[78-L] Late 1930s ARC/Brunswick sound quality, was Acoustic/electrical recordings....

[David Lennick]

You have to be the only person in the world who remembers that "Streamline" 
situation! I did a primitive sync job on those discs and actually put them on 
an Intersound CD, but they definitely don't stay in sync or in phase (they also 
put that compilation out on cassette without the explanatory note, which must 
have confused a few people). I'd have tried it with Sweet Lorraine as well but 
the later pressing (an English reissue taken from the Special Editions issue) 
had an alternate take.

I also have different pressings of one Raymond Scott disc, possibly The Toy 
Trumpet, with distinctly different run-outs, but I suspect that in this 
instance the run-outs were added not to the master disc but to a mother, if 
that's possible..I've also seen Brunswick/Polydor issues where one has no 
run-out at all and the other does.

Some late 30s Columbias also appear to have variable pitch, which I can't 
figure because they weren't being dubbed at that point and thus wouldn't have a 
"preview" source..the pitch variation also doesn't seem to occur at loud or 
quiet places. ("Pitch" in this instance refers to groove spacing, not speed or 
frequency of notes.)

dl

Royal Pemberton wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 8, 2010 at 9:57 AM, Julian Vein <julianvein at blueyonder.co.uk>wrote:
> 
>> Dan Van Landingham wrote:
>>   <snip>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.
>> ====================
>>   <snip>But, of course, there are the late 30s'
>> Brunswicks with their mushy sound. It made Eddie De Lange and Fletcher
>> Henderson sound the same!
>>
>> It puzzles me how a record company could adopt such poor recording
>> equipment. Did reviewers of the day comment on the poor sound? 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
>>
>> Somewhere I read that ARC began recording onto what amounted to lacquer
> discs, that they called 'instant-o-tiles', around the end of 1936.  As this
> was a new and as yet unproven technology then, I expect they would have
> continued recording onto waxes simultaneously.  This perhaps explains the
> existence of the two copies of Artie Shaw's 'Streamline' (recorded 23
> December 1936) David Lennick has or had, which had the same matrix and take
> number, but appeared to had been cut on two different lathes, AND sounded as
> though they were taken from different mike feeds (so one of them was not
> pressed from a matrix made by dubbing the matrix of the other copy).
> 
> My copy of 'Streamline' (Parlophone R 2984) looks like it was done on the
> older equipment, but it has some aspects of the later styles of cutting.  It
> has a rather shaky lead-in spiral as one with the grooves of the recording;
> the lead-out spiral is the same coarse-pitch deep groove like most Columbias
> have from c.1927 onward, with the eccentric ending introduced around early
> 1934.  However, there are two eccentric grooves close to one another, the
> second groove just inside the diameter of the first one (the first the same
> as that of the earlier single-groove eccentric ending).  The pitch of the
> grooves in the recording are somewhat closer together than what I typically
> see on Columbia (disregarding 5 minute, 'longer playing' 78s) and most any
> contemporary ARC product I've seen.
> 
> The other side of R 2984 is Shaw's 'Sweet Lorraine', mx B.20453-2, from the
> same session (and the next matrix in the ARC series), and it also has the
> same general appearance of 'Streamline'.  Sound quality for both much the
> same as for early to mid-1930s Columbia fare, betraying somewhat distant
> miking in a smallish, deadened room.
> 
> It seems to me like all the poor-sounding ARC sides of the late 1930s (with
> that ringy, wheezy, screechy top end) are those made on the lathe that gave
> records that sharp, fast lead-in spiral, and spaced the first and last few
> grooves on each side almost twice as far apart as the rest of the grooves,
> with the added lead-out spiral having both the closer pitch and the
> 'machine-y' eccentric stopping grooves as also seen on red label era
> Columbias through c. 1951 or 1952.  (Was there possibly some bug they hadn't
> quite worked out with cutting to lacquers as opposed to cutting to waxes?)
> 
> But in 1939, after CBS completed their extensive equipment upgrades, the
> sound greatly improved, and the groove pitches settled down....
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