Rockaway, NJ (November 20, 2017)—U.S. audio and moving image preservation company George Blood L.P. aims to create a digitized reference collection of 78rpm records by digitizing nearly 400 sides a day—an effort dubbed The Great 78 Project.
George Blood L.P.’s Philadelphia studios operate 16 hours a day, six days a week. Every month, a hard drive containing 5,000 to 7,000 sides is sent to the Internet Archive, which uploads them onto its servers where they can be accessed by researchers in a format that allows them to be manipulated and studied without harming the original, very delicate shellac artifacts.
To record audio from the 78rpm discs, Blood devised a custom turntable with four tonearms. “We capture both groove walls of four different stylus sizes, with and without EQ for each side,” company founder and preservation expert George Blood explains, “That’s 16 channels in total, which are recorded using two Prism Sound Titans. In this way, the user can decide the stylus size they like best. They can even mix and match—size A for the outside of the discs, size B for the inside of the discs, size C for a damaged part of the discs, and size D for some instrument or four bar phrase.”
The Prism Sound Titan audio interfaces were chosen because they fit the project’s streamlined workflow, which sees audio being recorded directly onto a computer. Blood has been a Prism Sound user for more than 20 years.
Apart from the Titan units, George Blood L.P. is also using six Prism Sound ADA-8XR multichannel converters, an AD-2 converter and a 2024 BitSplitter in its music studios where staff have worked on over 45 GRAMMY-nominated projects over the years.
Prism Sound
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