56 new of 74 responses total.
The tip contacts and rides on the sides of the groove, so that the groove can wiggle it back and forth, which is what stresses the crystal and produces the piezoelectric signal that goes to the amplifier. The needles therefore wear on their wides, making them wedge shaped. This creates some sharp edges, which then begin shaving vinyl off the grooves.
If I ran the world, I would separate out the LP tech-talk discussion from the music & label discussion... :) If I were Sindi, I would go buy a VPI 16.5 record washing machine; I think they are still made for the audiophile market. Best record cleaner I ever saw; the only problem was that it cost about $500, so I don't think it fits into Sindi's lifestyle. I was about ready to buy one when the compact disc came along and made the idea of a record washing machine seem kind of irrelevant. Hi Fi Buys used to have one of these machines and for a buck they would wash any LP you brought in, and I revived quite a few dirty LPs this way; but Hi Fi Buys has been out of business for years. What I would recommend for the routine pre-play cleaning of LPs is a carbon fiber brush. I just saw an LP dealer on the net who stocked them as of a few weeks ago... I wonder where I bookmarked that page. I will look for it. In the meantime, take a look at http://www.nviclassical.com for all sorts of LP accessories, including stocks of an out-of-print book on how to set up turntables. I believe the old handheld Discwasher brushes are still in production. I used those for many years and still find mine useful for attacking a really messy record, because you can use more force with it than you can with the carbon fiber brush. Stylus geometry is kind of complicated, and I'm probably going to mess this up. In the discussions above, the word "wedge" is being used to describe two different things. One is a stylus which has been designed to have a non-spherical shape, and the other is a stylus which was once spherical but has been worn into a "wedge" shape. The stylii which were designed to be non-spherical were usually called "elliptical" or "hyperelliptical." The spherical stylus would only touch the walls of the record groove at two small points as the stylus floated along in the groove; the elliptical designs were shaped to increase the area of contact between stylus and groove, thus minimizing wear. Stylus design was pretty much a function of price; my vague memory was that $20-$30 would get a spherical stylus, $50-$100 an elliptical, and $150 and up would be a hyperelliptical. The rule of thumb was that a diamond phono stylus should be replaced after 1000 hours of use. In the LP era, I would buy a new stylus every 12-18 months. Usually I could hear the stylus wear in the music as a sort of harsh distortion in the high frequencies.
Found it! The Pickering carbon fiber record cleaning brush, CFB-80, is offered for $10 from http://www.garage-a-records.com I have never shopped with them, but I'd gamble $10 to get one of those Pickering brushes. I have used one for most of a decade and I recommend it. Garage-a-records also lists a "Hunt" brand carbon fiber brush which costs $25 and looks interesting. Another good investment would be the Discwasher SC-2 stylus brush.
Thanks for all your suggestions, but I will stick with water and detergent for a while, on my records, which cost me no more than 50 cents each. Blowing the dust off first also helps. We sold the Dual turntable with the round needle in it with a clean conscience. Running out of working phonos, the last one someone wanted to buy, the diamond was no longer in it, they get knocked off easily.
Still sorting through duplicates. I chose in one case on the basis of nationality (Russian Melodiya record company), in another case Mendelssohn's Songs Without Words with two extra songs on it compared to the one I did not keep, and then there was a piano concerto played by (a) Van Cliburn (no mention of which orchestra) and (b) Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Symphony. On the first record you could hear the piano and little else.
More choices: Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto in E Major, 'Heifetz plays...Sir Thomas Beecham Royal Philharmonic Orchestra; Ruggiero Ricci violin, Mathhias Kuntszch conductor, Philharmonica Hungarica Reinhard Peters Conductor; Louis Kaufman violinist Otto Ackermann conductor Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra. They all sound wonderful but I am leaning towards the Heifetz Dvorak 16 Slavonic Dances: Antal Dorati Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra; Dvorak Slovanske Tance Vaclav Neumann Czech Philharmonic Orchestra Rossini Overtures: Czech Philharmonic Gaetono Delogu Six Favorite Overtures, E. G. Asensio and the English Chamber Orchestra Faure Requiem: Paris Philharmonic Chorus and Orchestra, Rene Leibowitz Faure Requiem: Phillippe Caillard Chorale, The National Orchestra of the Monte Carlo Opera, Louis Fremaux Faure Requiem: Jocelyn Chamonin and George Abdoun soloists, Chorale des Jeunesses Musicales de France, Orchestre des Concerts Colone, Louis Martini (I could have made the choice easier by getting a tape of the performance that I was once in). I have not heard of any of the above orchestra, have you? Oops, one more Mendelssohn: Philharmonia Orchestra Leon Barzin. Which two would you keep out of the four? Handel Fireworks and Water Music: English Chamber Orchestra Johannes Somary, or Eugene Ormandy and Philadelphia Orchestra or Vienna State Opera Orchestra Beethoven's Ninth Symphony: Bruno Walter and the New York Philharmonic or Netherlands Philharmonic under Walter Goehr. This assumes they are all relatively unscratched. Eugene Ormandy seems to do an excellent job conducting anything.
My non-expert suggestions: Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto: Heifetz-Beecham. Dvorak Slavonic Dances: Neumann-Czech Philharmonic. Rossini Overtures: Czech Philharmonic-Delogu. Faure Requiem: Paris Philharmonic-Liebowitz. Handel Fireworks and Water Music: Ormandy/Philadelphia. Beethoven's Ninth: keep both.
Thanks, I will listen to them all and try to hear what it is you prefer. Which other orchestras and conductors are as consistenly good as Ormandy and Philadelphia? I also liked Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, at least their Vivaldi Four Seasons, an outstanding winner.
I did like the Paris version of Faure best, but in order to fit it onto a 10" record they omitted a few lines here and there (any line that was repeated in the original was left out in their performance). Do modern composers time their compositions to fit in 72 minutes (formerly 45 minutes)? The Handel records were not quite the same either - Ormandy did abridged versions of both Water and Fireworks music, then I had one complete Water Music and one complete Fireworks with abridged Water. May keep them all. The Musical Heritage Society performances seems to be technically correct but lacking in interpretation. The Musical Masterpiece Society (Netherlands and Paris Symphonies, etc.), though on 10" records and therefore at times a bit abridged, are uniformly good, in my opinion.
The Faure Requiem Monte Carlo version (at least, if this is the one that won the Grand Prix du Disque) is the first one I ever heard and I've never liked another performance as well. Especially the boy soprano. If you decide against that one, may I have it?
THere was something about a Grand Prix, you are welcome to this version. I am currently comparing three versions of Beethoven's Ninth. I recall it being very hard on the second altos (a long very high note that I could not reach at all). First version is scratchy. Basic Library of the World's Greatest Music (with yet another Barber of Seville on the reverse side).
I've heard it said that many composers since 1950 have turned out 20- or 25-minute pieces that could fit on one side of an LP.
I just read that CDs were lengthened from 60 to 74 minutes because LPs are 37 minutes long per side. Did someone invent a longer LP by putting the grooves closer together? (I think this is what happened when going from 78s to 33s). Or is this just an error?
Certainly some LPs gained length by tighter grooving. I think it was a change, but I'm not sure of that.
On CD length: The story was always reported that Akio Morita, the chairman of Sony, decreed that the CD had to be long enough to record Beethoven's 9th Symphony on one disc. (Sony and Philips were the co-developers of today's CD format.) The original CD standard called for a 72 minute length. Some releases started pushing that limit up by packing the tracks in a teensy bit more tightly and getting closer to the rim of the disc; when 80-minute discs came out, we found that lots of players would not make it through to the end of these discs. So the upper boundary is now 78 minutes and change. LPs: Yes, the grooves (and stylii) got much smaller with the transition from 78 to LP; that's why the LPs were called "microgroove" recordings for a while. 37 minutes may be a theoretical possibility for the length of one LP side, but it was not a market practicality. In LPs, there would always be a tradeoff between how loud (=how wide) the grooves were cut, and how much time the LP could hold. I rarely saw LPs packing in more than 25 minutes per side and I doubt that I ever saw an LP with 30 minutes on a side. I suspect some exist at that length, but they were very rare. (Oh, it's important how loud/wide the grooves are cut because the signal needs to climb out of the vinyl surface noise with the LP.)
<nods> All the CDs I've seen that even come close to 70 minutes, the LP version is on two records.
At the library, I took a look at which companies are now putting out classical CDs: Phillips, London, Deutsche Grammophon, Nonesuch, RCA Victor and CBS (Columbia) are the only ones that I recognized. Are Angel/Seraphim, Westminster, MHS and other record companies still in existence? Did they merge or get bought out? Are there now fewer and larger companies or perhaps more and smaller, now that anyone can make a CD? Vox/Turnabout still around? Mercury? Oryx?
Some of those companies are, I think, gone, and new ones have arisen in their place. Others are there under different guise. For instance, what once was Columbia was bought by Sony, which is now using the Sony name on some releases, and CBS on others, I think. Angel was only the American imprint of EMI, which is still around.
In general, record labels are merging into a few big groups, rather like car companies did a while back, although not to quite such an extreme degree. I don't know much about classical labels, but I'd assume they're following this general trend.
I fairly recently (I think) bought one or more CDs labeled as MHS. I bought them through BMG, so they were also labeled as BMG; BMG always (or almost always) does that.
This is off the top of my head, with some references to the web.
There are now five multinational conglomerates who control 85% or
more of all recorded music sales (not just classical):
In approximate order of size, they are:
Universal (formed last year by merging MCA and Polygram)
Time/Warner
Sony (historically, Columbia in the US)
BMG (historically, RCA in the US)
EMI (historically, Capitol for pop and Angel for classical in US)
Of the labels keesan mentions:
Polygram controlled the Philips, London and Deutsche Gramophon
labels, so they are now part of Universal Music Group.
I think all three labels are still active, though I'm not
sure about Philips. Mercury is also a part of the Universal
conglomerate; Mercury dropped out of the business of
selling new recordings many years ago, so today the
Mercury name is only used for their old reissues.
Nonesuch is still an active division of Time/Warner.
The "CBS Masterworks" label was retired when Sony bought Columbia.
New issues are under the Sony name, and historical issues are
usually under Columbia.
The RCA name is used for many BMG classical releases, both reissues
and new items.
Angel and Seraphim were label names used by EMI; Seraphim was for
budget-priced reissues. I'm pretty sure the Seraphim name is retired
but I don't know about Angel. New releases seem to be marketed
as "EMI Classical."
I don't know what happened to Westminster. I vaguely recall that
ABC bought them, and then ABC's music operations ended up in MCA.
Westminster used to have the funkiest LP covers.
Musical Heritage Society, primarily a mail order operation, was still
active as of a few years ago, but I have not seen any advertising
from them recently. "MusicMasters" was their label for retail
store sales. (Response above: maybe BMG bought them?)
Vox is still putting CDs in store racks, but I don't know if they
are new recordings or just repackagings of old work.
I never heard of Oryx before.
There are a lot of new small classical labels. Harmonia Mundi,
Hyperion and Chandos leap immediately to mind, and I'm sure there are
lots more.
So Nonesuch will soon be a division of AOL. Heh. In the last couple of days I have noticed that the London imprint has been retired. The Decca label in Britain used to use "London" on its American issues, but now they seem to be using Decca worldwide. This seems to be part of a trend of labels to present a consistent image worldwide, probably to simplify packaging and marketing.
Wow. Hard to picture two more unlikely partners.
Musical Heritage Society is still around. I am still getting occasional mailings from them begging me to rejoin: since they kicked me out in the first place because I didn't buy enough, I'm not inclined to do it. They do sound desperate, though, as the latest ads actually say things like "Not Your Father's MHS" (though I can't tell any difference in the inside, save that instead of being 90% Baroque, their offerings are now down to about 85% Baroque, or so it seems).
I found a website for MHS, but it's closed for renovations.
Does MMS still exist? They seem to have published mainly the better known works of better known or somewhat known composers. I have a set of 10" records by them (thanks to John Morris). Musical Masterworks Society. All high quality performances and recordings. Only problem is that my auutomatic turntable automatically heads for 12" (or 7" on 45s and I had a 7" 33, from Albania). The older turntables also had 10" settings.
Another correction to my resp:39 :: at Borders tonight I saw a big stack of Seraphim CDs in the $7-and-less classical bin. So that imprint has been revived for a super-budget line of discs. It's just a brand name, the small print on the discs identify them as coming from EMI Classical.
Today at Kiwanis I found a record of Favorite Popular Music produced by Plymouth Merit on Genuine Vynil (sic). They also had Music of the Rocco. I expected the worst, but the music was played and recorded well. We enjoyed ourselves listening to whatever made it to the ten cent end of the rack (meaning nobody bought it for about a year already). Another musical by the composer of Music Man, about Santa Claus. Not as good. Several selections of Hawaiian Music. There are many copies of Tijuana Brass.
Music of the Rocco? Like my cousin Rocco from the North End?
Don't know, all they gave on the jacket was a long list of record titles, many of them starting 'One hour of favorite...' Possibly the French Rocco, not the Italian branch.
You mean "rococo": 18th century, elegant, ornate. The music of Rocco is mostly Sinatra and Lois Prima.
They probably meant rococo but they wrote Rocco. For a budget line too cheap to hire a proofreader for their only record jacket, they picked good music and good performances.
From a book by EMI. The company was founded by several mergers, including
one with a branch of Columbia (later CBS, bought by Sony). At one point they
also produced radios, TVs, refrigerators, etc., and owned some restaurants
and hotels, but undiversified. Had licensing contracts with RCA Victor and
Columbia but antitrust laws ended this, so they bought Capitol Records in
1955, the fourth largest US record company. (What was the third largest?).
Also marketed under Angel/Seraphim.
First produced records in the 1890s, wax cylinders which were cut.
After about ten years switched to flat disks, first in the US then Britain,
where people were understandably reluctant to have to purchase a new
grammophone to play the new shape records. Until around 1925 records were
recorded by making loud noises into a horn, they they got electric
microphones. Eventually record players also electrified, somewhere around
the thirties when radio became more widespread. You could buy a grammophone
or something that plugged into your radio for amplification.
Stereo was first developed in the thirties but not marketed.
LP records (microgroove, on unbreakable vinylite instead of shellac,
which was short during the war), were sold starting in the later forties.
78s were also sold at the same time for the next ten years (cylinder and disk
coexisted for about ten years earlier), but by the late 1958s only 33s and
45s were produced. At which point everyone had had to buy a new record player
and new records. In the late fifties the record companies then started to
make stereo records, meaning for the next ten years they sold both stereo and
mono (you could buy a special cartridge letting you play stereo records on
a mono player) and then only stereo. Meaning people again had to replace
their record collection and record players. (There was really no point in
coming out with stereo and LP at the same time, you would only have sold half
as many total records).
By the late 60s only stereo records were made, and once everyone had
switched over they tried marketing quadraphonic, which flopped (but made a
comeback in the nineties). Stereo records lasted 20 years before CDs came
out, but were seriously challenged in the seventies and eighties by 8-track
(a flop) and then cassette tapes.
Can someone bring us up to date since 1987? How widespread are formats
other than CD and cassette tape? After 13 years are CDs due to become
obsolete? We have noticed many working single-CD players coming in to
Kiwanis, so presumably the manufacturers managed to convince some people that
they had to replace their players with CD changers. When do we start seeing
more working tape decks when people start replacing those with DAT?
'When they are good, they are really really good, and when they are bad they are horrid.' I had promised to record some cello concertos for my new Serbian neighbor and instead of my slightly scratchy records decided to get out library CDs. The first three got stuck at one spot. Why do they do this? One of them got stuck at several spots. Have not tried the other three but one of them looks pretty scratched up. A few 10" records sounded awful, very faint sound alternating with not so faint, not a scratchy but a dull sound. They looked very dusty. In disintegrating cellophane jackets with corners missing. Wiping off the dust had no effect. No visible scratches. So I took them all to the kitchen sink, ran water over them, noticed water-repellent areas, squirted dish detergent onto these on the theory that it was grease holding dust which causes the needle not to seat in the groove, and rubbed the detergent around for a while then let it sit. Repeated this up to ten times then left them to dry at an angle propped against and on a linen dishtowel. This has done miracles before. No sign of fingerprints, maybe they stored them in the kitchen. The paper labels stayed on despite being rinsed for a while.
re #51: DVD is one thing that is supposed to replace CDs in the next few years, though at the moment it seems that it is being used more for videos. (I think it can hold about four times as much stuff as a CD, and I also think DVD players can play CDs too.) Someone else can probably give a better answer than me... DAT is used in recording studios IIRC, but I don't know if it is going to become a distribution format or not (didn't they already try that and find that it was a commercial flop?) re #52: Scratched CDs tend to "skip" if they are scratched-probably it has something to do with the laser not focusing properly. If it is a bad enough scratch the player could skip for several seconds or possibly just "freeze" at that point. Portable players generally come with "skip protection" these days (as jarring the player will also make it skip). Perhaps a stationary player doesn't have this kind of protection? I have borrowed CDs from the library that were scratched enough to make several tracks unplayable too.
I've never seen skip protection on a stationary player, but it's also been years since I bought my CD player, and I haven't really looked to hard at features since then. And it's possible to scratch a CD (or shake a CD player) so hard that even skip protection won't do you any good.
I don't know why skip protection would be needed on a stationary CD player. Maybe for people who live in earthquake zones? As to CD vs DVD, our DVD player will play any ordinary music CD. Hook it up to your amplifier and you're in business. I note that there are DVDs of operas and "great" performances. (Karajan conducts Dvorak's "New World" symphony, etc.)
A friend in Prague asked me to send her some American spirituals, on DAT. Is this format more common in Europe? What does a DVD cost? I have seen CD players skip when someone heavy walked across the room. The washed records no longer sound dull, but now they sound scratchy. The dust must have done some damage. Another record that sounded dull but was not dusty washed up like new. A Kiwanis volunteer explained that when cleaning CDs you should wipe them radially (outside to inside or vice versa) as opposed to records, which you should wipe in a circle (to avoid the dust or grit breaking down the partitions between grooves). CD players have built-in circuitry to average out anything that messes up the sound for a fraction of a revolution so a radial scratch can be corrected, but cannot deal with circular scratches.
Record companies that I have run across: European: Deutsche Grammophon - Germany Erato - France (imported by RCA?) EMI-Angel-Seraphim (bought Capitol) - England Argo/Decca - England London 'division of Polygram Classic NY' (British or American?) EMI - England (also bought Capitol and owns Angel/Seraphim) Supraphon - Czech Melodiya - Russia Philips - Netherlands Did I miss any? The larger US companies: Columbia - Masterworks and Odyssey RCA Victor - Red Seal Capitol - sold to EMI in 1955 Capitol Classics, mostly pop MHS Musical Heritage Society Vox- Turnabout NYC Vanguard Mercury - affiliated somehow with EMI Smaller companies - are any still around on this list? Westminster - Gold Quintessence Critics Choice - MN Pickwick International Design Spotlight Series Musical Masterworks - recorded European performers and conductors Lyrichord Stereo- NYC Dover Publications - NYC Book of the Month Club Connoisseur Record Corp NJ Concert Hall Society (red vinyl) Musical Treasures Plymouth Merit (an hour of ....) MGM Records - Heliodor Murray Hill - I have two multirecord sets, one of all the greatest classical, and one of Japanese classical. Collector's Library of the World's Musical Masterpieces (European world, that is). 16 Magnificent Long-Playing Records. All selections are complete and performed by leading ARTISTS, CONDUCTORS, and ORCHESTRAS. Steinberg, Krips, Stokowski, Sargent, Goossens, Etc. (Has anyone heard of Sargent and Goossens? Less well-known conductors include Poliakin with the NY Stadium Symphony, Ludwig with London SYmphony, Dixon and the Rundfunk Symphony, the Musical Arts Symphony, Wand and Cologne Philharmonic). Murray Hill was on Park Avenue in NYC.
Oh, _that's_ why they can deal with some scratches but not others. Makes sense. cool.
What is a Stadium Symphony? I have run across them three times.
Malcom Sargent was a British conductor. I don't know much about him, except that he was the conductor on one of the first LPs I ever acquired, Holst's Planets. Eugene Goossens is remembered for being the person who commissioned Aaron Copland's "Fanfare for the Common Man." Other than that, I don't know anything about him.
My resp:39 covered much of what Sindi was asking in resp:57. The classical record labels are more like brand names now, than independent companies. And they are all getting traded around like baseball cards. Just to pick one example from Sindi's list: There was a venerable British company called Decca, which has been one of the biggest names in opera recording for decades. Decca marketed its American products under the London name, for some reason. At some point, I don't know when, Decca/London got absorbed by Polygram, the Dutch firm which also now owns Deutsch Gramophon (originally German) and Philips (originally Dutch, I think). Last year, Seagrams, the Canadian liquor company which is now much more of a media company, merged its MCA music operations with Polygram's music holdings to create the Universal Music Group. So, London/Decca, Deutsch Gramophon and Philips all report to Canadian management now. And, as far as I can tell, the London name is now being retired. The same CDs used to be issued as Decca in the UK and London in Europe, but now they are coming out as Decca worldwide. I believe this is being done to streamline marketing, and also to reflect the globalization of the classical music business. In particular, I think the main classical music magazines are now all British publications; I can't think of any big American classical music magazine.
Andy fixed a CD player, after cleaning both the player and the CD did not prevent skipping, by pushing on something, which somehow realigned the gears. A lot of things can go wrong with CDs and players. What did Argo have to do with Decca? Also found Epic, Monitor, and Summit (CMS records NYC).
Re the "Stadium Symphony": orchestras you've never heard of with English-language names (German ones are mostly authentic obscure German regional orchestras) are mostly either 1) pick-up studio orchestras consisting of whoever the company could hire to sit in that week, or 2) famous orchestras recording under pseudonyms for contract reasons. Sometimes they're a combination of both.
Such as the NBC Symphony Orchestra under Toscanini? Were there any other good studio orchestras?
Another 'label' - Camden, a product of Radio Corporation of America. With Gruve Gard and PLUS fidelity on 12 inch Long Play Records. A budget series? Classical, Light Concert (Song of India, Blue Danube, I'm Always Chasing Rainbows), Specialty (marches, movies) and Popular Standards (star dust melodies, musicals, Guy Lombardo). Classical Orchestras (from probably late forties or early fifties?) Warwick Symphony, Centennial Symphony, Stratford Symphony, World Wide Symphony, Regent Symphony under Charles O'Connell (the others had no conductor mentioned), Festival Concert, Globe Symphony, Cromwell Symphony, Sussex Symphony, Century Symphony, With Orchestra (presumably also With Conductor), Soloists Chorus and Orchestra, and Golden Symphony Orch. Leonard Bernstein Conductor. Are these orchestras as British as their names, or might they be put together at the recording studio? A couple more on the other categories: Mitchell Ayres Orch, H. Coates Orch. Janssen Symphony of Los Angeles W. Janssen Cond. Raymond Paige Orchestra and American Youth Orchestra. Some titles: The Heart of the Symphony (excerpts from 8 symphonies) Richard Crooks Sings Songs of Faith: Six Arias by Handel and Mendelssohn and Oratorio Arias: Six Songs, including Ave Maria--Panis Angelicus-Were You There (With Orchestra) I have an interesting description of how Toscanini was electronically reprocessed for stereo to type in some other time. It actually does sound like stereo. I also have the original 1953 mono recording. For best reproduction High Fidelity phonographs should be adjusted to the New Orthophonic characteristic. Where it is not designated on the instrument it can be obtained by selecting the A. E. S. position and then, using the tone controls, boosting bass and reducing treble, each by a small amount. Alternatively, the LP characteristic with the bass and treble each boosted by a small amount may be used. A Kiwanis volunteer was explaining that the better receivers processed signals from the old ceramic phonographs differently from tape inputs. Probably they boosted bass etc. A couple of our receivers have a switch between magnetic and ceramic, and between two types of tape input. Sounds like early record listening was somewhat of an art.
The Dolby guy figured out, as did the rest of us with early tape players, that you could greatly diminish annoying tape hiss by turning the treble way down. What he also realized is that by recording the original performance with the treble artificially boosted up, you could then play it back with the treble reduced enough to net out to zero the artificial treble boost, and there would be little or no tape hiss. (The hiss being an artifact of the tape itself, not of the recorded sound.) You could turn the volume way up, in fact, and there'd be hardly any audible tape hiss. Thus began the era of really, really loud sound in movie theaters. Or so it was once explained to me.
THere would also be less of that annoying piccolo sound. The receiver we had was most likely pre-Dolby (also pre-cassette).
No, you'd end up with the same amount of piccolo sound, since it would be boosted during recording and quieted during playback. ...or so the theory goes, at least. I've heard a few people complain that Dolby does bad things to the tone of music. I don't remember the specifics, though. Anyone?
Also, you can play Dolby tapes on a pre-Dolby amplifier if you turn the treble down. You have to guess at it, though, whereas a "Dolby Logic" amplifier will get it precisely right all by itself.
Toscanini reprocessed for stereo. Miracle Surface: This record contains the
revolutionary new antistatic ingredient, 317X, which helps keep the record
dust free, helps prevent surface noise, helps insure faithful sound
reproduction.
One of stereo's greatest powers is that of irresistibly enhancing not only
recored and reproduced sound itself, but also its listerenrs' aural
sensibilities and appetitites..... And as we come to appreciate more fully
stereo's far more auditorium-authentic spaciousness, precise differentiations
among instrumental tibmres and source-locations, and superbly natural
'airborne' qualities, most of us tend--conciously or unconsciously--to become
progressivley less satisfied with everything which lacks these newly prized
and wholly delectable attractions.........
...the unforgettable performances conducted by Arturo Toscanini....prove to
be so much mroe moving and impressive than ever before [when heard in stereo]
that even their oldest and staunchest admirers have been stimulated to sense
the still greater drama and beauty which might be unveiled if by some new
technological miracle it were possible to endow even a small portion of the
Toscanini monophonic heritage with at least SOME of the magical appeal of
stereo sound.
[Some ways to do this:]
for example, dividing the frequency spectrum between, and/or differentiating
the loudness levels of, two channels results in distinctively stereo-like
'separation' - if too often at the cost of obvious channel imbalances and
conseequently unnatural sounding reproductiong. To a lesser extent, the use
of time-delays and phase-shifts have similar advantages and disadvantages.
And while neither any one of these means alone nor several of them in
combination can be depended upon to operate AUTOMATICALLY at maximum
effectiveness throughout a whole composition or even a complete movement,
nevertheless the best results which can be obtained breifly seemed to promise
that it might be possible for a skillful engineer, who is also thoroughly
familiar with both the original performances and the musical scores
themselves, to manipulate a versatile battery of various processing devices
with enough virtuosity and critical taste to achieve many distinctive stereo
qualities, while still retaining the naturalness, relative sound levels, and
tonal colors of the monophonic originals.
A research project was inaugurated in 1958 under the direction of a
young musician-engineer, Jack A. Somer. ...... After innumerable experiments
Mr. Somer was convinced that extremely complex and versatile equipment could
achieve the desired goal when the operation of that equipment was continuously
controlled by an operator who at the same time could scrupulously follow the
musical score requirements of constant page-by-page, or even bar-by-bar,
changes in instrumentation and sonority...
The primary means of achieving channel differentiations and
sound-source localizations is frequency spectrum division -- a technical
procedure which finds some justification in 'live' performances from the fact
that a common orchestral seating plan assigns the majority of 'high' toned
instruments to the left..... Yet, since merely arbitrarily splitting of all
the highs into one channel and all the lows into the other, while effectively
'placing' certain all-high and all-low instruments in definitely left and
right aural locations, often results in unnatural sonic imbalances, greater
naturalness as well as flexibility is achieved by varying (according to the
demands of the music itself) the specific frquency at which the spectrum
division or 'filtering' is made--and also by re-introducing into each channel
varying portions of some of the omitted frequencies. At the same time,
provisions are made for feeding controllable amouns of the over-all original
signal into either or both channels, which not only further reduces
imbalances, but also, as the level fo the original-signal insertion is raised,
effectively 'moves' some apparent sound-sources nearer the desired position
in the sound picture.
Even with this considerable control of instrumental separation and
localization, however, there would remain a lack of the 'spaciousness' that
is no less characteristic of true stereo sound. Here this is approximated
by first by-passing portions of both the 'filtered' and original
(full-frequency) signals through reverberation (time-delay) chambers, and then
reintroducing them at appropriate levels into each channel. In addition,
small-portions of the 'filtered-echo' signals from each channel are fed into
the other---thus approximating the distinctive true stereo characteristic
which results from each microphone's 'hearing' some part of the direct and
some part of the reflected sound picked up by the other microphones used.
To enrich the overl-all sound and to give it more natural auditorium
reverberation and balance, a smaller amont of full-frequency echo is added
'out-of-phase' to both channels in order to broaden the total 'curtain of
sound' and to spread it more evenly between the two playback speakers......
(Small print, fills the entire jacket back, with no room for information about
the composer, the piece, or the performer. There is a one line biography of
the person who wrote the above. This is a technological miracle they are
selling here, not a performance of Dvorak's New World Symphony.)
It does sound different from the mono, and better.
But I am used to listening to mono radio as that removes the hiss that you
get on weak stations, and all the classical stations come from 60 or more
miles away so are pretty weak. Why does stereo hiss but mono does not?
News item: the Washington Post reports today that BMG Classics is being gutted in a corporate reorganization. BMG, Bertelsmann Music Group, is one of the four remaining major record companies, and in the US their main classical imprints have been RCA Victor and RCA Red Seal. Most of the artists BMG has under contract are being cut loose, and at best BMG's classical division will release only a handful of new recordings. http://washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A40560-2000Apr18.html
<blinks> This is getting ridiculous....
Ouch. OUCH.
I have before me a Pro Arte Digital record of Bach's Magnificat, conducted by Joshua Rifkin. A round gold medallion proclaims that it was Imported from Europe (Pro Arte Records). The jacket tells me that the performace was recorded in New York, at the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, in Sept and Dec 1982. Copyright by Intersound, 1984. Manufactured in the USA by Intersound, Inc., Minneapolis. Okay, so we have a record recorded in NY in 1982, manufactured in Minneapolis no later than 1984, and imported from Europe. The recording was done on some 17th and 18th century violins, as well as on a trumpet made in 1978 after a 1746 model from Nurnberg, a 1740-imitation flute made in San Francisco in 1980, a 1980 New York bassoon imitating a London 1747 original, a 1979 oboe imitating 1730, a 1982 oboe imitation 1720, and last but definitely not least, an oboe made by Jonathan Bosworth and Stephen Hammer, Acton, MA, 1983 (sic!) after Johann Porschmann, Leipzig, ca 1730). Can someone explain how the oboe player managed to play it in 1982? It is a very nice recording.
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