The Diane Arthur Belfer Audio Laboratory and Archive is the first studio ever designed solely for audio preservation, containing a live end–dead end studio with two control rooms.
Founded as an audio archive in 1963 with a collection of 150,000 recordings held off-campus under the leadership of Walter L. Welch, the Special Collections Research Center’s collection of sound recordings and related items has grown to over 500,000 items housed in a specially designed, climate-controlled facility on campus. The collection includes formats from the earliest experimental recordings on tinfoil to modern digital media.
The Belfer Audio Laboratory and Archive maintains equipment capable of playing back all of these formats, and performs preservation, digitization, and delicate restoration work on deteriorating recordings.