Records on Acetate or Aluminum discs! Click here for more info on this early recording service/hardware manufacturer.
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1943: A Dictionary of Radio Terms
1940: Radioman Romance
Thanks to H. Layer: A never-before-available Magnecord, INC factory-film circ 1955 (???) is now available on YouTube. These are the people that built the machines that powered broadcast tape-recording on the 1950s.
Click here to see the video on YouTube
Loads more Magnecord INC history and related information on PS dot com… just click here!
Beyond Four Tracks
Sansui six-track cassette format c. 1989
Otari Compact 8-track 1/2″ format c. 1989. Also, SECK mixer.
…and you better bet TASCAM made one too.
Above: some short-lived “more-than-four” home-recording formats that were available between the 4-track cassette and ADAT eras. It’s kind hard to imagine how significant an issue ‘track count’ (IE., the number of available tracks of a particular multi-track recording machine) was just a short while ago. It’s not unusual at all these days for me to make a production for an artist that has 80 or even 100 tracks. And I am not talking about some crazy orchestral or prog-rock epic; I am talking about just a well-produced indie pop song. Modern music means layering. Lots of it. When I, and many other folks started doing this, we dreamed of someday having more than 8 tracks to work with. Well, as it turns out, ‘more’ didn’t mean 16, 24, or even 48: it meant infinite. “Be careful what you wish for…”
What will be the next technological barrier to fall in the world of audio production?
I wouldn’t mind seeing all those goddamn wires go away, for one…
Any other ideas?
Although I don’t necessarily agree with super-aggressive enforcement of certain copyright laws, OR the fact that she tried to sue one of my favorite recording-artists after he released an affectionate tribute-song about her, I don’t want anyone to think that I am hating on Wendy Carlos. Given the remarkable and really uncanny life of this great composer, who can really judge? Pictured above: Carlos with cats and synthesizers.
This Wednesday at BAR in New Haven CT I will be performing as part of Tomorrow Tomorrow, a new group organized around Meredith Dimenna. Tomorrow Tomorrow is the first full-length album that I’ve produced in my new spot Gold Coast Recorders and it is very exciting to be bringing it to life for the first time. Meredith is a truly gifted vocalist and the music is unique hybrid of raw country and psychedelic drone. TT is opening for Daughn Gibson, a fine singer who was been getting acclaim for his new record on the White Denim label. If you’re in the area, come on down; the show is free and Bar serves some of the best pizza in world too.
Diggin
Picked up a few interesting pieces today. Above, an Altec 660B microphone circa 1958. I already had a 660A (same thing, but fixed impedance) but this was too good a deal to pass up. Altec marketed these as ‘broadcast mics’ but both of my units, while having pretty good top end, have a pretty weak bass response. The 660B sounds a little bit better to my ears.
The 660B came mounted on this beautiful Shure S36 tabletop mic stand; that’s a push-to-talk DPDT switch mounted on the front.
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Moving on to stranger fare: above, a “Little Mike” as made by the Brooklyn Metal Stamping Company circa 1930. This one confused me for a minute as it had no markings on it other than a patent date on the rear:
This was enough information to coax Google into revealing the origins of this artifact. See here and here for the details.
The Little Mike’s rather long stretch of two-conductor cable terminates in these unusual copper discs. As it turns out, these discs are intended to be attached thru two of the pins on a radio’s detector tube; this will allow the mic signal to come out of the radio speaker.
The question is, naturally: which pins? The grid and the ground-side filament, I assume? I can’t figure out how to get sound out of this thing. I get no DC resistance reading across the two terminals, and no sound when I connect the terminals across a high-gain, high-impedance input. I am guessing, based on the patent date, that this is a single-button carbon mic, which would mean that I would need a low voltage source and a signal transformer that can handle DC on the primary in order to test it. Anyone have any suggestions/advice?
***update: read the comments section for implementation information courtesy of M. Shultz, as well as the not-so-thrilling conclusion to the saga of Little Mike.