SH Spotlight Old 78 RPM records: FATS WALLER/BUNNY BERIGAN, etc. sound so amazing 75 years on...

Discussion in 'Music Corner' started by Steve Hoffman, Nov 23, 2007.

  1. BILLONEEG

    BILLONEEG Senior Member

    Location:
    New Jersey
    I live in New Jersey & I am less than an hour away from Camden so as soon as I can I will visit that location & then post a picture update. They are awesome pictures Steve & I thank you so much for sharing them. I love listening to the old 78's I come across. I also play the "B" sides too. I've even come across some 78's that are one sided. There's gold in them grooves!!!
     
    Lurgan Lad likes this.
  2. il pleut

    il pleut New Member

    what was the victor cabinet factory (the building with the nipper windows in the tower) is now condos, thankfully, considering what was going to happen to it up until a few years ago. i believe the victor office building still stands too, and is going to be put to similar use if it hasn't already.

    up until a few years ago the power house with its big victor smokestack still stood on the banks of the delaware, that's since been demolished.

    i remember in the late 60s when they took the nipper stained glass windows out and replaced them with white boards painted with that hideous rca logo (the one that appears on (orange label lps) in red. horrible. those have been replaced with reproductions of the original nipper stained glass.
     
  3. kt66brooklyn

    kt66brooklyn Senior Member

    Location:
    brooklyn, ny
    There is a fellow who periodically gives speeches about RCA history in and around Camden. He wrote a long out of print, and now valuable, book on the subject. One of the neat things about attending these are all of the old employees who show up to the talks. One old man started working for Victor in the 20's.

    I'll let everyone here know if there is another event happening.
     
  4. Dave Garrett

    Dave Garrett Senior Member

    Location:
    Houston, TX
    That book sounds like His Master's Voice In America. It's a fantastic book, but as the Amazon asking prices indicate, it's very hard to find, mainly because it was never sold to the public but was privately printed for GE employees. You can probably borrow a copy via interlibrary loan - that's what I did before I finally bit the bullet several years ago and bought my own copy. Completely essential to anyone even slightly interested in the history of radio and sound recording.

    A bit of Googling found this article on author Fred Barnum, who matches the description you give.
     
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  5. kt66brooklyn

    kt66brooklyn Senior Member

    Location:
    brooklyn, ny
    Yes, that's the book and Author I was thinking of. He seems to offer his presentation once a year or so. I get emails about them when they happen. I'll keep you posted.
     
  6. Steve Hoffman

    Steve Hoffman Your host Your Host Thread Starter

    Reopened. Should never have been closed in the first place.
     
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  7. McLover

    McLover Senior Member

    Seconded on that, Steve! A 78 RPM related thread kept permanently open might be a good option, or sticky this one occasionally, .
     
  8. The Beave

    The Beave My Wife Is My Life! And don’t I forget it!

    The thing that absolutely KILLS me about this era, is that, after watching the RCA films, a company like the Wisconsin Chair Company, aka Paramount Records, could put out such a crude product that still holds immense fascination today.
    I mean really....the mastering turntable being rotated by a weight pulley mechanism???
    And i still get a kick out of listening to Paramount 78'$. Sometimes listening to a song where the noise is like 85% of the signal, while the performance is struggling to make itself heard is a n incredible experience for me.
    No wonder so many 78 collectors still strive to obtain them......
    And on the other hand we have RCA who refined the process but Steve, my on going question is this.....beyond the hype of scientific precision, how come, to this very day, we have so many records pressed Off Centered??
    The biggest complaint i have because, all things being equal, it should NEVER happen. But it still does...even with $100 premium pressings.
    Beave
     
  9. Steve Hoffman

    Steve Hoffman Your host Your Host Thread Starter

    Reopened by request..
     
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  10. Steve Hoffman

    Steve Hoffman Your host Your Host Thread Starter

    Reopened by request..
     
    audiomixer likes this.
  11. drh

    drh Talking Machine

    Late reply to a very old post. In the early days of electric recording, gravity-driven lathes were actually better than their electrically-driven counterparts. If you try stitching together the sides of English (or English-derived) Columbia classical sets from the mid-to-late '20s, at the dawn of electrical recording, not infrequently you'll find that the pitch at the end of side X and that at the beginning of side X+1 are 'way off from each other, side after side. The reason: English Columbia was using electrically-driven cutting lathes, and the motors were too weak or poorly regulated to keep constant speed as drag on the cutting stylus decreased going across the surface of the record. As a result, the pitch creeps lower if you play the record back at a constant speed, as rotation was faster by the time you got to the center. (And, by the way, even at the outside that speed generally still isn't 78; Columbia remained wedded to 80 RPM as its nominal standard for some years after the introduction of electrical recording, just as Victor continued its bad old habit of claiming 78 but actually recording at more like 75 or 76.)

    Anyhow, HMV and Victor relied on gravity-driven cutting lathes for some time after adopting electrical recording technology, because the old drive system was actually more reliable.

    If you'd like to see the original Western Electric electric recording system, including the gravity-driven lathe and original condenser microphones, in action, check out "American Epic," a PBS production put out a few years back. It offers a lot of info about recording American popular/folk/ethnic music in the hinterlands--musicians like the Carter family, the jazz and blues artists in Memphis, etc., etc.--immediately after the introduction of the electrical process, and it shows an actual recording device, painstakingly reassembled over a period of maybe a decade from far flung locations across the world, in action recording modern performers. Note that Western Electric did not sell these machines; it leased them, and when they were supplanted later, it reclaimed them and broke them up. Before the guy who reassembled this one did his thing, no complete system survived.

    [​IMG]
     
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  12. drh

    drh Talking Machine

    I didn't make the request, but thank you!
     
  13. The Beave

    The Beave My Wife Is My Life! And don’t I forget it!

    I did watch this when it came out years ago.
    Some cool stuff but it came across to me as 'pap' for the masses.
    I was hoping for more in-depth digging into the transition, technically, from Acoustic to Electric, But the series seemed to be more focused on entertainment than bringing new info to the fore.
    It was nice watching today's musicians recording onto a 78 and hearing it played back. But it left me a bit pissed that after 100 years, instead of a really good documentary of the history of the 78 era I got vanilla.

    And we STILL don't have any form of any kind of doc of Paramount Records.
    That, to me, is a testimony of how far we've fallen from documenting our American Past.
    Beave
     
  14. The Beave

    The Beave My Wife Is My Life! And don’t I forget it!

    Ah, but if you actually USED a new Needle on everyplay You would NOt be shredding the grooves.
    Is that correct Steve?
    Beave
    Rhymes with Steve
    Just sayin....
    :D
     
  15. audiomixer

    audiomixer As Bald As The Beatles

    This show was tremendous. And so is the CD box set that goes with it.
     

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