[78-L] Acoustic/electrical recordings on same disc

[Michael Biel]

From: Julian Vein <julianvein at blueyonder.co.uk>
> It puzzles me how a record company could adopt such poor recording 
> equipment. Did reviewers of the day comment on the poor sound?

Yes.  Now that The Gramophone is on-line, it is fun going thru their
reviews, even though most are classical.  Here in the U.S. there were
reviews in The Saturday Review, Time, Newsweek, Downbeat, and eventually
The Record Changer.   David Hall and Irving Kolodin also discussed sound
quality in their books. 

> If a recording company is considering updating their equipment, either
> by their own development or buying in, wouldn't they make some test 
> recordings first?   Julian Vein

There sometimes were arguments about what is good or bad sound on which
recordings.  The diversity of playback equipment, including acoustical,
makes for different attitudes.  It's been discussed here that there
occasionally is evidence that recording quality was dumbed-down to
enable the records to pass the wear tests and to be playable on obsolete
equipment.  Of course if you read the record company propaganda, their
records were all great!!!

Mike Biel  mbiel at mbiel.com  



Dan Van Landingham wrote:
> You're right regarding the sound of those acoustic Brunswicks.I felt that their recordings in
> the mid to late thirties were horrible-I mentioned a 1937 Brunswick I have of Gus Arnheim's
> orchestra doing Shubert's "Serenade" and it was truly awful.Those recordings from the mid
> twenties were so much better.However,I do remember a Duke Ellington date where some
> engineer put a speaker and mike in the men's room to give it an echo chamber like sound.
> This was around 1936.Can anyone give me some input regarding the rather high quality 
> sound OKeh recordings from the twenties? I can cite a few Bix Beiderbecke-Frank Trumb-
> auer for examples such as "Three Blind Mice" and "Krazy Kat".
====================
I used to believe that Harmony acoustic was the only studio sound that 
one could immediately identify. But, of course, there are the late 30s' 
Brunswicks with their mushy sound. It made Eddie De Lange and Fletcher 
Henderson sound the same!    Julian Vein