0.   A person in Marblehead MA is giving away continuous runs of Stereophile and The Absolute Sound starting in the 70s and 80s. He wants them to be picked up. If interested contact me. If out of area, I can arrange pickup and shipping for a fee. Concidentally the March BAS meeting is in Salem which is nearby.

1.   Sales of DVD players surpassed those of VCRs in September and October and are expected to reach 12.5 million units this year according to the CEA. Blockbuster recently cleared 25% of its dust-gathering VHS tapes to make room for DVDs.

2.   A paper by Linda Walsh of Drew University, A Clinically Diagnosed Case of Loud Music Dependency Disorder, examines loud-music listening behavior and characterisics to determine if it is a clinical disorder like substance dependence, and to understand why some individuals continue listening to loud music despite having tinnitus and/or noise-induced hearing loss as a direct result of their music-listening behaviors. This present study reports the results of two independent clinical interviews of an individual whose music-listening behaviors meet clinical criteria for a behavioral dependency disorder as defined by an adapted version of the DSM-IV Criterion for Substance Dependence issued by the American Psychiatric Association (1994). This finding appears to confirm the existence of a true dependency on loud music, called Loud Music Dependency Disorder (LMDD). [email from Peter Marvit, marvit@neu.edu]

3.   The Boston Globe profiles Bob Ludwig under the header "From Symphonies to Springsteen, He Masters Them All." As an 8-year-old child in 1953 he was so fascinated with his first tape recorder that he used to make recordings of whatever was on the radio in South Salem, N.Y. He played trumpet in the Utica symphony. In 1968, as a master's student at the Eastman School of Music, he attended a workshop by the rock producer Phil Ramone. At the end of the session Ramone offered him a job as an apprentice engineer at A&R, his New York studio. A stint at Sterling Sound led to a position at Masterdisk, where Ludwig worked for 17 years. In 1993, with an initial investment of $1.6 million, he opened Gateway Mastering in Portland Maine, the first major mastering facility outside the music business epicenters of New York, Los Angeles, and Nashville. Now Gateway does more than 200 sessions annually for an average fee of $5000, and generally booked 6 months in advance. The original staff of 3 (including his wife) has grown to 10, including a handful of talented young apprentices who have had to pass Ludwig's job application test--a tape loaded with subtle defects. [8Nv02]

4.   The July/August 2001 AES Journal has some interesting articles on audio preservation. "The Jack Mullin/Bill Palmer Tape Restoration Project" chronicles the effort to save the original German Magnetophon tapes that were used for the production of Bing Crosby radio broadcasts after WWII. Most of the tapes were not coated but were homogeneous tapes, that is to say polyvinyl chloride with the iron oxide particles mixed into the film and embedded throughout the thickness of the tape. Perhaps not surprisingly the coated tapes fared much worse due to ageing causing cupping and weaving. Mickey Hart, half of the percussion section of the Grateful Dead and now on the Recording Preservation Board of the Library of Congress, writes about restoring and digitizing the 2400 tapes of their concerts. They have had 100% success in baking tapes made between 1976 and 1981 which exhibit sticky binder syndrome.

David Hadaway

President, Boston Audio Society