[78-L] Schizophrenic Victor Scroll

[Chris Zwarg]

At 16:31 01.01.2009, you wrote:
>Abendroth Semiramidis G&T has an undersize label. It dates from 1903.

In pre-changer days, no company had qualms to use smallish labels whenever a recording ran on into the usual label area. In Europe, there was a bunch of cheapo labels in the late 1920's (when shellac was expensive and money was scarce) employing minuscule (less than 2-in. diameter) labels to make 8-inch records that played about as long as a standard 10-inch, and 10-inchers that played almost as long as standard 12-inch discs, although - naturally - at the expense of more distortion and less fidelity. With standard 78-rpm groove dimensions, you need a minimum diameter of about 4 1/2 inches to record the "full" frequency range (at the time that usually meant up to 6000 Hz) with tolerable distortion. On smaller grooves, the treble response breaks down and distortion builds up rapidly because the soundwaves get shorter than the diameter of the stylus tip and thus cannot be traced exactly on playback (elliptical styli help a little, but only if the record in question has not been played with a heavy soundbox/pickup).

Chris Zwarg