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

[neechevoneeznayou at gmail.com]

When the AFRS checked a recording from the line, they recorded a long 
overlap. IIRC 4 minnits of an 11 minnit side.

I would love to see a film about how they did disc to disc editing.

joe salerno


On 7/3/2012 1:04 AM, Sammy Jones wrote:
> 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
>>
>>
>
>
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-- 
Joe Salerno