I Wanted A Hot Dog, Not A Math Problem

One of the great imponderables of life has always been: How come hot dogs come in packs of ten and hot dog buns come in packs of eight? The only way to come out even is if you decide to buy 40 of each (4 packs of dogs and 5 packs of buns.) Unless you have a huge family to feed, how much sense does that make?

While there have been logical explanations provided by both meat packers and bread makers defending their respective packaging decisions, it really isn’t what I sat down to write about. You see, the recording industry has its own version of this dilemma.

A CD is designed to hold 74 minutes of audio recording. There’s a bit of an old wives’ tale stating that engineers developing the technology wanted to ensure the entire performance of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony would fit onto a single CD. I’m not sure if that is entirely true but it is an interesting folk tale. Regardless, the 74 minute length didn’t cause many problems at first when transferring vinyl records or early audio cassettes to a CD format as both analog types were typically under 60 minutes of playing time beginning to end.

But as audio tape manufacturers continued to develop their products, audio cassette lengths increased and 90 minute tapes became commonplace (45 minutes of recordable tape per side.) And try as I might, I have never quite figured out how to squeeze 90 minutes of recording onto a 74 minute disc.

So, when faced with clients who have 90 minute tapes they want digitalized, I have to inform them that what they will receive (and what they will have to pay for) is a two disc set as the full recording is too large to fit on a single CD.

And in case you were wondering, if you wanted to come out even… bringing in enough 90 minutes tapes to fill each and every CD to their fullest 74 minute capacity,  the number of tapes you would need to bring in is … 37  tapes. That will exactly fit onto 45 CDs. And I would be more than happy to handle that job for you.

Michael Ondrasik and Home Video Studio of Mount Dora specialize in the preservation of family memories through the digitalization of films, videotapes, audio cassettes, photos and slides. For more information, call 352-735-8550 or visit our website.