Cleaning vinyl LP records

I'd expect that an autocorrelation function would dig out the wobble FM.

Crosscorrelating the data from several different discs would be useful too.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

I came across somebody who was doing this in the late 1980s, but I don't remember the name. John

The rattiest parts tend to be towards the 'end' of the disk, though; they're not typically randomly distributed throughout the recording.

Unless there's no other option, I don't believe they remaster from vinyl records. They use the orignal 1" or 2" studio tapes.

Tape only came into use in the early 1950s - everything before that was mastered directly to disc or film.

Discs that have been played with steel needles are also rough during the first few seconds, that was the bit where the needles wore down to fit the groove.

Resonances in some of the older machines caused a high mechanical impedance at the needle tip at certain frequencies. Records that have been played repeatedly on those machines will have groove damage on certain notes. Loud notes of any frequency cause a lot of needle and disc wear. The horrible noises resulting from these effects are known by record collectors as 'blasting', it is a mixture of noise-behind-signal caused by the roughened surface and severe intermodulation distortion.caused by the distorted playback path.

You're giving your age away. :-)

I used to claim to be an audio historian but I am more and more finding that I am part of that history. :-(

^ a good

Correction applied.

We played wax cylinders.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

I still do - and I record them: <

There's a chap that turns up at our country fetes with a gramophone in the back of his Rolls-Royce. He winds it up and plays a bunch of old shellac records from the 30s and 40s on it. I find it astonishing the level of volume he's able to wring out of the thing with no electronic assistance whatsoever. No power, nothing but wind-up energy and clever horn design. The thing is so loud you'd get noise complaints if you played it in an apartment late at night. Truly remarkable. And he brings along a selection of steel needles and they each have different properties and can change the sound according to the circumstances. I remember our family having a wind-up gramophone in the house when I was growing up and it got a fair bit of use, but I'd totally forgotten the noise level and what they were able to do with no amplification at all. Amazing!

What sort of sense does that make?

Are you asking about the webpage or about the reasons for recording on wax cylinders?

Both, that web page says will record your music on wax cylinders? and why would you (or anybody) record on wax cylinders?

I remember as a kid playing 78 rpm 'His Masters Voice' records on an electric turntable with a Philips dynamic element with real needles. And listening on crystal earphones late at night to radio-plays.. My father had a real big multiband Philips radio with shortwave etc, he was a journalist and needed to know the news of the world. I was not allowed to touch that radio as he knew I would take it apart to figure out how it worked. I learned how radio worked from 'That is how radio works' from Aisberg...

WHY IN THE WORLD GO BACKWARDS?

Then mp3 came and recording took less space. USB sticks came...

I cannot hear the difference between a good mp3 and the original wave recording! I have a Creative Muvo small battery mp3 player that plays >10 hours of music on my Sony HD201 headphones or small earplugs, it runs on a 1.5 V Eneloop battery. Sometimes I leave it on next to my bed, very loud at full volume, my favorite selections, makes me sleep better in all the environment noise. ebay.com/itm/397418275657 still has some.

I had lots of records, donated it all when I started travelling the world. All the music I wanted when back I could find on the Internet, some now with video, or via satellite TV, Including the lyrics and notes so I can play it or play along with my keyboard. In the seventies I played trumpet, tried some guitar too. Cracks and ticks? rumble? hey man, you should hear the neighbors or traffic or workers or cars or heating or rain... here! You need a sound proof studio to notice that stuff. Now your WAX stuff, what a joke. 2 minutes that website says.

Let go of old technology, Sure having a fire starter and wood versus a microwave and solar panels and batteries ... may help in an emergency.. you could probably engrave your music in wood, or modulate the year rings in trees as secret code. Encode music in DNA, all of it... !!!:-) :-)

who knows where it goes? Modify some DNA and make an other King Kong ape? The current ape respects no rules, he may copy himself, if he did not already. Or is the result of that pig-human mating experiment long ago, his mama was a pig?

Should I duck now?

Netherlands next ? he wants ASML?

The recorder was originally built to the specification of the UK National Sound Archive with the ostensible intention of calibrating their playback machines. I later discovered that this was actually an exercise of a very different nature and I was being used as a guinea pig to test a theory that the early Western Electric cutterheads did not actually do what was claimed of them.

As I designed the cutterhead system, I was asked to report my findings in detail. I found I could not get the feedback loop stable without a lot of phase-shift components because of the unavoidable phase shifts in the mechanical part. Eventually I worked out that the WE cutterhead was using a feedback system that, at higher frequencies, ignored the mechanical vibration and simply fed back the input signal by transformer action. That explained how they were able to claim such a fantastic high-frequency performance which did not appear on the recorded discs.

Having built the machine, I was able to offer calibration cylinders to various archives who were doing research into historic recordings. It also meant that I could record 'entertainment' cylinders if customers wanted them - and they did. The novelty of having your own recording on a cylinder which you can play on a clockwork machine appeals to some people and one musical group has made one of their songs only available on a limited edition cylinder.

I have also made a playback machine which can cope with historic cylinders that have gone 'wonky' over the years:

There is a lot of interest in this field because early cylinder machines were not just designed to play cylinders, but recorded them too - so unique historic recordings turn up from time to time and they are often badly damaged.

Looks nice and logical, but I will stay with my player / recorder to SDcards / hardisks / CDs / DVDs / Blurays / M-DISC :-) Just took some pictures of the snow that fell here with my Canon camera and saved it to my 4 TB harddisc connected to this Raspberry Pi4 8GB: raspberrypi: /mnt/sda2/backups/laptop_sda11/video/ixus/all_pics/180___01 # l total 111948

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 6535537 Jan 2 21:03 IMG_1535.JPG*

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 6046727 Jan 2 21:03 IMG_1536.JPG*

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 5819215 Jan 2 21:04 IMG_1537.JPG*

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 5280320 Jan 2 21:05 IMG_1538.JPG*

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 4396407 Jan 4 12:34 IMG_1539.JPG*

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 4319402 Jan 4 12:34 IMG_1540.JPG*

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 5945528 Jan 4 12:35 IMG_1541.JPG*

Stone of Rosetta had a lot of interest too:

Recording by old methods can teach a lot about why things were recorded the way they were and how to get the best results playing them back. Many of today's mastering engineers have never actually recorded in the media the are playing and don't realise the difficulties the recording engineers faced.

As an example, the cutting stylus was sometimes skewed to direct the swarf away from the cutterhead in a direction where it would not tangle, this was particularly the case if the studio suction equipment had broken down or if they were recording on location with no suction. There was also a type of cutterhead which was prone to skewing because of the way the cutter was pivoted. These records have to be played with a skewed stylus, otherwise they sound dreadful.

One of my customers was intending to re-issue, from 78s, a rare and valuable opera performance, which had been the subject of several attempts at re-issue in the past. All the re-issues had terrible distortion and had been 'processed' (fudged) one way or another to try to cover it up.

When I played the 78s, I could see they had been cut with a skewed cutter, so I rotated the cartridge and the sound suddenly became clean. None of the other transcription engineers had thought of that. As far as I know, none of them had ever made recordings on discs.and one even uses a commercial radial arm instead of a parallel-tracker, so he can't get the angles consistently right even if he wants to.

I was very lucky: I was mentored by a recording engineer who had spent the early years of his working life cutting hundreds of discs and was able to tell me far more than I would have ever learned by just trying it a few times for myself. I have now cut far more cylinders than discs and have discovered more ways the process can go wrong than the number of cylinders I have cut.

I once had a Mustang V8 ,. 8 cylinders Nice car, needed a bit of weight in the back to stay stable in steering Now I use no cylinders, use a bike Took the bike to the next village to do shopping, warning for sliding because of ice forming all day in the news...

Did not notice when biking, but when stepping of the bike noticed. Keeping balance is an interesting thing. Made it home in one piece, not many bikes on the road.. Cookies!!!