[78-L] acoustic recording

[Royal Pemberton]

And if you include the Phonautograph in the chronology (c.1857) that makes
acoustic recording the only method for 69 years.

I remember seeing a photo in THE FABULOUS PHONOGRAPH showing three horns in
use on a  Victor recording, of a quartet....three of the singers on one
horn, the lead singer on a second horn, the musicians playing to the third
one.



On Fri, Feb 12, 2010 at 9:35 AM, DAVID BURNHAM <burnhamd at rogers.com> wrote:

> 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.
>
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
>
> 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
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