[electrical]

Squashed, you will doubtless appreciate that I don't want to rely on hiring someone off the internet to make a copy of old masters for me, and in what an awkward position this would put the rights owner. A couple of years ago, some original Led Zeppelin master tapes made their way out onto the internet via a "simple" copy someone wanted to make.

Additionally, playing a digital master is not necessarily the simple process you imagine. The Mitsubishi X-series tape machines, for example, have mechanical head alignment adjustments, which tend to drift more and more over time. Mitsubishi did not supply alignment tapes or instructions (as they were considered intellectual property), and it did not allow them to be made by a secondary source. For this reason, if you find a working X-series machine, it is unlikely to play back any master tape not recorded on it.

I only know this because I was peripherally involved in another studio trying to play an X80 tape about 8 years ago. It proved to be impossible on the two machines they found in Chicago and three more in Nashville -- including the one it was supposedly recorded on.

Eventually they used a commercially-pressed vinyl record for the re-issue master.

I tell this story because it demonstrates that the digital nature of the data is meaningless, because the data are still resident on a medium (there are another couple of pages I could fill about the volatility of digital media, but this is far enough afield for the moment), and that medium is subject to the failures of time, the playback device, penetration of the technology and (increasingly) intellectual property protections. The story would be the same if the data were on one of the many proprietary removable tape systems or any other format long since discarded by the computer industry.

Analog recordings are much more robust, and playback devices are ubiquitous, non-proprietary and not particularly difficult to make, if it comes to that. Analog recordings require no additional attention to last centuries. Longevity is built-in.

If you want to continue the sport of trying to find "solutions" to my reservations about digital recording, be my guest. It is clearly entertaining you, and it might be entertaining for others. You are unlikely to come up with anything that hasn't occurred to me in the last 20 years that I have been working on the problem myself, but it can't hurt anything.