[78-L] acoustic recording

[David Lennick]

78s didn't disappear till 1958, stereo LPs didn't disappear in 1982 (in fact 
they're still being manufactured).

dl

Royal Pemberton wrote:
> 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