Instataneous Recording

[Walter]

Manufactuered by AIM Industries
Profesional coatings=Instantaneous recordings
The label has check boxes for 78 or 33.33 RPM recording
these were not checked.Each disk has 2 holes.
One disk is a Reeves Soundcraft "AUDITION" 8" with 4 holes, 78 rpm.

I have 9 disks the size of a standard 45 RPM
each contain only one selection and were used for auditions
the disks are very flexable and slightley sticky to the touch
they have no date but the owner thinks his Dad made them
in the 40's.
Any sugestions as to safest restoration and or cleaning
proceduers?

[Dan McDonald]

Not likely in the 40s if it has 33.3 as a possibility.

There were a lot of home recording technologies, and little booths where people could make records. I imagine this is one of those. I recently got one (from a library sale) that was not the flexible kind but appeared to be one of the ones with cardboard overlapped with vinyl. I couldn't get anything out of it but scratches. I didn't care about the material, so it wasn't a major catastrophe, but I would have liked to have heard it. It looked like one side had never been recorded on. If you figure this one out, post on here so that I can try the same technique with the cardboard one I have.

Dan

[Craig Maier]

Instantaneous recordings at 33 RPM were available by Victor as early as 1931 with their "pre-grooved" technology. These would be recordable at either 78 or 33. Later on, acetate transcriptions were also able to record at both speeds. Also, even though these were often recorded at 33, a 78 size stylus is required for playback else nothing but noise will be heard. The optimal stylus should be listed in the Diamond Cut Users guide; I forget what that size is right now.

ps - the reason for two holes is to assure that the disc does not rotate on the cutter's platter. The second hole locks the disc in place so that no slippage can occur.

[Dan McDonald]

hmm.. I never heard of that before (33 in the 30s). Thanks Craig.

So when 45s came out, they really were a big step, but lps were not such a big deal? I have read the stories of the rivalry between Sarnoff and Paley. Columbia with the 33.3 and RCA with the 45, but it sounds like 33.3 wasn't really an advance. Were there early versions of 45s also?

Dan

[Craig Maier]

Hi Dan,

Here is a link that discusses them:

http://78rpmrecord.com/vichome.htm

There is also a little information pertaining to Victor 33.33 RPM Transcription Recordings on this forum at the following link:

http://www.diamondcut.com/vforum/sho...n+Long+Playing

ps - I have a collection of around 60 Victor pre-grooved recordings from around 1931. Most are recorded at 33, but some at 78, most of which are 10 inches in diameter, but a few are 7 inches. The 10 inch records play around 12 or so minutes @ 33 RPM and about 3 minutes or so at 78. They are mostly air checks taken from the NYC Area. It is very interesting to hear what live broadcasts sounded like at that period of time. This is probably the most valuable set of recordings that I own; I understand from the experts that all of these recordings are to be found no place other than in my collection. I have digitized all of them (about 10 years ago), but not cleaned them up yet. It is a big project for someday. A lot of the material could be of commercial interest. However, the recording quality is poor. Besides being noisey (which I can deal with using the software) there is a lot of distortion on them of the intermodulation variety. I have been somewhat successful in reducing the distortion by using the polynomial filter in the Forensics version to reduce this, but it is quite tricky to set it up.

Keywords: Victor Pre-Grooved Records, Early 33's, Early 33 RPM Records

[Craig Maier]

It is interesting to note that the Edison approach to the LP was to keep the speed the same (as on his Diamond Disc machine {80 RPM}) and to increase the pitch of the groove. Victor, on the other hand, kept the pitch of the groove the same as the 78 RPM lateral cut record of the time, and just reduced the RPM to 33.3.

keywords: Early LP, Early LP's, Early LP Records

[Ringmaster]

I restored a 7" recording that was made in a booth at Ocean City, many years ago. It took a lot of processing, and the end result sounded very much like a good Cylinder recording; kind of "Hollow" and "High Pitched".

I did it as a favor for a friend's Aunt, for her 80th birthday. The "duet" was recorded by the lady and her husband. Her husband had passed away many years ago. It turned out to be very memorable.

I did so much processing, that I forgot which filters I used, and did not save my settings because I thought it unlikely I would ever do another restoration of this type.

[Craig Maier]

The DC6 system will save almost an unlimited number of presets, so it may be a good idea to save them considering the amount of work that it takes to create them. In the older days of Millennium, the number of presets that the system would hold was limited, so only keeping the extremely important ones made more sense with that system.

[Geebster]

The DC6 system will save almost an unlimited number of presets, so it may be a good idea to save them considering the amount of work that it takes to create them. In the older days of Millennium, the number of presets that the system would hold was limited, so only keeping the extremely important ones made more sense with that system.

That is a great point. Not all that long ago, I wasn't very good at saving my presets, that sometimes took a very long time to perfect. Now, I save almost everything. I label mine with a distintictive name that corresponds to the restoration that I am doing. For example if I am working on the Beatles "White" album, all my presets for that job will start Beatles_white; so if I ever want to revisit that restoration, I can duplicate what I did in the original restoration.

GB

PS. I am an organizational fanatic, so everything that is used in a certain restoration, I keep in that "jobs" folder. Besides the wave files themselves, I also keep cover art, presets, a text file of what steps I used to perform the restoration, as well as any other notes, a playlist file, etc, etc. It may seem like overkill, but it sure saves a lot of time if you have to revisit a restoration job.

[Audyossey]

...Victor, on the other hand, kept the pitch of the groove the same as the 78 RPM lateral cut record of the time, and just reduced the RPM to 33.3.

There was ample precedence for this. The Western Electric discs used for Vitaphone sound-on-disc movies were done that way. I don't know at what point 16-inch transcriptions started to be used in radio, but it was probably the thirties. I used to have a radio station turntable with the huge RCA straight cobra arm and a magnetic cartridge about 2"x1.5"x1" in size which was surely a 1930's or earlier device. There were subscription libraries of music distributed to radio stations in the 33 RPM, 16-inch format, all using 3-mil grooves. Armed Forces Radio was still using the format in the 1950s. So RCA wasn't inventing anything. They were just adapting an exisiting technology (unsuccessfully) for home use.

HB

[Craig Maier]

I think that the Edison system would have had a better chance of producing wide bandwidth long playing records based on the analysis that I performed on this topic found at this link:

http://www.diamondcut.com/vforum/showthread.php?t=2152

The problem that Edison was unable to solve at the time was the necessity of having a very light pickup so that the extremely delicate fine pitch groove would not become damaged by the vertical forces of the heavy pickups of that time period.

The Western Electric / Victor system could not have had much bandwidth since the groove width was kept the same as 78's and the speed cut down by a factor of 2.3 : 1.

A quick calculation shows that a Victor 10 inch 33.3 RPM record using a 2.7 x 1.2 mil elliptical stylus would produce a 7 KHz bandwidth at the start of the record and around 3.2 KHz at the end. It does not seem that would be very satisifying to a listener.

[Ringmaster]

"It does not seem that would be very satisifying to a listener."

At the time it was. I remember a school teacher that I had in the 50's collected the 16" Radio Station recordings; I often wondered what he did with his collection.

He also collected glass Coca-Cola bottles from different locations; he told us that he had made a cement wall, with the bottoms of the bottles visible. This sounded interesting, at the time.

[Craig Maier]

16 inch acetate radio transcriptions recorded at 33.3 would sound a lot better than 10 inch records recorded at the same speed with the same groove width.

I was just trying to imagine what the enjoyment factor would be listening to a recording that ends with a bandwidth of only 3.2 KHz.

Maybe, at that time, the Long Playing aspects of the technology more than made up for the lack of bandwidth. I think that is what you are hinting at and that certainly could have been true.