A Brief History of Recording - a good link.
Posted by: u5227470736789439 on 14 December 2007
I found this link looking for a photo of Elgar's gramophone to post on my gramophone thread.
There are about 15 audio extracts to sample, and two factual errors in the article that I can see.
Nikisch recorded Beethoven's Fifth Symphony in 1913 with the Berlin Philharmonic and not the London Symphony Orchestra as stated, though the Webber Oberon extract was recorded by him in that year with the LSO.
AD Blumlein died in an accidental aircrash near Ross-on-Wye [Herefordshire, UK], and was not shot down by enemy fire.
Anyway for anyone interested here it is!
Gramohone recording.
Have fun looking and listening! George
This photo would have been taken at Elgar's last house, Marlbank [now the sight of several blocks of flats called Elgar Court, I think] on Rainbow Hill [Worcester, UK] only a couple of hundred yards from the Post Office depot where I am off to fetch some lovely Mozart CDs in a minute. Menuhin visited Elgar there in 1932 whilst preparing for the famous Violin Concerto recording for HMV, and series of concert performances in London and Paris. He described the garden most poetically as being the quintessense of the the infinite shades of greeen of the English Garden. It was a big house in a large garden, but only a quarter of a mile from the town centre, and ten minutes walk from Shrub Hill Station, which Elgar regularly used for his visits to London for concerts and recordings.
Also note the various photos of Elgar making records found in the link in my first post. Elgar was very far sighted about the significance of recording, and also the revolution in the possibilities of recording using the microphone rather than the acoustic horn. He presided over the opening of the Abbey Road Studio in 1931 ...
ATB from George.
The size of it is usefully shown by the man stanging next to it. [Google EMG Gramophone, for much more fascinating history]!
ATB from George
And the Halifax which crashed into a hillside Near Ross.
Fancy how much quicker recording techniques would have progressed had Blumlein not been killed testing RADAR in 1942.
ATB from George
This is a shortened [though actually long] description of the developement of the Moving-coil recording system AD Blumlein developed at Columbia, which would become EMI with the Merger with the Gramophone Company [HMV] in 1931.
It shows a rate of work and developement which seems incredible in today's world.
From these developments stem most of what we take for granted even today in modern recording. The work would carry on to making true stereo recordings in 1934 [an idea that was floating about since 1926], and the developement in the Marconi/EMI television system of "high definition" TV, which was a reality and possible and much better than Bairds Television transmission system. the BBC continued to use Blumlein's 405 line system into the 1980s! An amazing man. His contribution to our modern world of electronics carried on with his Wartime developements in RADAR. He died at the age of 38.
ATB from George
It is fascinating to read that Blumlein and his team were so far ahead of their time the EMI did not, at the highest level, begin to appreciate the significance of the work being done, and that it took Decca, in the early fifties, to start working on stereo, only to find their efforts pre-empted by exisiting EMI patents, that EMI themselves made a practicle effort to introduce stereo for recording in 1955, given the spur of competition!
It seems barely credible how far those early engineers and scientists of recording had progressed before the War intervened!
ATB from George.
PS: Is anyone going to answer this Thread? Please don't be shy. It is what this hobby of ours is all about!
http://www.quantium.plus.com/ahr/
Certainly an investigation of historical figures like Reeves and Blumlein shows that what was undertood in the first half of the 20th century about recording has still not been overtaken by subsequent developments!
Real stereo on discs in 1934! PCM described in 1937. Churchill's hotline to Roosvelt, actually based on PCM digital encription, and which makes the German Enigma machines look like dinosaws!
Yes there were such very brilliant people about in those days! The thing that has brought all these ideas to life is of course massive improvement in semi-conductor technologies!
ATB from George
“Suffice it to say that for all its convenience (replaced of course by the CD), the LP lacks the immediacy and that partial illusion of a live performance that characterises the 78. By the early 1950s, all 78s were purely transfers from tape, and in that form held on for a few years before being completed ousted by the LP.”
The LP was viewed at its introduction as in many ways a retrograde step. It is fascinating to see the same view of the various digital formats nowadays, which have ousted the LP as the main music carrier in the last two decades.
I suppose my favourite recordings are those without any editing at all, which does include many recordings from the LP and even CD eras, but often I still find that the priorities of recording in the 78 era produced recordings still unrivalled in musical involvement, from a time where the gramophone was regarded as a way of preserving the event as "live" [as far as this is possible] in the recording studio, or even captured live in concert without the possibility of a make-up!
It is interesting that modern digital transfers of beautifully restored old recordings are not only usually better and more lucidly balanced musically, but frequently reveal the old recordings as being more accurate as to instrumental timbres than a great deal achieved since! Especially as they tend to be uncoloured by boomy, ill focussed studio acoustic overlay.
Nowadays note perfection is the first priority, plus trying to perfectly set the players out in the over-reverberant sound of an empty hall.
I do think there is a strong case for re-examining the history and returning to the musical values most beautifully presented in the period up to forty plus years ago!
ATB from George
quote:Originally posted by GFFJ:
“Suffice it to say that for all its convenience (replaced of course by the CD), the LP lacks the immediacy and that partial illusion of a live performance that characterizes the 78.
I don't think we will ever really know how good those 78's really sounded, played on a good windup phono with clean cactus needle. The transfers we get on cd and lp are a poor shadow of what is really there.
Anyways, I have a lp transfer of shellacs of Weingartner's Brahms 1 fom the early 50's, I also have the same performance transferred 40 years later to cd. The two sound like completely different performances.
US
I would take AC Griffith's and Keith Hardwick's words on the subject seriously.
When EMI have good stampers [or origianl metal parts to make new stampers] they make a new pressing for the transfer process! These two old [now retired] engineers often transfered their own masters, and so should know what they are saying when they point out that the best transfers are far better than the commercial shellac pressings available to the public!
Of course there are some grim transfers out there.
I have the Weingartner recordings of the Four Brahms Symphonies that you mention in their official EMI transfers from new pressings from the master parts, and also knew the First Symphony from the shellac pressings!
I imagine that if the transfer you have was made from the noisy pressings issued then the remarkable clean original master transfer offered by EMI [albeit for only one pressing run sadly] would be a revelation to you!
ATB from George
There is an excellent link on early stereo and even multi-channel recording for film done as early as 1935 at EMI!
There is also the chance to see pictures of some of the early recording machines. And diagrams of the fist moving coil microphones ...
One thing that is nowhere mentioned is that the earliest sound recorded was captured by a machine called a Phonautograph in 1857, though the resultant recording was not replayable but simply scribed onto a piece of moving paper as a sort of visual recording of the sound waves with a steel ink pen. Presumably this could now be read by optical means to recreate an aural idea of the very earliest sound recordings exactly 150 years ago!
ATB from George
I read a good book on the blues earlier this year and the guys that went out recording or the library of congress early in the 20th century - interesting history of music, people and recorded music
Dear Briz!
Try this! I did have trouble with it myself, though it did work properly when I set it up.
ATB from George
PS: Yes, that works ...
A nice little film clip from the Pathe Company of Elgar making the first official recording at Abbey Road [Large Studio]. The actual master recording is a lot cleaner than the film sound, but this gives something of a clue about how luxurious Abbey Road must have been compared to the various rat infested warehouses in use as recording studio [AC Boult's comment on Maida Vale for example, used by the BBC at the time], and a fascinating glimse of the formal informality of it all!
Note how compactly the players are seated, and interstingly that only two double basses were used for the session, and these are right in the centre at the back in the Viennese style. You may notice that the cymble is struck, Jazz style to prevent too much tone and the attack driving the groove over its neighbour in the wax disk on the cutter. The Orchestra is the London Symphony and the date was the 11th November 1931. The recording equipement in use was still the Western Electric set, using large condenser microphones each running to a back up recording head, but AD Blumlein's Moving Coil system would be in use only weeks later in mid-Decemeber, when Artur Schnabel made his first experimental records, having refused up to that point as he disliked the sound the WE system produced. By May 1932, when Elgar returned to the Abbey Road with Menuhin to record the Violin Concerto, Blumlein's system was completely settled.
The actual first test record cut in Abbey Road was made by Eric Coates and the LSO in August 1931 in Coates' own Knightbridge March, of which take one was ommercially issued! I have this an very fine it is!
Enjoy! from George
Better version, where the picture more or less correspondonds in time! Also shows the Engineer starting off the wax cutter for the official recording, though this was not released till 1973 on HMV RLS 716 in a six box LP set that covered, with RLS 708, all Elgar's [then sourced] electrical recordings. One more would emerge of one of the Three Characteristic Pieces, in a defective test pressing that was first released after considerable restoration on CDs [with all the rest previously released] in the early nineties.
Only four sides are seemingly lost forever, or possibly not, including the Demons Chorus from Gerontius recorded in September 1927 in Hereford. Once again Elgar's own test pressings may still be some dusty attick unknown to their owner!
Have a look!
ATB from George
ATB from George
What is striking however is that the lack of modern recording techniques is no bar to realising how fine older style music making really was!
That should really be no surprise as the recording equipment left no oppotunity for post production work or special non-musical effects. This is demonstably a good thing.
Have a hunt through my various posting on the "Music Arranged ..." , and "Unarranged ..." threads for confirmation of this!
Do enjoy!
George
Earlier in 2012 the National Sound Archive - based in the British Library made transfers of twenty two of AD Blumlein's "binaral" recordings made in about 1934, as a preparation for the recording system being used for film sound tracks.
Though conventional monaural 78 records could contain up five minutes of music per side at that time, these reecordings are snippets of three minutes or a few seconds more.
Here is a link to the NSA page that reveals the recordings. Be sure to turn the volume slider to maximum, or else the effect is quite poor.
The ones where Blumlein is heard walking round and talking all the while on the stage at the small [HMV] studio at Hayes are a remarkably clear demonstration of how accute the system actually was, and the sections of rehearsal with the London Philharmonic Orchestra and Sir Thomas Beecham in Mozart's Jupiter Symphny also show something of a surprise. Though there is a small degree of vaguely directional presentation, there is none of the modern "stereo-pinpoint" precision that is managed in many modern stereo recordings. I don't think I have ever heard a more natural presentation of the kind of sense of the musicians being on the stage in front of the audience, with no sense of different players sitting in discrete and separate places on that stage.
Of course these are the very first EMI stereo recordings, but Blumlein's patents became the basis for EMI's adoption of stereo as a secondary recording method alongside mono in late 1954. By early 1955 they were making stereo recordings that were technically fine enough to issue, firstly in two track tape [requiring a special machine to play them] and later in Long Playing records.
http://sounds.bl.uk/Sound-reco...-Blumlein-recordings
Anyway, I hope that you enjoy listening to some historic recordings that were made with a system so far in advance of its time, that it is still in use today in certain circumstances - except not engraved on unplayable two channel 78 records!
ATB from George
PS: I started this thread in 2007, so please forgive that in those days I used to sign off as Fredrik, and my Forum Membership was under the name of Fredrik Fiske. But it is me as the opening poster.
And a refreshed link to the original essay on the history of recording before LP became the mainstream medium.
The inaccurate elements have not been corrected since I fist posted the a link to this five years ago, so please see the first two or three posts above for a few that I spotted.
http://www.charm.rhul.ac.uk/history/p20_4_1.html
ATB from George
Fascinating George. Cheers. The history of recorded sound is a most interesting subject. There's a great book I remember reading in the early 80s - long out of print - called The Guinness History of Recorded Sound by Robert & Celia Dearling and Brian Rust. The Gramophone magazine also published a similar tome in 1977 IIRC.
Dear Kevin,
Please don't forget to listen to the first British stereo music recordings, done on the 19th January 1934, as linked two posts up.
The stereo-ishness is nigh non-existent, but if you get into the sweet spot, then you will hear something very similar to the effect as actually heard in the concert hall.
The spoken word recordings show something that is quite a surprise. The system could image stereo with pin-point accuracy when that is what would be heard, such as on speech or foot falls!
ATB from George
immediately rendering the result musically bogus, and not infrequently tedious in the dulled perfection possibly by joining any number of takes together regardless of the musical flow being destroyed!
How true!
I thought my old here was closed years ago!
Still makes good reading. Thanks for bumping it!
ATB from George
PS: In the olden days I used to be Fredrik Fiske on the Forum, and that is still not a complete alias!
Okay Fred! I agree, it is an exceptionally good read and worthy of resurrection.
Is the Alan Dower biography the best? After a trawl today the cheapest I could fine it was circa £23 in paperback! I might nip to the library instead.
It would a fascinating read if you have an absorbing interest in the subject.
I find the topic truly fascinating. Perhaps rather more interesting than the incremental differences between modern replay variants for example!
ATB from George
I share that fascination, but saw another biography. Wondering which to go for.