UC4 – Multiformat high end digitisation


From 1970, all Montreux Jazz festivals have been recorded with the best possible quality. To avoid losing this invaluable heritage, the Montreux Jazz festival foundation worked with EPFL (Ecole Polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne) and together, they decided contracting with Vectracom to digitise their media with the best possible quality.

Today, the total archive has been digitised and a selection of content can be purchased on CDs/DVDs and seen at the Montreux Jazz Cafés that exist in many places including Montreux, Geneva, Abu Dhabi, Paris, London and Zurich.

At Vectracom, the mission started in 2009. To have the best possible quality, each digitisation was treated separately. The Montreux Jazz foundation and EPFL engineers invested a lot of time to qualify each process, each equipment used by Vectracom and finally to verify each delivery. We can affirm today that this project has been the most interesting and the most demanding ever.

All digitisations were done without any compression and files were delivered on LTO cartridges as they were huge. To finalise the job, Vectracom had to put in place new systems to digitise or transfer original audio multi-tracks from original recording of prestigious people like “The Stones”, “Deep Purple”, “Ray Charles”, etc.

The completion of the preservation of the collections of the Montreux Jazz festival is now under finalisation with currently the digitisation of some VCR cassettes (the consumer format that was in used in the 70’s, before VHS).