[78-L] Speaking of cuing transcriptions..wuz Re: Edward VIII Abdication on records

[David Lennick]

Tape was beginning to be known, but as far as I know, the first use of it by 
Columbia was to produce "I Can Hear It Now" in 1948. And for what it's worth, 
early lps that were done from tape masters in 1949 sound far worse than the 
earliest ones dubbed direct..I've just been listening to a number of them in 
the last couple of weeks and some of the transfers are amazing. It probably 
required a couple of engineers who could read scores and someone to have 
previously timed the sides, but my question is really..did they mark the start 
points somehow or did they (shudder) actually cue up the discs? Oh, as for 
pitch changes, you can hear those. Nothing was perfect. The Prokofieff Fifth 
Symphony conducted by Rodzinski on ML 4037 changes pitch very slightly every 4 
minutes, but the joins are beautiful (with some possible overlaps where they 
were necessary to keep the music flowing). So how dey do dat?

dl

On 7/2/2012 7:54 PM, Sammy Jones wrote:
> I thought tape was available in the U.S. as early as about 1946 or '47.
> Wasn't the second season of Crosby's Philco Radio Time edited on tape (as
> opposed to disc to disc like the AFRS did)?
>
> I don't know specifically about Columbia's early LPs, but I have the
> impression that methods of disc to disc editing (dubbing from  several
> source discs to a new master disc) were pretty refined by the late '40s.
> They were pionered by sound on film editors (early Vitaphone, etc.) and
> perfected by the Armed Forces Radio Service which edited dozens, if not
> hundreds, of radio programs every week to remove whole commercials and
> sometimes single words.
>
> I have an AFRS Fibber McGee show where the quality drops tremendously and
> then returns to normal quality during one section within a 15-minute side,
> but the edit is otherwise imperceptible.  That says to me that the section
> in bad sound may have been edited down to a sub-master disc because of
> complications, then played back in to the new master disc at precisely the
> right time.  Very complicated stuff...
>
> That being said, I don't know how they did it!  I imagine there were
> turntables that were mechanically linked together and some sort of counter
> to count revolutions, or parts of revolutions.  This is a fascinating
> topic...
>
> Sammy Jones
>
> David Lennick wrote:
> Hijacking the thread, thank you.
>
> On 7/2/2012 7:01 PM, Michael Biel wrote:
>>
>> That (arrow) is what you find on soundtrack
>> discs so that they can be cued up without backspinning them.  It doesn't
>> point to the beginning of the groove, but to the point in the disc where
>> the sound begins.
>
> When Columbia began cutting 33rpm microgroove masters for the new Lp format,
> they dubbed from 16-inch lacquers that had previously been used as source
> material for 78s. Classical works consisted of movements in 4 minute chunks
> spread over several 16-inch sides (contrary to what people have written,
> they
> did NOT record the works non-stop). The dubbing team had to be right on the
> note to make the side joins, and they usually got it right, but how did they
> cue to music without back-cuing and ruining the original? Did they work from
> safeties? Did they carefully note the number of turns and cross their
> fingers?
> Remember, this was all before tape. I've heard one 78 issue (not on
> Columbia,
> but on Mercury) where the music is preceded by an entire rev of cue scratch.
>
> dl
>
>
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