By Mark Schreiner
You might say this story has two messages:
- Don’t try this at home
- The staff of The Classical Station will do just about anything to keep the Great Classical Music playing, 24/7
Here’s the story — In addition to the usual bagels, cold pizza and leftovers, dozens of 20-year-old CDs of precious music have been warmed in the station’s kitchen toaster oven.
The natural question at this point is to ask why. And we will tell you: Our engineers have discovered that a spell in the warmth of a toaster oven is just what an old CD needs to get back into digital-playing shape.
You may know that the Great Classical Music you hear all day comes from high-quality digital renderings of some of history’s finest performances. We maintain a collection of nearly 15,000 commercial music CDs as a backup. But one part of this vast library is a precious archive that can’t be bought in any store or heard on any other streaming platform.
A spell in the toaster oven is just what an old CD needs to get back into digital-playing shape.
For 26 years, our friend Al Ruocchio was the host of Thursday Night Opera House. Al brought his deep love for the art form to listeners through entertaining and deeply engaging broadcasts. Working from his personal collection of high-quality recordings of the 20th century’s opera greats, he brought Grand Opera Music to people all over North Carolina, the United States and beyond.
Al Ruocchio
Perceptively, Al (a skilled electrical engineer) recorded all his shows and, using the breakthrough technology of the time, burned them to writable CDs. These recordings are, as we call them, one-of-ones. There are no other copies, anywhere.
Station staffer Tanja G. and engineer Daniel C. recently took on a project to ensure Al’s legacy would endure: saving the digital files from hundreds of CDs of Al’s shows. To their dismay, they discovered that many of the discs, some nearing 25 years old, skipped or could not be played at all.
The music had appeared to stop.
“As we looked at it, it became clear the problem was that after 20 years, some of the discs had warped,” Daniel said. “They weren’t flat. The laser inside the CD player couldn’t read them.”
What to do? The CDs could have been sent to a digital recovery firm, but Tanja and Daniel wanted to find a solution on their own before committing to the cost and risk of shipping these one-of-a-kind discs to someone else.
They tried pressing the discs, carefully sandwiching them under a 30-pound case of batteries. No luck. The material properties of polycarbonate plastic only made the CDs spring back to their warped shapes.
After a bit more research, they came upon a solution: warm, even heat. Warmth could relax the plastic without hurting the digital information stored in the thin layer of aluminum bonded to it.
Al Ruocchio was the host of Thursday Night Opera House for 26 years.
“If we were going to do this, we needed a very flat surface, and one that could take the heat,” Daniel said. “Based on our research, the perfect choice was sheets of tempered glass.”
In their first test, they put two Ruocchio CDs between panes of glass and put the sandwich into the toaster oven in the station’s kitchen. Here’s their recipe: 30 minutes at 150°F. Now, all they had to do was wait for everything to cool.
“It worked the very first time,” Tanja said. “The CDs played perfectly.”
As Daniel has been flattening CDs, Tanja has been saving the programs digitally, meaning Al’s programs will be available for broadcast indefinitely. A precious musical legacy has been saved for future generations.
If you’d like to hear an Al Ruocchio program, you don’t have to wait long. The Classical Station broadcasts one of Al’s archival programs every month over the radio and digital stream, and through the WCPE app. Browse the schedule for broadcasts from the Ruocchio Archive.