wave files for archival preservation.

Mass Productions can now transfer and digitize DBX type II noise reduction encoded reels, cassettes, and records.

This is an antiquated, but highly effective compression/expansion system that greatly reduced tape and record noise, while also increasing the dynamic range.

When used correctly,  recordings made with this system sound amazing!

We carefully calibrate our decoder to the reference tones on your tapes to get the most precise decoding of your tape.

Not sure if your tape is DBX 1 or DBX II?   Don’t worry,  just let us know the model of the original encoder and we’ll figure it out!

Mass Productions is now an active member of New England Archivists, Inc.   http://newenglandarchivists.org/

New England Archivists is a regional organization of people who organize, describe, preserve, and provide access to historical records in a variety of formats.

We will be providing our digital Archival Services to members, and will be present at the upcoming meeting in Amherst this fall.   See you there!

We recently restored a very early magnetic sound recording on paper audio tape from 1947!
The tape was very delicate, it had broken in many places. It was held together with dried up cellophane tape.
We replaced the splices, but there were missing sections.   Thankfully there were additional copies.
We digitized the oldest copies, then edited and equalized the missing pieces back into the recording.
The end result was pretty amazing for a 66 year old tape! These are pictures of the actual tape.

Here is a sample of the recording.

We dropped into the Christian Science Church today to pickup even more audio reels!

These are recordings of the Sentinel Radio program,  this batch is Russian and Czech.

All of these tapes will need to baked before transfer.    Looks like we’ll be busy!

After several months of painstakingly transferring antiquated Digital sound recordings on Betamax videotape, we now continue with the analog reels from the tape library of the Longy School of Music in Cambridge.

These reels date from the mid sixties to the early seventies. The tape is warped on many of the reels, splices will need to be replaced, and some use early Dolby A noise reduction.