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In Reply to: RE: Stereophile: Computer Audio Without Computers posted by Sprezza Tura on December 12, 2014 at 13:05:50
I see. Making recordings accounts for your sanity. You have perspective and you have a real reference. :-)
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
Follow Ups:
Sanity? I am not sure.
You should see the looks when I bust out a reel to reel deck with vintage microphones on occasion..I might as well have had a wire recorder as far as anyone under 40 is concerned.
Most of the live recordings that I made were done in analog, typically on a two track Tandberg machine at 7.5 IPS, using a pair of AKG C-451 cardiods. I still have this equipment and used it to transcribe the 1970's vintage recordings to my web site. The piano recordings were pretty close to transparent when played back through a pair of Snell A-IIIs located a few feet from the piano, but only after quite a bit of adjustments to the microphone positions.
As a kid I had a wire recorder. Can you say wow and flutter, especially after passing a knot that had been used to splice a wire break?
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
That is quite a rig...I wish I had a Tandberg..although my dad had one of their receivers..built like a Sherman tank.
I was amazed by this story. Woody Guthrie's daughter received an anonymous package in the mail consisting of a few cans of wire. She had no idea what they were, but it turned out to be the only known recording of Woody in front of an audience. The found the equipment needed to master it and it was released. She said it was a method of recording used in the 40's for just a few years before tape became the standard.
I got the Tanberg tape recorder for $200 second hand in 1975. The microphones were about $100 each. To put matters in perspective, my wife gave two recitals in Jordan Hall. The NEC recording department made these recordings of these concerts using the Ampex machine in the Jordan Hall recording booth. (I was familiar with this booth, at least as it was a decade earlier.) I still have the bill for each recording session, about $80 per concert, including tape all spooled onto 7 inch reels with leader tape between pieces.
A bit of history... I used to record/broadcast lectures in Jordan Hall at the "Ford Hall Forum" when I was in college in the 1960s. (One of these was given by Ayn Rand. Quite the bunch of groupies after this event.) I once made a live recording of the Boston Symphony Orchestra from Sanders Theater. This was just a matter of turning on the equipment and checking it out and pressing PLAY. The levels had already been determined during the rehearsal earlier in the day. (With a 2 dB allowance for the musicians playing louder in front of an audience.). Other recording sessions that my buddies and I did involved Bob Dylan, Doc Watson, Malcolm X and Benny Goodman. It was in the course of this work that I learned the difference between live microphone feeds (the reference) and everything else. The college radio station at the time was mono, so FM broadcast was at least decent quality. However, even then the difference between the signal up the cable to the transmitter vs. that back through the monitor was dramatic. Even full track 15 IPS Ampex 350 tape recorders were obviously not transparent to live microphone feeds. In those days we were using KLH 6 speakers for studio monitors.
At WHRB in those days there were two groups, the "techies" who built and maintained the equipment and the "control men" who ran the equipment, recording live concerts and doing broadcasts, live or pre-recorded. I was one of the "control men". We considered many of the techies to be sub human. Our basis for this was their obvious deafness. We were responsible for the quality of the broadcast sound and sometimes the equipment malfunctioned. Our job was to detect this and switch to working gear and then arrange to get the defective gear repaired or replaced by the techies. The usual problem was cartridges and needles used to play LPs. On more than one occasion we would summon a techie and complain that a cartridge was distorting playback. The techie would listen and say, "Sounds OK to me.". This is why we concluded that many of these people were sub human. When we ran into these problems we would solve them by deliberately destroying the defective cartridge, so that even a deaf "techie" could hear that there was a problem.
In these early 1960's days the equipment was mono and tube based. The electronics sounded good. Later after the studios moved, a new bunch of techies designed solid state equipment based on discrete op-amp circuits. Fortunately, I had graduated before this and subsequent sonic debacles. I'm sure that all of this new equipment sounded entirely "OK". That was the problem... I identify today's "objectivists" with the deaf techies from this earlier era. Their attitudes remain, even if their slide rules and pocket protectors are gone.
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
"I got the Tanberg tape recorder for $200 second hand in 1975."
The Tandberg had good sound quality but the old joystick transport were sometimes finicky. The newer 3 motor 9000x was nice though. Liked the sound of the Tandbergs better than the B77 or the Crowns of the era. Could not afford the Crowns or the Revox as a teenager but a friend had both and also three Tandbergs. I owned a Pioneer RT-701 which sounded pretty good also.
What a great post. Brings back memories. I guess I get my love of recording and tape from my dad. He bought Revoxes in the mid 60s and recorded everything he could from radio broadcasts and he would haul it around and record anything, even lectures.
Do you still have that BSO recording? Did you archive to digital?
I think you make some very interesting points concerning mic feeds and the distortions that can occur going downstream.
I love reading about recording technology from that period.
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