tony sayer <tony@bancom.co.uk> wrote:
In article <1rg7b0d.1sqepa3lqdsliN%liz@poppyrecords.invalid.invalid>,
Liz Tuddenham <liz@poppyrecords.invalid.invalid> scribeth thus
NY <me@privacy.net> wrote:
[...]
I will check it very carefully for coating splitting/cracking and red
powder.
It's very rare that they decompse that far, but it is worth checking.
At least I have a digital copy of it. It would have been nice to have
played it with a proper 78 needle to avoid some of the surface noise
that you get with an LP stylus. I played it at 33 1/3 rpm and then
resampled it to 78 rpm because my record deck doesn't do 78.
That's a terrible way of dealing with them (although not as bad as
playing them with a steel needle, which will destroy the grooves
completely). If you live anywhere near Bath, contact me by e-mail and I
will copy them for you free of charge.
I knew we should have kept my grandpa's radiogram - ugly bit of
furniture in a cabinet about 6 feet long but its turntable had a
flip-over stylus for 33/45 or for 78 rpm records.
You would still have been unlikely to get the best out of it because the
recording characteristics for microgroove records were usually different
from those for coarse-grooved discs - although the BBC used different
characteristics at different times and may have used RIAA towards the
end of the disc era. They recorded contributors personal copies with a
commercial characterisitc but had their own curves for transcription
discs: the BBC 'D' curve, approximately 2dB per octave.
Remember when i left school and started work at Pye TVT (TeleVision
Transmitters) in Coldhams lane Cambridge, there was a sound products
area and they made this transcription unit Thorens deck and a disc amp
section with no end of EQ settings anyone else see one?..
I've not seen that particular unit but there have been quite a few
pieces of multi-equalisation equipment over the years.
The basic parameters are the mid-frequency transition from constant
velocity to constant amplitude, the bottom point at which the correction
is discontinued and the point above which pre-emphasis applied to high >frequencies. These are usually expressed as time constants and so three >numbers can represent the entire characteristic for a given disc.
In order to simplify this, for people who don't like numbers, the
equipment manufacturers resorted to switching the time constants in >configurations corresponding to individual disc manufacturers. Thus, if
it says "HMV" on the label, you put the switch to "HMV" and it selects
an appropriate set of three time constants. Unfortunately the record >manufacturers used different time constants at different times, so a
single setting can't always be right. Furthermore, some records
recorded by one company may have been pressed with a different company's >label, so the label is an unreliable guide.
The characteristics used by some companies in the early electrical
recording days were either unknown to the companies themselves (if they >didn't have a way of testing them) or may have become lost in the mists
of time. The whole system is a mess and sometimes a good practiced ear
is the only way to approximate the settigs.
Theres a community radio station here in Cambridge they used to have an outfit called the "shellac collective" to be a member i think you had to possess an EMT turntable else you were a non entity!.
One of they did have an Edison phonograph that was or could be miked up
that did sound surprisingly good!...
tony sayer <tony@bancom.co.uk> wrote:
[...]
Theres a community radio station here in Cambridge they used to have an
outfit called the "shellac collective" to be a member i think you had to
possess an EMT turntable else you were a non entity!.
I have serviced an EMT for a transcription engineer but could never
afford one myself. There are several turntables of quality which is >comparable in most aspects except for rumble. A lot of broadcast EMTs
were fitted with an SME arm - but the whole radial arm business is
inherently flawed and the biggest improvement is to be had by replacing
it with a parallel-tracking arm..
One of they did have an Edison phonograph that was or could be miked up
that did sound surprisingly good!...
If you hear one in good condition playing unworn cylinders, it is quite >amazing how good they are.
One of they did have an Edison phonograph that was or could be miked up
that did sound surprisingly good!...
If you hear one in good condition playing unworn cylinders, it is quite >amazing how good they are.
Indeed Analogue from beginning to end;)...
Question.. How did they duplicate them from what "Master" recording were
they from?.
Or was it just a one time recording?..
On 2025/7/27 13:18:29, Paul Ratcliffe wrote:
On Tue, 22 Jul 2025 19:09:53 +0100, John Williamson
<johnwilliamson@btinternet.com> wrote:
A combination of analogue and digital problems that is going to lose us a >>> lot of important master tapes on Betamax cassettes in that there are not >>> enough tape heads left in the world to play them all back and recover
the data. More can be made, but the cost would be ridiculous.
Who stores master tapes on Betamax? Like nobody, ever.
It was a domestic format. Maybe you were thinking of BetaCam?
But that wasn't really a format used for 'proper programmes' for
very long.
In the early days of digital audio, a means was devised to convert the digital bit-stream into a video signal; it was sufficiently
low-bandwidth that a domestic video recorder could easily handle it, and indeed domestic videocassettes were indeed used, for example to transfer
data losslessly between studios of the same company (e. g. between
mixes, and/or adding artists who were physically in different
locations).
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