A Seaside man rescues and preserves old audio and video before it’s lost to technology.

Everything old is new again is an apt saying for vinyl records, currently experiencing a resurgence in popularity. It’s also a perfect phrase to describe the business of Seaside resident Arno Featherstone, who through his company, AV Transfer, takes old audio and video recordings on aging formats – including vinyl – and makes them new again by transferring them to digital files. Featherstone sees it as rescuing moments from people’s lives before the sounds and clips of milestones are lost.

“I find everybody has that bag or box in their garage or closet full of old tapes,” Featherstone says.

He takes the piles of cassettes, VHS tapes, Super 8 film, reel-to-reel tapes, photographs, slides, or whole libraries of vinyl records, and hands back a thumb drive to his clients. “I’ve got a piece of gear for almost everything,” he says. Many times, his clients and their families no longer have the “gear,” like projectors and VCRs, making the film or recordings useless.

Prior to starting AV Transfer, Featherstone worked as a film and television industry recording engineer in Los Angeles. He began as a projectionist then a sound effects librarian followed by working for a film studio where he learned how to be a recordist. He eventually worked for Sony Studios.

As a musician himself – Featherstone now drums in the local Brazilian rhythm band, Samba Legal, and plays saxophone for the R&B group The Eldorados – he dreamed of working in L.A.’s recording studios but found there was more stability and money in film and TV. After more than 20 years in the industry, he and his wife moved to the Monterey Peninsula. (He also previously worked at Monterey County Weekly as a sales executive.)

When in March the pandemic struck and he was laid off, Featherstone went all in on AVTransfer4U. “My interest in studio work and recording paired with attention to detail, paired up with customer service,” he says. “It’s the perfect business for me.”

Customers have brought him audio recordings and film from as far back as the late 1940s. Not only does he transfer the format to digital, he cleans up the sound quality. In one case he took six 78 rpm albums – those that preceded the speeds that came later – containing recordings of a client’s grandparents’ wedding in the ’40s. He removed “the ticks and pops and a lot of the surface noise,” he says. “I try to give somebody something better than they give me.”

Once he’s made the transfers of any old media to digital, he encourages clients to throw out the originals. “It’s saved, it’s preserved,” he says.

Before he transfers a music collection to digital, he checks to see if a CD is available. “It’s already done,” he says. “Me digitizing and cleaning it up won’t be as fantastic as a studio that went to great pains to master something.” Sometimes, though, there is no digital version – he’s cued up some rare vinyl records on his equipment that never made it to the digital world.

A lot of material hasn’t made it to digital because it’s one-of-a-kind. Featherstone has discovered a love of combining some different old formats – photos and film – with music to create videos for special events.

“He extracted and rearranged and magically pulled together bits and clips of our Veterans Day celebration,” says Laurie McNamara, program chair for the Enrichment Committee at Del Mesa Carmel. The resulting DVD was circulated and treasured by the resident veterans. “He made a community event so much more special,” McNamara adds.

The biggest issue Featherstone encounters in his work – besides people not labeling their vast collections of AV materials – is poor storage. “Old tapes are susceptible to age and wear and they’re going to sound worse with time because the tape will degrade,” Featherstone says. “Many times I’m saving stuff before it’s too late.

“From a legacy standpoint, I provide a very necessary service for people who want to save stuff for their kids, grandkids and future generations,” he says. “That’s why I do what I do.”

Learn more at 531-8429 or AVTransfer4U.com