78rpm Records Digitized

They can be recorded as a .WAV file at 33 rpm, which is then easy to write a program to speed up to 78.

Thank you for pointing this feature out. IA never cease to amaze me.

That's just amazing. Last year I realized you can still download winamp (they ... freed it??) and it has that bizarrely good milkdrop 2 visualizer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EO2YkCvOhNE - it's mindblowingly interesting.

Here's a short video clip from ELP (Japan): https://youtu.be/W_4sooWCh_Y.

I was wondering the same thing! For the dust problem, I’d like to imagine that the machines could be modified with an air pump to blow away anything ahead of the pickup. One probably wouldn’t want that extra noise in a listening room, but for archiving, it wouldn’t matter.

I guess when you can get a ‘good enough’ traditional turntable for a couple hundred bucks but an ELP laser turntable costs over $14,000[0] the economics just don’t make a lot of sense. I wonder how much the IRENE systems cost.

[0] https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_nkw=elp+turntable...

It's the equalization that had the kids thinking 78 was so obsolete & bad sounding compared to our 45's and the upcoming 33's back in the early 1960's.

Naturally it was all the fault of the RIAA.

By that time almost all new record players had the recent RIAA standard equalization built in, by compensation in the audio playback circuit based on the published RIAA engineering standard which had emerged.

Otherwise the 45's & 33's would have sounded nasty themselves since way less bass frequencies could be represented mechanically by the analog carving of the signal into the _microgrooves_ of the more-compact discs and not as many highs could be recovered at the slower playing speeds.

Compared to 78's which had plenty of space between the grooves since there was only one tune per side.

When they first tried to track smaller grooves more closely to get more tunes on a disc, the playback needle would jump out of the groove if more bass frequencies were not removed relative to 78's, before cutting the groove.

So almost all vintage record players which have speeds for 33, 45 & 78 [which is almost all of them] play everything through the RIAA circuit, so the 33 & 45 sound correctly equalized but the 78's are miserable because of the EQ even though they are turning at the right speed.

So 78's always sounded lousy since the beginning for me and everyone younger, even including a number of years older, and I was already a critical listener before The Beatles started making records.

78's had never been able to contain the full analog level of bass either, so their equalization had been engineered by each record company as best they could based on their advances in materials & electronics as the 78's were developed and had become popular. But there was no real standard and each record company made occasional improvements over the decades of 78 dominance.

To begin with a record album was a boxed set of these single-tune-per-side 78 records.

Then came the RIAA and an industry-agreed standard for equalization so popular music could continue to be distributed in audio form at prevailing prices on 45's & 33's, but at a cost of pressing closer to sheet music than 78 albums.

Plus there was going to be stereophonic sound with each channel on either side of the microgroove, fully compatible with monophonic by nature. Stereo 78's were never going be an actual thing, they had always been mono.

After RIAA, single 45's replaced the single 78, and 33's replaced the multi-78 albums with a single full-size disc.

Anyway by the time the 1990's came around I decided to do something about the EQ thing.

Firstly studying RIAA compensation using plenty of vintage 33 & 45 vinyl, as well as numerous other-peoples-circuits, then fully pursuing the NIH approach as if it had never been done before.

Numerous AM/FM/Turntable/8-Track combo players were being finally discarded, and they had come from various price-points in design & manufacturing, some very expensive consoles. A few times I was able to use a Dremel to simply saw out the audio portion of the PCB for testing, then later trim out only the RIAA sub-section for further testing in an otherwise all-reference rig.

Music CD's were already more popular than ever, so next had to design a flat analog circuit having less noise than a CD can reproduce. Could then fully confirm the best results would not be obtained using CD versions as references.

Then adding only passive components made my RIAA curve out of it.

Simply eating away at my excess gain & headroom willy-nilly compared to what I had seen and it came out great. Some EE's will probably relate to the math involved to select RIAA component values. The proof is in the testing. Much more testing than math & soldering.

Then came the 78's and no more math, just soldering & testing.

Sure had gotten a lot of pattern recognition done by then though, this was by design.

It was assumed the RIAA curve had been adapted from previous but disparate 78 EQ curves, so that was attempted to be reversed.

The best references were the ones by Elvis, Bing Crosby, Chuck Berry and a few other very popular artists who had simultaineously released new singles on 45 & 78 even after everyone knew 78's wouldn't be available for most releases after a number more years.

Some of the tunes could also be heard in vintage movies where they had sounded as intended, rather than ugly like 78's played on a late 1950's 60's or 70's turntable always did.

With numerous classical from US and Europe, some jazz, show tunes, pipe organ, and of course the 1812 Overture to go along with the pop music, another trend thought necessary was to make sure the Deccas came out good at the same time as the Capitols since they were often more numerous at the time.

During this reiterative process the best styluses could be selected.

When all was said & done what made people's jaw drop was The Tennessee Waltz by Les Paul & Mary Ford.

This was so popular a hit that the previous owner had obviously left it on their heavy-arm original 78 player for at least hundreds of plays, collecting little dust between plays but still the total amount of dust expected over that period of time. The music was about halfway scratched out of the groove and it was ugly :-(

Apparently they had never played the other side of the record though, it didn't have any words to the song anyway and you couldn't even dance to it at all. Record companies would never put a popular song (or even ones having popular potential) on both sides of the record, and Paul & Ford had already been on the air a lot. Nope, this was just Les Paul solo picking on some experimental electronic techniques at the time, using his own handmade equipment like nobody else had either.

This was also the harder phenolic pre-vinyl, vintage vinyl never sounded that good, even through the audiophile excesses of the '70's.

:-...\.

Old 78 records were produced with equipment from recording to cutting and pressing that is long since obsolete. Even if you overcome the challenges of dealing with laser equipment (dust, tracking).. what extra information are you really getting?. that it is useful signal more than even a dB or two above the noise I think is very wishful thinking.

Literally the only advantage of a laser turntable is that they don't wear out the disc with repeated plays. They are worse in literally every other respect, especially sound quality, since they have no method of pushing dirt and dust out of the groove, so the record has to be perfectly clean, which is essentially impossible.

> dust

I wash my vinyl with liquid dish soap before playing, then air-dry them. It removes all hair, grease, dust, etc. Not a spec left.

TIL. I only have 45s and 33s. A lot of modern pressings are 45 RPM on 12” vinyl.

I imagine someone with a signal processing background could design a suitable digital filter to emulate the effects of various tone arms. Designing the filter might require cutting a special tone record so that the frequency response can be measured.

Alternatively, the "hip" thing to do might be to train a neural network on a bunch of old record recordings, and then pipe whatever you want through the resulting model.

I knew going in that I wouldn't get much so I was not surprised to end up with a only few dollars which I spent on books for the kids. At the same time I also sold them a bunch of books so the records and books were co-mingled money. I know that HPB has always had a good selection of 78s on the shelves and that is why I took them. Hopefully they were able to send them to a store where someone could buy and enjoy them.

I also have a large collection of vinyl albums from the late 60's through the mid-80's that I tried to sell/give to a well-known local record shop in FtWorth. They wouldn't touch my albums or 45s and told me that most albums have no real value. This, in spite of the fact that their entire store was wall-to-wall used albums. They recently moved to a new building with a lot more floor space and their store has become a lot more like a HPB in that you can get memorabilia, posters, junk and crap along with your used albums. Pretty funny actually.

Ah, brilliant!

Also, Jason Scott replied to me! Wohoo!

Also, thank you for all the work you do, and thank you for writing about it.

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