Read a recent article in Phys.org (A physicist uses X-rays to rescue old music recordings) on how researchers team is trying to recover old audio from tape recordings made over 40 yrs ago. It turns out that there are plenty of old musical recordings on reel to reel audio tape that are deteriorating over time.
Even if you had an audio tape playback system that worked for that generation (or prior generation) tapes, the magnetic media is in such a state that it would be at best, result in a destructive read back, at worst end up just destroying the tape with poor to non-existent read back.
Enter the Swiss Research team, apparently the Swiss had been recording Montreux Jazz Music Festival acts on reel to reel magnetic tape for a long time.
They just so happen to have a 48 minute recording of B.B. King, the King of Blues, from 1980 festival. The tape can be barely read on an audio tape deck without destroying it. There will come a time soon where reading it will destroy it.
But it just so happens, that synchrotron radiation (SR) from the Swiss Light Source (SLS) or better known as extremely (several giga-electron volts) bright X-rays can be used to read the “orientation” of every magnetic particle on an audio tape. Note it’s not reading the magnetic field.
It’s almost like the magnetic particles have a different structure depending on whether they are N-S magnetized or S-N magnetized and SR x-rays are reading this structural difference. But I must admit this is only conjecture. I could find nothing online about how extremely bright X-rays would interact with magnetic particle orientation. (IDK how this is really working, any help here would be greatly appreciated).
In any case, they are able to read the tape signal (as represented in magnetic particle orientation) using SR light exposure and compare it with the actual audio playback.
At the moment it’s not quite perfect. Even with a proper magnetic signal off a tape ,there’s plenty of electronics (in the tape deck) interpreting that signal into audio sound.
Nonetheless, comparing the two should help tell them when they are reading (via SR x-Rays) it correctly.
Fortunately, the SLS is down for an upgrade, intended to increase the brightness of the SR light by a factor of 40. The researchers believe, brighter x-Rays should lead to more accurate reading of magnetic particle orientation.
What does this have to do with storage?
Magnetic tape has been in use to record digital data almost as long as it has been used to record music. AND much the same environmental impacts, physical tape degradation happens to magnetic tape as audio tapes.
And something that works to recover audio signal from audio magnetic tape should just as well work for digital signal on data magnetic tape. Yeah NRZI, and all the other different data tape formats would need to be considered, but that’s just formatting. If it can read magnetic particle orientation off of magnetic tape it should be able to reconstruct any magnetic tape data.
Unclear if some magnetic tape data is as important as the King of Blues, playing for 48 minutes at the 1980 Montreux Jazz Festival, but my guess there just might be some data out there that is. Now all one would need is a synchrotron at the same power as the new, upgraded SLS to read it.
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Still if they can read back the audio from the King of Jazz’s music at the 1988 festival, they ought to have a (free) copy on their website, so the rest of us can download ienjoy it as well. IMHO
Photo Credit(s):
- B.B. King photo from Wikipedia article, CC BY-SA 3.0
- Reel to reel magnetic tape deck photo from Wikipedia article, CC BY-SA 3.0
- Montreux Jazz Festival photo from Wikipedia article, CC BY-SA 3.0
- Swiss Light Source photo from Wikipedia article, CC BY-SA 3.0