The First Recording Studio

I thought this was interesting. These photos (except for the speaker enclosure) are of Thomas Edison's music recording room at the Edison factory in New Jersey. The first photo is from about 1890. If you don't know the history of recording, that big horn you see sticking out was used for both recording and playback. Edison experimented with all kinds of horn materials and sizes (some as much as 15 feet across). When recording, a player/singer would get close to the horn just like a microphone and the horn would pick up vibrations from the air and mechanically move a stylus over a wax cylinder (they later switched to celluloid plastic in 1912) and it would cut grooves into the wax as it spun around. To play back the recording, the opposite would happen (sort of) and the vibrations would be transferred from the stylus to the horn.



In the majority of the photographs I've seen from the Edison factory, the piano was always high in the air for some reason. No doubt this had to do with the way sound traveled in the room and the loudness of the piano in ratio to singers and other instruments. They had to carefully and strategically place musicians at various distances from the recording horn to get a good overall level just like with the later developed microphones.



Microphones weren't used until 1927 so virtually all recordings were made acoustically/mechanically with a horn previous to this. The first microphones didn't sound much better than the horns but they produced a much louder signal. Still, if you ever got close to a windup Edison Diamond Disc player from the early 1920's they were quite loud. They used a mechanical damping mechanism to raise and lower the volume that worked remarkably well by simply moving a padded ball shape in toward the playback horn to cut the volume. Other companies just placed the horn/speaker behind a wooden door and you controlled the volume by opening and closing the doors a smidge. Not rocket science eh?



See all those horns sticking out in the background in the following photo? Ever wonder how they made copies of records in the early days of recording? They didn't. They simply placed anywhere from 5 to 15 cylinder recorders in the room and made that many recordings at once. Then they'd reload new wax cylinders in the machines and the musicians would play the same tune again. They'd keep repeating the process. In about an hour's time you'd have around 90 recordings of the same song via 5 to 10 different takes. So if you buy a cylinder recording of Len Spencer doing his comedy routine to the tune of "The Arkansas Traveler" in 1906 you might get one of several different takes he did at that session. That was a big record back in the day and he did several recording sessions featuring the same song over about a 20-year period, so there are likely to be around 50-takes of that comedy bit he did.



The good ole days eh? Maybe not. Well... it must have been exciting even if a little tedious.

Hey, somebody'd awake on a Sunday morning!

Hey Bill,

Where do you find all of this great stuff you continue to post?

I definitely enjoy them!

Keep 'em coming.

Good stuff Joe. The crazy part is that this is pre electricity.

Joe ,
You find some cool things to post, as usual I enjoyed this history lesson...
Kenny

For about 5 seconds I was thinking of posting that first pic on my studio website and saying "welcome to LnL Recording"

Hey,

Whenever I have a moment, I check out the forums 'cause there's ALWAYS something interesting here. Thanks, really interesting stuff!

Hey wait a minute - I think that's Yep's living room

ORIGINAL: yep

ORIGINAL: krizrox

Hey wait a minute - I think that's Yep's living room

Time was, it was not far off...

Now with computers everything is so much smaller and neater, but it sure doesn't look as cool...

Cheers.

LOL ! yeah.. my studio doesn't look much like a studio anymore. All I have is one rack of gear and most of that is not used it's just playback devcies for dead formats in case a customer brings in a DAT, LP, or cassette. Some day I'll get a desk with some rack space and I can get rid of the last of my racks. The only wow factor now is the one wall covered in Guitars.

ORIGINAL: gullfo
....
you would think that music recording and production would be better 100 years later... :-)

Well.. from the sound of the overcompressed, distorted, drivn' to clipping CDs I've purchased lately I'd say there is something about "better" some people can't stand. You have to buy very old CDs off e-bay to get decent sound... god I can't wait till this fad is over.. I hope I live long enought to see HiFi come back.

ORIGINAL: yep

ORIGINAL: ohhey
...Well.. from the sound of the overcompressed, distorted, drivn' to clipping CDs I've purchased lately I'd say there is something about "better" some people can't stand. You have to buy very old CDs off e-bay to get decent sound... god I can't wait till this fad is over.. I hope I live long enought to see HiFi come back.

There is hope in DVD audio. Most DVDs I hear take good advantage of digital's capabilities. Sometimes almost too much (!)-- ever try and watch a DVD of an action or effects movie when some's asleep in the next room? You need to ride the faders with a remote! Of course, the early CDs were like that, too. Remember how huge dynamic range was an early selling point of CD format?

I really think the best hope lies in the introduction of compression circuits or metadata decoders in consumer playback devices. I have a couple of TVs that have "AVL" or "smart volume" settings, and my digital cable allows for three levels of compression. Windows media player has similar features, but all of these are obscure settings with enigmatic names buried in submenus. What's really needed is a one-button switch on the remote and the front of the device, like the "loudness" switches you used to see on hifi recievers. If these become common on car stereos and home playback systems, then hopefully the loudness race will not seep into DVD audio, and people will start to think of DVD sound as the new "benchmark," and other formats will follow suit.

In fairness to the loudness race, I think what really started the slide was the virtual abandonment of the cassette and widespread use of CD players in cars. If CDs are going to be listened to in cars, they almost need to be compressed. Listening to symphonic CDs in a typical car at highway speeds in an excersize in volume adjustment. If you turn it up enough that the quiet passages aren't masked by road, wind, and engine noise, then the loud parts will clip the stereo.

Cheers.

I think having a compressor on playback devices is the answer also, the factory radio / CD in my 1995 Ford Mustang had a compressor button and it worked perfect. Another example of how things were getting better then they started to slide about the time folks started trading MP3s. My theory is that CDs were compressed like that to make the MP3s sound worse to prevent piracy, the MP3 encoders don't expect all things to be the same volume.

Now that I'm straight and sober, a lot of that old stuff doesn't seem to have the same impact it once did.

I thought it was an age thing. LOL! Maybe its just me. But I really don't care about playing guitar or listening to anybody else play anymore either. The old records just don't mean much to me now. The old Edison recordings I've collected are mostly spoken word things. I've got Florence Nightingale, Gladstone, Tennyson, Robert Browning, Teddy Roosevelt, Conan Doyle, WB Yeats, Marconi, Einstein, George Bernard Shaw, Ernest Shackleton etc. The music I usually pass on. And I mostly listen to talk radio in my truck. I think CD's have sounded terrible for the past several years too but on the other hand, I seldom listen to them anyway. A day doesn't go by that I don't think about selling all my music gear (again!) I probably will in the next year.

If you want to hear a hard limiting nightmare, pick up a copy of "One" by the Beatles. I think its all songs by them that were number one on Billboard. I got it for my sister last year and was stunned by how bad it sounded. Nothing sounds worse than listening to rock radio now though. They've got all these loud, distorted CD's to begin with and then have to compress the heck out of them. FM rock has never sounded this bad. By contrast, try to catch a broadcast of "World Cafe" on PBS. Its usually on Friday nights where I'm at. Mostly its acoustic based stuff i.e. Bruce Cockburn, Mary Chapin Carpenter etc. I've noticed that acoustic musicians don't tend to have CD's mastered as poorly as rock. Maybe because there are fewer sales in them and a lot of acoustic musicians are recording and mastering at home like a lot of us. I guess anyway. But I don't know why anyone would pay to have a CD professionaly mastered these days. The professionals sure sound like amatuers.

Do you suppose the room in the second picture is a reverb chamber?
Any other guesses?

ORIGINAL: yep

Ever try and watch a DVD of an action or effects movie when some's asleep in the next room? You need to ride the faders with a remote!

Since this is an actual problem for me right now, let me offer a solution, at least if you watch on your computer: VLC. It's a free, GNU multimedia player (as well as streaming server and several other things). If you go to SETTINGS / EXTENDED GUI, the third panel has options for volume normalization as well as hard limiting.

It's my favorite video player, as it uses no external codecs and thus can play tons of stuff other players choke on. That, and it plays smoothly when all kinds of competitors get all stuttery on me.