Recording from damaged 78rpm record

[Adam Aglionby]

Sorry thought heard a sound rush past.

To get the best source possibly non contact, laser reading might be best before feeding to the CEDAR rack server:

14K USD apparently think CEDAR modules start at around 8K UKP , " best engineering solution" is undoubtedly CEDAR , its what others seek to emulate.

At the less expensive end of things garbage in garbage out, getting the best transcription of source means less cleaning up afterwards.

Convenience with a sub =A360 tutntable, with built in sound card and EQ as well, depends what your wanting to transcribe TBH...

Lot of good quality turntables go for little money nowadays and with a decent cartridge will certainly make a lot better result.

Adam

[meow2222]

IIRC a wiki article on this was written, you might look at the audacity wiki to see if its there.

Needle: 78s used a bigger needle, but can still be played with a modern stereo needle. The profile will be wrong, but OTOH you'll not be playing the badly worn parts of the groove. This is why studio transcription is done with a fair range of needle sizes, picking whichever one gives the best result for each record. You can get 78 styli for some modernish cartridges.

Equalisation: Audacity has several built in 78 eq curves. But...

1. if you change speed, your eq will be all wrong and none of the curves apply, just have to do it by ear.
2. a novelty booth in 1940s is unlikely to have made any attempt to conform to any of the eq schemes in popular use at the time.

Cleaning: old records can be cleaned, but NEVER use alcohol on 78s. Since its not a moulded disc it wont be shellac anyway, but something rather softer, so be even more wary about cleaning it.

Speed: Some pre-war discs were 80rpm, but I think by the 40s they'd be

1. OTOH a booth recording could easily have been a few rpm off and have varied with cutter position. so there's lttle point getting fussy about speed.

Audacity has pretty much everything you need to do the job.

NT

[pjlusenet]

I've been lazy. Most of the records I want to digitise are available on the net in mp3 already.. Probably worth checking before you do your own. If they're not of good enough quality THEN try it yourself.

[pjlusenet]

Ignore me Finding your recordings might be a bit tricky!

[meow2222]

snip

its ok for a 78 or two, they dont take long, but for bulk digitising of vinyl media collections you're looking at maybe 4 hours per album to do a decent job of it... not very practical.

NT

[meow2222]

huge snip

physical needles push a fair amount of dust & dirt out of the way. A laser interprets it all as sound instead.

NT

[Toby]

£49.99 At Aldi on Sunday!

Reports to work with 78's too

[RobertL]

But you might have to splice them together. I remember an old 78 recording* where you could hear that the orchestra stopped dead at the end of each side - the echo died away afterwards. You'd need to join them up with an overlap.

Robert

• Beethoven's Eroica in fact

[Steve Firth]

These are fragile disks, playing them can cause damage so you need to be fairly sure that you have things set up properly before you start. As others have said, the stylus needs to be specifically designed for 78s. Don't try using the 33/45 rpm stylus because it will go to the bottom of the groove and cause damage or scrape up the muck.

Those Ion turntables are absolute rubbish, a waste of money in almost very respect. If you could get hold of a 78 turntable + cartridge and stylus with a pre-amp and feed that into the line input on your Mac you would do much better. OTOH if you were familiar with audio equipment I guess you would have worked this out for yourself.

A new 78rpm cartridge and stylus will cost about £150. A decent turntable could be as low as £40 with tonearm, if you're lucky you might get a cartridge with it.

[meow2222]

not if you want the genuine 78 experience :) I always thought they made clasical utterly unworkable.

Why would anyone want to rip a classical track off 78s? Just about everything on 78s is now public domain, and some of its available online now, plus in some cases numerous derivative versions. And yes, there is some good stuff on 78, just very very little.

NT

[tonyjeffs]

If you play them back at 45 and use software to speed the recordings up to normal, you will lose the top frequencies. in accordance with the ratio 45:78 I'd definitely obtain a 78rpm player.

Tony

[meow2222]

that would be true for vinyl, but not 78s. Their recorded bandwidth is a long way shy of 20kHz.

NT

[Dave Liquorice]

Explain?

Original recorded 78 sound = 5kHz Played at 78, frequency reproduced = 5kHz

Played at 45, frequency reproduced = 2.88kHz Digitally speed up by 1.73, frequency = 4.98kHz

Close enough for Jazz...

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Think that's apex over posterior. You might lose the extreme bottom end through this - not the top. But it's very unlikely there is much of either in this case.

[The Natural Philosopher]

What top frequencies would those be then, on a 78rpm? typically 200-3khz if that.

Actually you get *better* top frequencies that way...;-)

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Depends. 78s were actually produced much later than many think. Pye even making them out of vinyl. 10kHz plus isn't unknown. But something out of a booth could be no better than telephone quality.

[The Natural Philosopher]

I once took some stuff off an old wire recorder for a friend..some speeches of his fathers.. and put them on cassette. I ran the whole think straight of the replay head, as the electronics had died, and used a graphic equaliser to try and get some sort of reasonable balance. ISTR I built a basic equaliser as well..to cope with the innate equalisation.

To be honest it didn't replace what wasn't there in the first place, but a reasonably hiss free and un-tinny tape resulted.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Good grief. I've only ever seen one in a museum. ;-)

They must have been reasonable for speech at least since the BBC used them for some time. Although they had disc recording too.