Very interesting

Hi Joe,

thanks for the VERY informative post. There are lots to be learned from the past...
Many of the musicians from those days were technically superior to today's musicians. They only had one take to get it right(not 20, like in my case!). If there were mistakes, they were left on the recording. Try lstening to Artur Schnabel's recordings of the Beethoven sonatas made in the early 1930's. The piano has a fullness and sense of realism rarely achieved today. There are also ''wrong'' notes, but these are easily forgotten when Beethoven's spirit is so apparent. I can go on, but my intension was to thank Joe.

Generally speaking, most of the early microphone recordings that I've heard even from the late 20's sounded better simply because they were louder and masked a lot of hiss. I don't think they were sonically superior to horns though until the mid 30's, about the time Bing Crosby hit it big. Its kind of a toss-up sometimes between a horn recording that's so noisy that you can barely make out the song, and an early microphone recording that's at least loud enough to hear everything distinctly but with a little less fidelity in the frequency spectrum. And a lot of it has to do with the recording medium I think. Those Edison Diamond disc recordings done with mics in the late 20's sounded much better than anything else I've ever heard from that era. And some of that is due to simply using a diamond tipped stylus that sat stiffly in the groove thereby producing more volume. Victrola had what they called "loud" and "soft" needles. The loud ones were just a tad heavier but they came with tone arms that added considerably more weight, thus producing a needle that sat in the groove better and produced more high-end response because of this. And whenever we hear more high-end in a recording, it tends to seem louder to us.

Edison also used vertical cut grooves instead of the lateral cut ones that Victrola and some other companies used that eventually became the standard we all know from 33's and 45's and on back to most 78's. I don't know much about it but I would assume that a vertical cut groove and a diamond tipped stylus would track louder than the steel tipped stylus Victrola's that were made.



Another thing was the design of the horn on the playback machine. Both the early Edison and Victrola machines used to place the horn's base right on top of the stylus, thus placing a lot of weight on the needle, making it stay in the track better and play louder, but also sometimes causing distortion and wearing out records prematurely. They both eventually moved them to the back of the tone arm, and then later into a box under the machine like the one in the photo on the first post I left. Having a later model Edison player or Victrola doesn't necessarily mean better fidelity. They were constantly experimenting. Those early efforts to place the horn in a box were pretty bad sounding. But they kept finding ways to improve things. There's a whole lot more to all this stuff than I'll ever know. But generally speaking, I really liked those Edison Diamond disc recordings. There's a lot of them out there for collectors, they're reasonably priced, and they sound pretty darn good whether the recordings were made from mic's or horns. They hold their value better than 78's and are less prone to break if you drop them too. For somebody wanting to start out collecting old records, you could do a lot worse than collecting diamond discs. And you can find a good Diamond Disc player for $400 to $600 which isn't too bad in my opinion. The records themselves often go for about $6 to $8 bucks. The old Edison Cylinder players and recordings are pricier, harder to find, and sound much worse. But on the other hand, how else can you find an original recording of Florence Nightingale?

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Absolutely cool photos..

Thanks Markus!