It's 1970 and Columbia Records is beginning to feel the pressure

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joeekaitis

joeekaitis

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Located via books.google.com, a full-page ad from the March 20, 1970 issue of LIFE magazine speaks volumes about the state of recorded music.

As the inventor of the 33⅓ RPM Long-Player record which wasn't even 25 years old at the time, Columbia's devotion to the LP oozes from the text. Eight-track and 4-track tapes are already popular in the car, and the Philips (Norelco) Compact Cassette is gaining in popularity, so Columbia reminds the reader that a night at home is best spent with a stack of LPs, not those pesky li'l magnetic oxide upstarts. Zoom in to read the teeny tiny text in the bottom right corner that pretty much sums up Columbia's opinion of tape back then.

books.google.com

LIFE

LIFE Magazine is the treasured photographic magazine that chronicled the 20th Century. It now lives on at LIFE.com, the largest, most amazing collection of professional photography on the internet. Users can browse, search and view photos of today’s people and events. They have free access to...
books.google.com
 
Formats

as a devoted vinyl fan, this si a great ad to read.....the other tape formats that were around along with vinyl took us through many years of pleasure and at times pain, but nothng like the formats thrown at the public now days, what we have now is mediocre in qaulity and there is no pleasure for me in owning modern digital eqiupment......totally unsatisfying to listen to coupled with poor build qaulity (hmm i could be talking about modern washing machines aswell).........ah well sod it all i will stick with my lovely sounding retro analogue gear........here is a fot of one of my favourite sounding systems, a mixture of American and Japanese top end gear

electron1100++11-15-2009-14-12-43.jpg
 
read the teeny tiny text in the bottom right corner

Do you mean the line that LP's will always sound "as new and just as exciting as the first time you play them"?

Well, for starters, for many if not most LP owners, that wasn't exactly the case. Dust, fingerprints, and scratches take a grievous toll on LP's. And the hidden destruction if you play an LP more than once an hour or more than a couple of times a day. The vinyl needs time to recover from the pressure of the stylus, and repeated playing will crush and square off the peaks and result in loss of highs and new distortion.

Or did you mean the tiny text on the bottom left hand side of the advertisement? The line that reads, "Also available on tape".... LOL....

Don't get me wrong, I love vinyl and treasure my collection, even with its pops and clicks and wows and flutters (from discs that came warped on purchase). There's a presence to it that tape never could capture, and CD's struggle to reproduce. But I learned early on several lessons: don't play records repeatedly, and don't lend them out even to the closest of friends.

But while tape made inroads into LP's, it was really the compact disc that was its death nell. While the sampling rate of the CD standard is insufficient for the highest highs, it's still light years ahead of tape and LP's in dynamic range, as well as being very resistant to bad handling and care.

What I'd like to see is music released on the DVD format, which would allow for complete digitization of the highest highs. It would also allow for full 5.1 channel sound, something that is truly an aural treat.

Just my opinion mind you. Every medium has its message, and I even enjoy one-sided shellac platters from 1908...
 
distortion

I suspect most of the problems with digital recordings in these early days are related to three problems which took decades to get past in the analogue/tube (valve) era.
1) The distortion characteristics of tubes were falsely taken as valid for and applied to solid state studio gear well into the 1990s. Serious mistake and when you compare a recording done on solid state equipment driven properly, to good tube equipment, the difference is no longer so great.
2) THD is meaningless across technologies. The distortion characteristics of tubes happen to fall into those harmonic bands which our ears don't get upset about, solid state equipment hits just exactly the wrong orders.
3) Early digital recording was based on many false assumptions, not least that only those with absolute pitch could hear nuances of less than 0.001 second. Turns out that even old tin eared grampaw at 80 has no problem down to 0.0001...quite a difference. 16bit resolution and 44.1Hz sampling just don't cut it.

Vinyl and tube equipment, at the same time, represent over 100 years of continuous technological progress. Goodness, people rebuilding Heathkit tube pre-amps and power amps today with our modern tolerances and enormously better capacitors and not-so-hissy resistors are turning out sets with distortion figures which are outstanding by any standards and sound which actually does stand out in blind tests.

Give digital electronics and solid state another forty years or so and it will sound just fine.

(I'm listening to Frank Sinatra on vinyl right now on a Grundig tube set from 1962. Wow.)
 
Hmm,

Remind me again which US press started lowering the % of vinyl and upping the filler in their LPs about that time?

Wouldn't have been Columbia?? Nah, can't be. I had two copies of Silk Road in 1983. One made in Europe, one in the States. Still have the French recording. Perfectly centered holes, no warp and the vinyl is pure and self.healing (of course I don't abuse it). The other one with it's 'just as good' vinyl-like plastic came with wow and hiss, was worn out in only a few playings.

The record industry paved the way to CD's with poor quality and high prices. Today, they are killing themselves with poor artistic quality (how many 'albums' even deserve that name?) and obscene prices and DRM. Kids today are just as smart as we were and they do have ears.

Nobody questions that LPs aren't portable like digital recordings on chips, but I don't know anybody who really mourns the passing of the MCC. I recorded the ones valuable to me onto CD and never looked back. But my LPs...wow. They're going back to the 'States with me.
 
Actually, RCA Victor introduced the long playing format in t

However, it was not a commercial sucess. I guess technological issues and the fact that they required new equipment (at the very least a turntable "attachement" that lowered the speed from 78rpms) prevented it from being a sucess. I guess in 1934 many people were more concerned with putting food on the table than a new phonograph.

Eventually RCA abandoned the format and later introduced the extremely popular 45 rpm format.

Columbia may have made the LP a commerical sucess but I think the props for creating it belong to RCA Victor.

Here is a neat YouTube video of a 1934 machine playing one of the new long playing demo records.

 
Yes, poor LP record quality was a major source of frustration in the 70's and 80's.

I recall more than once opening up a supposedly new LP and finding it warped, scratched, or with cigarette (joint?) ashes on it. This seemed to happen more frequently at Tower Records in Berkeley, which had a return/exchange policy. I'm sure some of those returns made their way to a re-sealer and were placed back out in the bins as "new" even though they weren't. One run with a badly worn stylus and an LP can be permanently damaged. I think this sort of thing made people run to tapes, and later to CD's. Although I had a number of cassette tape machines, I don't think I ever bought a pre-recorded music cassette tape. I waited until CD's and their players came down in price before I got a CD player and started building a CD collection.

Regarding record media composition... During WWII there was a shortage of shellac (an imported item). For some reason it was also a strategic material. I forget for what. In any case, the government leaned on the record companies to reduce the shellac content of their 78's. One of the ways used was to square off the edges on the discs. This made no difference for manual record players, but automatic changers that gripped the discs by the edges wound up chipping them badly, sometimes to the point where the first grooves were unplayable or the entire disc prone to cracking. I recently bought an old 78 collection from an estate and a number of the WWII era records suffered from this problem. Earlier and later ones, they had round edges and no chipping.

Also have some early vinyl records - so called "unbreakable", but still 78's. One set is in clear red vinyl - a real treat to look at, although the sound obviously is nowhere near as good as a later LP.
 
Good changers

If you had a few more dollars in the 30s and 40s you could get good changers that didnt mess up the record.Also alot of recordings people played during wartime they wore out because of scarce needles.I play my 1935 Capehart alot and change the needle every 6 or 7 sides.The steel needles are softer than the record and dont wear them as much.The sound out of this machine is incredible.2 fifteen inch speakers and three amps.A power amp a treble amp and a bass amp.Plus the tuner.It cost 1200.00 dollars in 1935.Those saffire needles eat records up and they chip easily.Those early 33s from Victor suggested you use a 3mil needle.Alot of old radio programs used them for prerecording.Thanks Bobby
 
I remember hearing once that shellac came from islands in the South Pacific and that the supply was cut off during the War. To buy a new record, you had to bring an old one in for exchange.
 
I may be wrong,

but I do believe shellac was used to insulate the very thin wires used in all the various electro-mechanical devices needed for the war - relais, motors, etc.

Shellac has a very high di-electric value, is easy to use, when dissolved in alcohol, dries very rapidly and was a component of a far more established technology in the 1940's than the pvc's, nylon, polyethane and teflon insulations which were all being experimented with when rubber wouldn't do.

A major advantage of shellac was, like aluminum, it could be recycled fairly easily.

This is based on memories from a book I read on WWII back in the 1960's as a kid, so I may be wrong...
 
A Bug

Shellac actually comes from the shell of the Lac bug.I saw that once in old popular mechanics from the 30s.When Capitol records first started around 1942,they had a black label with the silver capitol on it.They hissed brand new,stamped on an awful material.Then after the war they became some of the best sounding 78s and 45s around.The first Columbia microgroove records didnt sound all that great until they started softer vinyl.Those old hard ones would scratch so easy.The first changers like Zenith had 2 tone arms one for 78 and the other for 33 in 1948 and of course RCA comes out with 45 and you had to buy another changer.They solved that real quick in early 49 the first 3speed ones came out.Actually the 78s on thin vinyl sounded better than alot of the 45s in the early fifties.The record makers stopped them about 1959.
 
I had older cousins, those girls would pile those 33 1/3 rpm's on the changer until they could fit no more. In the 70's disco era everyone had pretty much graduated to turntables like electron1100 posted, it was then "unthought of" to stack records on a changer like that. I still have some of my old records ie: Ms Ross's "Mahogany". alr2903

 
Is that a Technics SP10 that is shown in Electron1100's picture-Remember those as WORKHORSES in later radio stations when-yes-they played records by an actual DJ.Now to a modern "DJ" in most radio stations you have to show them a record,TT,or even a cart and RR tape machine to show them what you would be talking about.Yes I have some tube amps in the closet-needs caps-haven'tr found any in the voltage ratings and values the amps call for(McInTosh MC60)At some point would like to get them going agqin-even though I now mostly listen to movie soundtracks.And yes on occasion still play my LP's.Glad there is still some life in records today.Many companies still make them.At the workplace I work at they even used to make their won shellac records.sadly the Scully and Neunman recording lathes have been removed for carts,and CD equipment.Very fascinating peices of equipment.
 
Correct, shellac is a secretion of the lac bug.

The main producer is India. It's very labor intensive, involving people collecting the branches on the trees or bushes with the lac bug infestation, havesting the bugs, and then going through various fairly primitive isolation and refining techniques. Shellac is still quite useful today, and it has the advantage of being one of the least toxic protective materials one can use.

As far as I can tell, the main military uses of shellac were for insulation (as stated) but also as a coating for ammunition - to keep the powder dry and corrosion to a minimum. It was also used extensively by the Russians to protect entire rifles from corrosion, from stock to barrel.

Although I don't think trade with India was ever completely cut off during WWII, no doubt it was reduced due to wartime restrictions on shipping. An imported material that could be conserved and recycled at home meant more shipping available for transporting armor, troops, military supplies, and food for a besieged England.

This has been discussed here before, but early 78 needles, back in the days of the acoustic gramophone (Victrola), were meant to be used only once. They were honed to an appropriate shape by the first few abrasive grooves in the record, but by the end of the record they got sharp corners that could damage records if they were re-used. These old shellac 78's contained more abrasive material than later 78's meant to be played on electric phonographs. Some outfits sold needle sharpeners; never seen one nor do I know how well they worked. Victrola introduced a new type of needle, made of fine tungsten wire, which had a small enough diameter that even if worn down would not damage grooves. I've experimented with this type of needle on my grammaphone and noticed that it needs to be periodically honed on an old 78, after which it can play more modern 78's for a while before needing to be honed again. The drawback of the "Tungstone" needle is that the fine wire can easily be bent if the receiver is dropped on the record, at which point the wire must be clipped or a new needle used.

People also used bamboo needles on the old 78's. I understand they had a much softer tone. In fact tone control on old acoustic gramophones was largely a function of what type of needle one chose to use. It all seems rather quaint and awkward today, where we have bass and treble controls, not to mention equalizers and fancy sound processing capabilities, but back then I suppose it was a treat to have any recorded music at all inside one's home.

Before and during WWII record companies were experimenting with different disc materials - including some that had a cardboard core and were claimed to be "unbreakable". Some of these had a lot of background noise and distortion and shellac was generally the standard. Interestingly, hi fi mono phonograph recording was developed for radio transcriptions in the 30's, with special records and recording/playback heads, and some of the techniques developed then were used for the later 33-1/3 hi fi recordings that started becoming more common in the 50's.
 
shellac

is still used in candies and medicines.
It's E-number is: E904.

It's primary use over here today is as a "Sperrfarbe" when some numnut has smoked the hell out of a place and you need to isolate the filthy, disgusting stains and stench. Since it dries quickly and can be painted over with acrylics, in contrast to many glossy enamels, it's ideal, if very expensive for the purpose.

I wonder if wet playing was ever done in the early days? Never heard or read of it, but it certainly had its proponents in the 1980s.
 
I don't think anyone ever considered "wet playing" in the days of 78's and shellac.

One reason may be that vinyl is actually much more attractive to dust and harder to keep clean than shellac. A shellac record can be washed with a mild detergent and water (just don't use alcohol, which dissolves shellac!). Such washing of vinyl, esp hi fi 33-1/3, isn't recommended. It may also be that the lower fidelity of early systems meant that wet playing wouldn't have a noticeable improvement. Lastly, wet playing fell out of favor when it was learned that once a record is played wet, it can only be played wet in the future, due to the residues left in the grooves. A fad that came and went rather quickly, I understand.

The best record cleaning device I ever got was a carbon microfiber brush that has a little cleaning beater bar built into the handle. It does a great job of removing dust from LP's without damage.
 
it beats...as it sweeps...as it..plays?

Sorry, Rich, couldn't resist.
Yeah, I picked up the trick for making one last transfer to digital from records which were irreplaceable but noisy. It works, and works well, tho' you're right...do it once, do it always.

Was just curious, it seems like a fad that came and went with the wind.

It's ironic that we replaced a superior sound storage medium with an inferior one (44.1Khz, 16bit) and still cling to it. How many CD players have you seen recently? They're nearly all DVD or Blu-Ray and they are all 96hz, 24, 32, 48bit compatible...

What, by the by, was the dynamic range of LPs? I keep thinking it must have been about 70db or so...
 
Re: the various needles in the Victrola era.

Were the different needle types for tone control? I'd heard once something that suggested they were part of the volume control system, such as it was.

I know I've heard that wood was loved because of its tone, and--I think I've heard this--because it was easier on records.

I have never heard a Victrola-era phonograph, but I've heard people comment that the sound actually could be amazingly good.
 

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