And I generally don't care if it came from a tin can as long as it plays decent. If that's the only way to find a recording and I can play it, so be it. It's a fact of life that rarely is a large amount of the material available in one format converted to others, with only the most profitable (read popular and known) making the transition initially and some content being preserved and restored by fans and historians in the name of posterity and artistic merits.
In the 35 years since the rollout of the Compact Disc (and nearly a decade prior to that developing digital audio recording, from Denon and Sony to Soundstream, 3M, and Mitsubishi in the 70s and early 80s the capabilities of doing this archival work have improved immensely, due in no small part to digital conversion and restoration techniques.
Some searches and reading to ponder on digital audio recording are linked below. The world has come a million revolutions around the audio sun and yet the failures and foibles of early days are often the only thing kept in memories. Nothing is ever perfect. Your eyes and ears actually use a combination of sampling and filtering that resembles digital recording in so many ways and if you do not know, vision is not continuous, it's a series of sample scans with a hold between them so that you perceive fluid and uninterrupted motion.
YOU and ALL of us are a living A/D converter.
https://www.google.com/search?q=Mitsubishi+X-80
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ProDigi (use the directory at the bottom to find others I mentioned here and far more insight and information into digital recording).
I'm not the biggest fan of HD-AM (Hybrid Digital, NOThigh definition) as skywave interference and even geophysical structures (the San Andreas Fault comes to mind) can present challenges to it's stability as well as adjacent and tertiary channel interference in unexpected places hundreds or even thousands of miles away with both all forms of signals using amplitude modulation carriers.
In addition, the system is two decades old and hardly capable of quality reception in some cases due to the delay introduced to buffer the switch necessitated by the fragile nature of digital AM. AM stereo isn't much better at night due to phase errors between to co-channel or adjacent channels creating a false pilot signal in the main AM stereo system's protected pilot scheme (7 cycles of the pilot tone will trigger the decoder and phase errors can cause a mimic of this signal when they beat/heterodyne together). I may have some things mixed up a bit but there was a man who lived and breathed making AM it's best named Leonard Kahn. He got Alzheimer's Disease in later life, passing in June 2012 and started falling apart after the death of his wife Ruth, who was his rock, but the man was THE ENGINEER.
Look him up as well. Every day that passes by I realize again that Leonard Was Right.
