[78-L] Acoustical 78s in Spectra-Sonic Sound^

[David Lennick]

Columbia had problems with tape slippage even when the tapes were new. I have 
unlistenable copies of the Shostakovich Violin Concerto #1 (Oistrakh) and the 
Bernstein Serenade where the tape is slipping all over the head, and the 
Bernstein was I believe a DJ pressing..the Oistrakh may have been a reissue. 
And RCA had similar problems with a European tape recorded for the American 
Recording Society. I have 3 pressings, all from different cuttings, of one of 
the earliest issues and the tape is slipping on each one.

Then there were the old tapes used to generate new masters of a couple of Lenny 
Bruce albums on Fantasy, with 6 layers of print through.

There's a bad splice that got worse with each transfer in the Mitropoulos 
Shostakovich Tenth Symphony. Even the CD has a jump at that point.

And then there's Leroy Anderson's Fiddle Faddle on Decca 78..there's a splice 
that obviously catches on the guide post because there's a helluva pitch drop 
for a fraction of a second.

Nobody ever listened to any of these things before passing them?

dl

On 11/9/2011 5:27 PM, Michael Biel wrote:
>
> From: Royal Pemberton<ampex354 at gmail.com>
>
>
> I bought a copy of THE BIX BEIDERBECKE STORY, VOLUME 3: WHITEMAN DAYS
> (Columbia CL 846) in the early 1980s that was definitely a recent
> pressing,
> obviously mastered with their celebrated DisComputer pitch control.
> ('COLUMBIA NY' stamped into the dead wax on side 1 as well.) The tape
> transfer was obviously done in stereo as the 'image' wanders a little
> now
> and again, and is usually a bit right of centre! (Someone didn't know
> how
> to handle 1952-vintage tapes....) And the sleeve was dodgy as well, one
> corner chewed off, and the title and catalogue number print normally
> seen
> on the sleeve's spine omitted.
>
> I have a pressing from the 70s of Victor Borge's "Comedy in Music" where
> the splices at the beginning section make whole sections fade in and
> out, but it was not because it was transferred in stereo.  See below.
> (I have heard later pressings and CDs of this without the problem.)
>
>> I'd hate to see the state the tapes to INTRODUCING PETE RUGOLO are in,
>> based on the transfers in the Collectables CD that has that album plus his
>> ADVENTURES IN RHYTHM LP material (Collectables COL 5893; also labelled
>> 'Sony A-28821'). More than a few of the IPR cuts have that strange effect
>> of the high frequencies rapidly fading in and out that are due to trying to
>> play back furiously skewing cupped acetate tapes with a stereo playback
>> head stack with both channels summed to mono.
>
> That is not necessarily what is happening.  Most engineers are taught to
> never play back mono tapes with a summed stereo head.  This
> comb-filtering can also happen by playing a warped full track tape with
> a mono full track head.  What has happened is the razorblade-straight
> original recording  has now become a curve with several bends from top
> to bottom, so if you use a full-track mono head it works just like the
> comb-filtering you get when you do play a mono tape with a stereo head
> like you describe.
>
> Textbooks say that tapes should be played back on the same type of heads
> that recorded it, but actually old tapes should be played back on
> narrower width heads that are placed in an area of the tape that is less
> warped, usually the center.  One of the easiest ways they do it is to
> get a 4-channel quad head and use ONE of the tracks which sounds most
> consistent when re-alligned to the azimuth that now exists on the tape.
> What I used to do was use my old Wollensak with a "Head-track selector"
> which raised and lowered the two-channel quarter-track head.  I was also
> able to pull out audio that was incompletely erased when a full track
> tape was recorded over with a half- or quarter-track recorder.
>
> Mike Biel  mbiel at mbiel.com
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> 78-L mailing list
> 78-L at klickitat.78online.com
> http://klickitat.78online.com/mailman/listinfo/78-l
>
>