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Hallicrafter's Tour on Film
"Scott Dorsey" wrote in message ... Richard Knoppow wrote: Look for _Command Performance_ for an illustration of how records were made c.1940. This had method continues to this very day for vinyl records. 45's OTOH, were made by injection molding. Back in the seventies, if you wanted a 7" pressed you could either get a vinyl pressing (like an LP) or an injection-molded styrene disk. For large runs, the styrene pressings were considerably cheaper, so the big labels used them almost exclusively. But, the vinyl pressings lasted a lot longer and the distortion when they wore out wasn't quite as horrible, so they sometimes were used for DJ promo discs and small releases. None of the styrene systems are still running as far as I know, so if you get a 7" pressing done today, it will be on standard vinyl. A very well thought out record system but RCA just did not get the point that people wanted continuous records and didn't like record changers. The CBS Lp was a makeshift. Too bad RCA was so hide-bound about a lot of things. Well, the thing is that at the time, the vast majority of record sales were singles. And really, this continued until the early 1970s for pop music. A big discussion of the economics of singles vs. LP records can be found in Jim Eargle's original JAES article in the forties. The LP was a huge advantage for classical recordings and it totally changed the form of jazz to be able to make a cut longer than one side of a 78. But the 45 sure had a lot of popularity in the pop music world for very long because they were very cheap to make, and because the form of pop music was such that people wanted one song at a time. The CD Single flopped mostly because it was very expensive.... you could get the full album for only a bit more than the single, and so there wasn't a whole lot of demand for the single. But now in the age of digital downloads we are seeing a real resurgence in singles sales. --scott Well, I am old enough to remember when Lp's came out. They chased 78's out of the record stores in nothing flat. The 45 is an interesting case. It was much better engineered than the Lp. The speed was chosen to be optimum for for the inner and outer groove diameter, which is not the case for a 12" Lp. RCA also designed a innovative changer mechanism for it, using a one inch center hole that was much less prone to wear than the 1/4" (approximately) hole in the Lp or 78s. This also allowed the use of a simple dropping mechanism in the changer. The groove area is depressed so that the record is supported by the label area and a rim at the outside to prevent groove damage from records sliding or rotating over each other. I've forgotten the maximum time possible on a 45 but its considerable, probably around six minutes if not cut too hot. The audio quality of early 45's were better than early Lp's partly due to the higher groove velocity but also because RCA chose a different groove shape and there were some other differences. Columbia probably developed the Lp from its use of broadcast type transcriptions to make masters for records. I am not sure of the date this started but I think it was probably around 1938. The use of a 16", 33-1/3 disc allowed more flexibility in the recording session than cutting directly to a wax master. Columbia (whoever they are now) has released many CD's transferred from these discs. In a few cases I hear faults that I thought were in the 78's. Many early RCA and Victor records have been re-released from transfers made from the stored metal work. The quality is quite astonishing, generally better than the Columbia transcriptions. Perhaps they just aged better. Its interesting to me that we can hear quality in many of these early recordings that hasn't been heard since they were recorded (on the monitor speakers) if even then. Anyway, this is all pretty far from boat anchor stuff, although the disc recording equipment certainly fulfilled the requirements for being boat anchors! BTW, I knew John Eargle quite well and saw him last only a few days before he died. -- -- Richard Knoppow Los Angeles WB6KBL |
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