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

[Al Haug]

An article in 78 Quarterly stated that Gennett regularly "dumbed down" their
sound quality so the records would sound ok on the wind-up phonographs that
their hillbilly and blues customers were likely to have, much to the chagrin
of their engineers. Varsity reissues of this material often sounds better.

2010/1/8 Michael Biel <mbiel at mbiel.com>

> 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
>
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