[78-L] Playback speeds - was: Re: Orville Knapp

[David Lennick]

A couple of reasonably easy methods I use to determine playing speeds, rather 
than relying on set rules (such as "Columbia is always 80, Victor acoustical is 
always 76")...

1. Get a pitch pipe. Ten bucks.
2. Determine the key of the piece of music..not as difficult as it sounds. If 
it's classical, you can probably find an online version somewhere. If it's 
jazz, blow B flat, E flat, C sharp or any of the commonly used keys (Norman 
Field's website which is around here somewhere gives a good indication of the 
most popular keys, based mostly on what notes are easy for brass players) and 
adjust till you're hearing tones that match the music. 78s can be up to a half 
tone off or more, and Chris has already noted the possible pitch changes that 
can occur (Polydors in the 20s have this habit of dropping about one minute 
into the side), and you'll run into the odd puzzling record that falls evenly 
between two keys..but you'll have fun figuring it out.

dl

Chris Zwarg wrote:
> At 19:36 14.10.2008, you wrote:
>> The $7 Victor record of the 'Sextet' from LUCIA has 'Speed 82' printed
>> on the label.
> 
> ...which reproduces it one half-tone (6%) sharp vs. the score and almost turns Caruso into a contralto (and Sembrich into Minnie Mouse!) - in fact this is one example of an early Victor recording running reasonably close to accurate pitch @ 78 rpm! 
> 
> Another problem making a playback speed decision even more difficult is the slight speed drift that many acoustic (and early-electric) sides display: At constant replay speed, the pitch at the end is different from the beginning because the recording lathe was underpowered. Some sides need to speed up by 1-2% towards the end (because of the lathe having a constant but insufficient torque, the "braking power" of the cutting stylus being higher at the outer edge of the disc), others need to slow down to get a musically accurate reproduction (because of gradually dropping torque due to failing batteries or a weak spring). Usually the difference is small enough not to bother the ordinary listener much, but it quickly becomes really nasty when you're trying to join up recordings stretching over several sides - at such a joint, even a difference as small as 0.5% is painfully audible.
> 
>> Undoubtedly Victor and Gramophone/EMI both had varispeed playback
>> turntables in use by the time they began doing electrical overdubbings
>> on Caruso and other records, so as to match the original recordings to
>> what was being overdubbed.
> 
> The whole problem is caused by the fact that for the first 30 years or so, ALL recording lathes and turntables/gramophones were "varispeed", WITHOUT an ubiquitous reliable way of indicating the actual speed - stroboscopic discs are useless unless you have A/C light which wasn't universal at the time, and can be difficult to read depending on room lighting from other sources. When electric recording was introduced, A/C equipment was quickly banned from many studios because of hum interference; 1920's studio amps were usually batttery-powered to get "pure" D/C for the tubes, and stationary recording lathes were mostly still driven by falling weights (much like a cuckoo clock) as they had been since the very early 1900's; neither springs nor electric motors provided a constant torque like gravity did. Synchronous motors came into use rather late, and were not very practical for the semi-portable recording machines frequently used in Europe (and also for the now-legendary "fie
ld 
>  trips" to New Orleans and other places in the USA), as A/C cycles and voltage varied from country to country, if reliable A/C was available at all - e.g. parts of Germany still had 110 V D/C in the 1930's.
> 
> Almost every pre-WW2 gramophone, spring-driven or electric, had a "speed indicator" which however was rarely exact from the beginning, and quickly would have disadjusted with use due to the natural wear of the friction pad regulating the motor speed, so setting the pointer to "78" in no way guaranteed that the turntable really ran at that speed. "Speeds" found handwritten on old sleeves or on labels may well be just one listener's readings of the pointer setting on his gramophone, with no exact correspondence to the actual rpm - I suspect this might also be how Victor and HMV came to the occasionally very off-the-mark speed indications on some of their records!
> 
> Chris Zwarg 
> 
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