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

[Sammy Jones]

You know, they could have rehearsed with pressings, marked them up with 
grease pencils, and then transferred the markings to a fresh set of 
pressings or (gasp) the lacquer originals...

I tend to think there must have been some mechanism that counted 
revolutions, much as we have tape counters on modern audio tape decks.  Some 
where (I can't remember where at the moment) I read that the sound on disc 
engineers in the late '20s edited the sound by counting grooves and could 
get VERY accurate, usually withing a frame or two (they were editing to 
film).  Fast forward 20 years later, and it's not hard to imagine that disc 
dubbing/editing systems could be quite advanced.

Another thought...even if the 16" lacquers were not continuous recordings, 
but more or less reflected the content of one side of a finished 10" or 12" 
record, there could have been several seconds to a minute's worth of 
overlapped content--plenty of time to get the next disc going with a hand on 
the playback speed control to get everything in sync.  My Jack Benny ETs 
from 1948 and '49 are recorded over three sides of two 16" discs with 
several minutes' worth of overlap so that the grooves never even come close 
to the label area.  I believe these were intended for replay on an ad hoc 
network put together by American Tobacco, and so the playback engineers 
would have had to get the next disc cued up and running on the fly.  And 
with a radio broadcast, there's not really a chance to make the matrix over 
again...

Sammy Jones

David Lennick wrote:
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
>
>