November 1994

The «Shutov Assembly» Will Cease to Exist.

Imagine if you can, trying to tell your grandson what Brian Eno’s ‘Shutov Assembly’ sounded like. Do you think that it would be, maybe, difficult? Well, get ready to do just that, because when the time comes for you to describe ‘The Shutov Assembly’ to your descendants, all you will have left as a reference is your geriatric, faded, memory. The Shutov assembly will have ceased to exist.

For hundreds of years, the longevity of music has been assured, because the instruments that once made the sounds, and the transcribed music scores of composers have survived intact, for reconstruction in the unimagined future. We can enjoy the music of Couperin for this very reason. The actual harpsichords that he played on and his transcribed scores have been handed down intact from the time that the original music was created.

Now however, we face a situation where no remnants of whole bodies our contemporary music are going to exist in 10 years, let alone 300 to 400. Digital mastering, due to the artificial market stimulation of two giant companies, is set to erase whole sections of the history of music permanently.

Lets take the example of ‘The Shutov Assembly’. This, like the bulk of new, contemporary music, is a CD only release, and CD has a life expectancy of 10 years. After that timr they start to deteriorate. If the master tapes were recorded on DAT, and these DAT tapes decompose (more on this later), then there will be no example of ‘The Shutov Assembly’ to re-master from. It will absolutely cease to exist. It will disappear forever. It will become just a memory in an old fool’s cluttered up and confused head. This is quite apart from the fact that even if the master DAT tapes did survive, the 44.1 sampling rate will not have preserved the music at a high resolution. In the light of re-issues of great recordings like Miles Davis’s ‘In a Silent Way’, remastered from the 25 year old ‘as was’ original analogue master tapes, the importance of completely professional, high stability, maximum fidelity mastering cannot be overstressed.

Today there are thousands of master tapes that are literally falling to bits. This due to a manufacturing error that occurred in the mid 1970’s at the factory of one of the worlds leading master tape manufacturers, Ampex. These tapes are now absolutely unplayable, and the only surviving copies of the music that was on them is on vinyl, (which is, by the way, good enough to master a CD from. This is the second choice of engineers after a master tape has been found to be missing or destroyed) . When these badly manufactured tapes are put onto a machine, the magnetic material shreds off of the plastic substrate, the binding glue having decomposed. There was, apparently, too much of a single component added into the binding mix; the result was a ph imbalance causing premature decomposition of the glue. Because the molecular resolution vinyl examples have survived longer than the tapes, these pieces of music have escaped oblivion.

This manufacturers error, if transposed to the present day, would mean the complete death, and cultural erasure of tens of thousands of recordings, because it takes only a tiny amount of degradation to completely destroy a DAT tape (which is becoming the main medium for mastering music), due to the helical scan method it uses to encode the music onto tape. This fragile medum, coupled with the insane CD only policy that record companies are persuing, means that there is going to be a whole generation of music that will be eliminated from human history, after the ten year life/window of CD has passed by.

DAT masters often will not play back on the same day that they were recorded. They are particularly fussy about the machines they will and will not play on, which is one of the reasons why Irdial-Discs has banned DAT. Often a DAT will only play on the machine that it was originally recorded on. Even the ‘pro models’ wont play stubborn DAT masters. This is quite a difference from a master that playes flawlessly after 25 years, as in the case of In a Silent Way.

Unlike the scored music of the past, the non-transcribeable studio music of the 20th century will not be re-constructable; in the same way that buying a Rolling Stones song book won’t tell you anything about the sound of ‘Brown Sugar’, no matter how well you play the guitar. Synthesizer constructed music will suffer even more, because written transcription cannot cope at all with the main thrust of this type of expression, which is texture rather than notes. Synthesizers are like snapshots out of the history book of electronic manufacture and design. In the future, it will be exorbitantly expensive to re-create, say, a bolt perfect Arp 2500, or a Roland Jupiter-8 out of spare parts or reproductions of parts that perfectly match the period specifications. It wont be like getting V& A drawings of harpsichord designs and making modern equivalents out of identical woods and quills. Synthesizers are thousands of times more complex, and hundreds of layers of manufacturing processes go into the production of even the most simple synthesizers. Integrated circuits, sliders, potentiometers, all of these separately mass produced components impart a sound to the instrument within which they reside; to re-create a genuine instrument would be impossible. This coupled with the intricacies of modern studio techniques means that the re-recording of electronically created music in the future will be impossible without an audible reference. In order to insure that this music is going to live into the future in any accurate way, we must master onto high stability analogue tape. When tapes are due for re-archiving they must be archived onto another generation of analogue tape. Its only in this way that music, and records like The Shutov Assembly will survive, in high fidelity, for future generations.

The ignorant will say that digital dubbing does not involve a loss of generation, because it is a 1 to 1 copy of numerical information. The people who say this are part of the legion of the uninformed. They have not heard a digital to digital DAT copy compared A/B to the originating master. If they had done so, they would know that after ONE digital generation, the sound degradation is so great that the copy is useless for the purposes of music. This is in complete disagreement with the manuals for SONY DAT players, which state that degradation will only be detectable after the tenth generation. This is odd, because a 1 to 1 numerical copy should NEVER suffer degradation at all!!

People are starting to say, that vinyl is the preserve of the hi-fi elite, because turntables are ‘too expensive’ for the average listener to afford. This is a perfect example of the bizarre times that we are living through; at the introduction of the compact disc, reams of derision were buttered onto those buying CD players and the limited number of discs that were then available, because they were deemed ‘too expensive’. This is undiluted bullshit. If people start buying turntables and related systems, the prices would drop; this is a fundamental feature of consumer electronics and everybody should be aware of the way in which these market forces operate. To complain that an item of consumer electronic goods is too expensive is to fail to understand the most basic fundamentals of 20th century economics, and its just plain stupid. CD can and will die, just like 8 track cassette did, but for different reasons. ‘Will die?’ I hear you cry out? Yes, it will die, because there is a new monster on the horizon , and I dont mean the discredited MiniDisc or the lame DCC. I am talking about HDCD.

HDCD is a new CD standard which will replace the 10 year old CD format. It has emerged due to a breakthrough in the manufacture of commercially viable blue lasers. Blue light has a shorter wavelength than red light, which means that HDCD will store four times as much data as the conventional CD. And guess what, you will all have to go out and buy new HDCD players, because the red lasers in your old CD players wont play the high density discs. All of your old CD s will have to be gradually replaced, in the same way that you were made to replace your vinyl recordings with thier CD re-issues. And of course, the companies that have manufactured this new abomination control the release of most of the worlds music, old and new; notice how when a higher capacity format is created, the aim is not to quadruple the quality, but to shovel 4 times the shit into the same space...

The scene has now been set; every ten years, the public will be made to replace all of their equipment for an ever inferior stream of mass produced garbage, whose only purpose is to generate profit for two global conglomerates.

What a bunch of shit.

We are in the middle of the most dangerous times that the art of sound has ever faced. The threat comes from the artificial supplanting of analogue technology with inferior digital technology by Sony and Philips. These misguided and money driven companies will kill all music, and lay waste the landscapes of sound that have been heard and are yet to be heard. Boycott them and their shitty products whose purpose is to enslave sound. And us.

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