A further improvement in sound, and very forward. Uncle Fred was a past master at telling good stories. There is no evidence whatsoever for believing it! He recorded well and his records sounded relatively rich when played on the primitive gramophones of the time.
So popular were they that some of the masters wore out, and he had to re-record them in the November of that year. This was before they were able to make multiple stampers from a single master. From here on, technical developments were rather slower, and it might be argued that the vividness of these early recordings was lost as the move towards a standardised and smoother sound was called for — this for reasons of record wear.
The louder and more vivid the recording, the more easily the record wore out when played with the heavy and stiff playback arms of the day.
Records that wore out were not a good advertisement. This prompted the wear test whereby a record had to survive a 50 playings test before it would be issued. The same phrase from Lucia di Lammermoor is repeated as she moves further from the horn.
The loss of immediacy is readily demonstrated as she moves away from the recording horn. How some passed the wear test is a matter for conjecture. A typically forward Russian HMV recording of Dmitri Smirnov — Sadko ] mp3 file. Whilst we have concentrated on the Gramophone Company and by inference Victor in the USA , there were other significant companies operating in the early years of the century.
Columbia, though, never really committed itself, in either America or Europe, to large-scale classical recording until the electrical era — onwards. A typically thin and wiry sound. This was an era when vocal and opera records dominated the classical sections of record catalogues: in Italy the Fonotipia company recorded virtually nothing else.
Its Odeon associate was a little more adventurous, but not much. The Gramophone Co. Jan Kubelik recording acoustically. The conductor was the great Artur Nikisch. An acoustic orchestral recording of Although poor by our standards, the results were possible to enjoy.
As time went on, Elgar began to record his own music, and other conductors followed suit including Toscanini, Landon Ronald and Leopold Stokowski. Elgar recording in Another field of musical endeavour that was benefiting from the slow improvements in technology was jazz.
In , Victor recorded the first of a famous series of true jazz, as against ragtime, featuring The Original Dixieland Jazz Band. At this point it will be instructive to get a feel for the way in which recordings were made and to look at some of the technical processes involved. Let us imagine a recording made onto disc in about The recording medium was a form of hard wax, prepared at the factory in vats, filtered to keep the mixture as smooth as possible and, after cooling and hardening in circular moulds, turned on a lathe in order to produce a smooth surface.
The resulting wax blanks were packed in cases and sent out to the studios. For recording, the wax was placed on the turntable of the recording machine, where it rotated in theory though by no means always in practice at 78 revolutions per minute rpm. The whole turntable assembly moved sideways beneath the cutting head so that a groove was cut in the wax from the outer edge of the wax disc towards the centre.
Because it was attached directly to the horn, the cutting assembly was fixed. The stylus was moved by a usually glass diaphragm, and, depending on how efficient the connections were, pressure was transmitted more or less accurately. Horns tended to have resonances of their own, which were damped as far as possible by wrapping tape around them.
Multiple horns could be used to capture sound from a larger group of performers or from different parts of a piano, for example, and these were connected up via Y-shaped metal connectors joined to the horn with rubber tubing. The horns were suspended from or occasionally supported on stands to minimise strain on the cutting mechanism. The recording machinery, in almost all the surviving photographs, is out of sight behind the curtain.
Partly this was to cut out extraneous sounds, though given the insensitivity of the horn and all the noise generated along the way, it is unlikely to have been audible on disc; more importantly it was to protect company secrets. In those days, recording equipment was not bought off the shelf — each company made its own.
What we can see is the horn, suspended by a wire and wrapped with tape; and we can see the very unorthodox arrangement of the musicians in front of it.
For an alternative, American layout, there is one drawn by Fred Gaisberg in , showing more space between the players and the recording horns. Two recording horns are used, with the violins which recorded least well nearest to them.
Squashed around them are the woodwind players, who would have been reinforcing the string parts. Behind them, but higher, were most of the brass, with the French horns facing backwards in order to direct the sound from their bells into the recording horn, the players following the conductor in a mirror. Another surviving photograph shows Paderewski recording into a pair of horns and, unusually, it allows us to see something of the coupling mechanism. Pianists were instructed to play fortissimo throughout.
Singers, on the other hand, had to move towards the horn for quieter passages, and away for louder notes to avoid distortion.
Inexperienced soloists were guided back and forth by an assistant, sometimes on a form of trolley! A typical acoustic orchestra recording session by Victor. Recording proceeded in takes as long as one wax blank took to fill: for early cylinders and discs this was about two minutes; for later cylinders three and then from four minutes; for a ten-inch disc about three minutes; for a twelve-inch, just under four minutes at first, and later up to four and a half or slightly more.
Pieces that played for longer than this had either to be played quickly for which there is some evidence, though not as much as is sometimes suggested or - and this was much more common - had to be cut. If a piece or movement were being recorded that lasted much longer than one side, recording stopped at a musically convenient point in the score, and then continued later when a new wax tablet was in place and everyone was ready to resume.
Sometimes side-ends were composed by an arranger, for example adding a perfect cadence to what would otherwise have been an open-ended musical phrase; mostly the musicians closed a side with a modest ritardando. In the early s, HMV experimented with sides lasting over 8 minutes, but they were never commercially issued.
After the recording session was over, the wax masters were returned to the factory for electroplating. This produced a negative metal copy which was used to stamp a test pressing. If the musical results and sound quality were considered satisfactory, further negatives were made and nickel-plated for use as stampers.
The negative metal stampers were then used to make copies in shellac, either pressed against a blank for single-sided discs, or against another stamper for double-sided. Once the metal negative was made the original wax master was returned to the lathe to be planed smooth and reused. In the earliest days, many waxes could be re-plated after the negative was stripped known as a second shell to produce a duplicate master negative.
From this point in the process, it was simply a matter of stamping out as many records as were demanded for sale. See detailed article on duplication process.
After the end of the First World War the record companies began to face their first serious competition: radio. By the early s, this medium took hold in a very big way, and there was no doubt that the sound quality via the microphone and loudspeaker was far superior to the mechanical recording of the gramophone. This difference was not lost on the companies who in secret began to experiment with means of recording using microphones instead of the horn.
HMV had an experimental system up and running by An experimental electrical recording by HMV using their own process Unfortunately most of the results were little better than the old mechanical system.
But then came the telephone men. Maxfield and Harrison were engineers with the Bell Telephone Laboratories during the s. As part of their work, they developed high quality public address systems. Having achieved that goal, with its necessity for large power outputs with a wide frequency range and low distortion, they turned their attention to recording.
For the first time all the elements of recording, from the acoustics of the sound source right through to the machine upon which the record was to be played, were subjected to scientific research. The result was what we now call the Western Electric recording system or sometimes Westrex.
The results blew acoustic recording away virtually overnight. For the first time something like a full orchestra could be successfully recorded.
Transients and sibilants were there, studio ambience and atmosphere, and all these things made for far greater fidelity. Now the gramophone could compete with the radio. The effect of the Western Electric system. Already undergoing numerous challenges to his telephone patent, Bell sought to avoid future disputes about his photophone and graphophone work. These sealed deposits would, if necessary, serve as evidence of priority of invention. No patent dispute arose, and the boxes remained confidential and unopened for nearly fifty years.
Images and Recordings High quality images of the recording media can be seen in this Flickr group. Audio samples and their transcriptions can be found on our YouTube channel , or see below for links to high quality. Electrotyped copper negative disc of a sound recording, deposited at SI in October in sealed tin box.
Listen 2. Glass disc recording, produced photographically on November 17, III Nov. Listen 3. Glass disc recording, produced photographically on March 11, Listen 4. Disc recording in green wax on brass holder, probably Listen 5. Content: in two segments with a gap in between; first segment is a male voice reading a story. The phonautograph made it both visible and permanent by writing it to paper.
In this way sound waves could be studied as never before. Sound recording was an exceptional achievement in If a ranger is unavailable to take your call, we kindly ask that you leave us a detailed message with return contact information and we will be happy to get back to you as soon as possible. Thank you. Explore This Park.
0コメント