[78-L] acoustic recording

[DAVID BURNHAM]

Michael Biel wrote:

Caruso's daughter Gloria was three years old when Caruso died.  Masters 
could not be played back without ruining them, so when they played back 
a wax master it was either a test that they weren't planning on using 
anyway, or a duplicate master on a parallel machine.

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Were they able to record two discs at once in the acoustic era?  Certainly, if a single horn is feeding two recorders, such an arrangement would cut the available power to each recording head in half.  I think I would opt for your first thought - that it was a test recording.  If the blank waxes were larger than the final record, they could use the area beyond the useful diameter for the test.

So far, the acoustic era has been the longest era in recording history.  Although comercial recording didn't get under way at the beginning, from 1877 to 1925 acoustic recording was the only recording - 48 years.  Electrical 78s had their era for 23 years from 1925 to 1948.  Mono LPs from 1948 to 1957, a mere 9 years, stereo LPs from 1957 to 1982, 25 years and the CD from 1982 to the present - 28 years and counting.

I'm curious to know if they ever tried multi-horning - using one horn for the voice and a second for the piano or orchestra or whatever.  They certainly had long enough to try this kind of inovation, they were aware of the complications of trying to get all of the musicians around a single horn.  Flexible tubing should enable the horns to be moved around and  the recording engineer could even have chokes, similar to those used to control the volume of an acoustic gramophone, to control the recording volume from each horn.  I'm sure that likely they didn't but it's an interesting thought.

db