Is there any logical explanation for what I'm seeing here?

http://cgi.ebay.com/3-Antique-Vtg-U...1856431?pt=Music_on_Vinyl&hash=item4158277a2f

 

Record collectors will collect just about anything.

 

This would make for a cool SH Forum avatar!





Those sure look like 45s to me. Aren't they supposed to look more like this?:

 

Personally, I think those are pretty cool, and are aesthetically beautifully objects in their own right.

At the time Edison's diamond discs had a very loyal following who contended that they sounded better than conventional 78s. Edison set up various public "tone tests" where people reportedly could not distinguish between a live performance and recorded playback. Edison's fans can be thought of as the first audiophiles.

Edison Diamond Discs versus Victor 78s was one of the first audiophile debates. If the internet had been around back then there would have likely been discussions of the relative merits of each that got much more nasty than the LP vs. CD threads that show up here. There was a huge debate over whether better sound was achieved by cutting discs laterally (Edison) or vertically (Victor).

In short those are a really beautiful piece of history. Is that a "logical" explanation. I don't know, but now I kind of want one...

 

There were pre-recorded discs but there were also blank discs (which is what you see in this auction) that could be recorded at home. Recordable Diamond Discs were one of the first home recording formats, something that largely disappeared from the market for many years until the rise of magnetic tape.

 

They look pretty cool.

 

Edison Diamond Discs were never made as a home recording format. Edison cylinders were.

The records in the e-bay ad aren't any kind of original Edison product. It's not unusual to find weird stuff like that on e-bay, who knows why they were made or if the seller is pulling a scam. Sometimes people sell stuff like that that they acquired, really believing that they have something genuine.

 

Another hint of the sellers cluelesness is the fact that they're listed as 16 RPM records.

 

"Edison set up various public "tone tests"... - I think that is what proponents of better quality (higher res...) need to do. Just snag those hipsters strolling along the sidewalks with their iPods and say, "hey man, you think those crappy low bit downloads you are listening to sound "o.k."?, well check THESE out..."

 

The Edisons were vertical, Victor were lateral. Lateral recording on disc emerged as way to skirt existing patents held on vertical recording.

I don't know if there was a public debate at the time. Edison was certainly a stalwart champion of vertically cut discs and cylinders, manufacturing them all the way until 1929. Quite a few people today are of the belief that as far as acoustic recording goes, vertical cutting was intrinsically better. As far as retaining dynamics, in the days before the signal could be electronically modulated, it probably was.

In any case, the Edison record division began to take profit osses every year they operated from about 1920 onward.

 

So what are those items up on eBay? Are they likely something recently manufactured?

 

Right, sorry, with Edison discs the needle moved up and down (vertical) with Victor, etc. the needle moved side-to-side. According the the book Perfecting Sound Forever, Edison had a group of followers at the time who championed the inherent superiority of Edison's method and the sound quality of Edison discs. The author cites numerous specialized newsletters devoted to these issues from the time. Reading about it reminded me very much of various audiophile debates that continue today.

 

I guess this was the inspiration for red vinyl promo discs, eh?

 

Yeah, but verisimilitude to some real acoustic event has nothing to do with almost all popular music. There's no "real event" to compare most recorded popular music to, so such tests would be impossible.

 

What's the gripe?

Certainly you've seen weirder things for sale at eBay, right?

(Think: A piece of toast with Jesus' image, etc.)

 

Heh. I almost believed the explanation of them being recordable blanks. Late April fools?


What's so hard to believe is this looks like the cheap kind of plastic decoration you'd find at the "50's" section in party city.... took the effort to use a real product name... and took no effort to make it look like anything of the sort that would have ever existed.



Kinda like finding a yellow and black parlophone logo on the carton to a decorative wax cylinder who even would come up with an idea like this!

 

Some of that is true.

However I'd take Perfecting Sound... with a large dose of salt.

I gave that book a quick read and found it riddled with errors, especially in discussing the 78 era overall. Whoever are the folks that use that book as a template will be misled.

 

Geez. there are more.

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dl...e&rt=nc&si=caYXdoVygHOe%2F534A%2Bly8cM0J7c%3D

http://www.shugarecords.com/index.a....aspx&id=7f985bdd-d742-4493-9b89-90fea29f7b7a


why the high asking price? is this whole "edison blank" buisness legit? It's news to me...

 

No legit. The records won't be good for anything.

"McGraw Edison Company." I hope no one pays big dollars for this junk.

 

These might be some sort of recordable dictation machine discs. My grandfather had some blank dictation discs from the 1950's, I think. But the ones he had were opaque and green, smaller center hole.

 

Many years ago I had an old office dictation machine with a few blank (unlabeled) records that looked just like these. It was probably made in the late '50s or early '60s. The discs were thin transparent red vinyl similar to an Evatone Soundsheet. It didn't work very well, quality-wise.
I may still have the records I tried to "cut" with this unit.

 

Yeah, what would be the reason for a 45 rpm sized hole? From the pics those look like vinyl records, which we all know you can't cut recording groove right into.

 

Thomas A. Edison Industries, Division of McGraw-Edison Company, as distributor for Edison Voice writer Dictation Equipment in Northern Ohio and Western Pennsylvania.

The red discs are for use with the McGraw Edison Voicewriter dictation machine. They run at 16rpm.

LBJ used one: http://www.lbjlib.utexas.edu/johnson/archives.hom/dictabelt.hom/dictahist.asp

 

Okay, so there is some legitimacy to that. Still, McGraw Edison didn't make Diamond Discs, this is 30 years after the fact.

Unless they appropriated the Diamond Disc moniker, hence all the confusion.

 

McGraw Edison simply used the "Diamond Disc" name for a line of dictation blanks through the 1960's. The red blanks are unrelated to the 80rpm vertical-cut discs made from 1912-1929 by Edison Laboratories.