[HN Gopher] 78rpm Records Digitized
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78rpm Records Digitized
Author : Tomte
Score : 93 points
Date : 2021-02-13 14:54 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (archive.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (archive.org)
| reaperducer wrote:
| Since the kids are all about sea shanties these days:
|
| https://archive.org/details/78_rio-grande_leonard-warren-tom...
| pp19dd wrote:
| Thank you! Has one of the best renditions of 'drunken sailor.'
| samstave wrote:
| Thank you for this!
|
| I had a TON of classic Jazz 78s from my grandfather -
| unfortunately I couldnt find a 78 player at the time for the
| life of me - and I gave them to a friend who was a really
| accomplished Jazz drummer in SF - one of my biggest regrets -
| but they were so heavy and I didnt have space for them when I
| moved...
| Gregordinary wrote:
| The title sparked a memory of someone using a flatbed scanner and
| some software back in 2002 to extract audio from scanned images
| of record tracks.
|
| https://www.cs.huji.ac.il/~springer/DigitalNeedle/index.html
|
| Results were interesting though fairly unintelligible.
| Practicality aside, wonder if/how much this method could be
| improved today?
| rvnx wrote:
| I try to understand how this is legal ? I mean: what is the
| difference between Archive.org and any other torrent website ?
|
| Aren't they both preserving the culture ?
|
| Archive.org is doing 20M USD in revenue, lot of people are
| getting paid in the process, and suppliers as well, it's not like
| they are working for nothing. They just don't have investors (but
| can have big salaries).
|
| Genuinely wondering because I saw that you can download games
| there too (and some are still under commercial exploitation).
| SeeManDo wrote:
| Ssshh!
| rvnx wrote:
| ?
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| I think they're agreeing with you. There's no obvious
| reason this should be considered fair use.
|
| Last time I checked, Archive.org also host ROMs of various
| copyrighted Nintendo games. Nintendo are famously litigious
| so I'm not sure how long that is likely to continue.
| Black101 wrote:
| https://archive.org/details/78_west-end-blues_louis-armstron...
| Isamu wrote:
| Thank you for posting! I immediately found some old 78's that I
| had lost, it's great to listen to them again.
| aeontech wrote:
| I hope someone can put Internet Archive and Zero Freitas in touch
| with eachother. Zero is a businessman that has been buying up
| vinyl collections and archiving them in Brazil, amassing an
| enormous archive.
|
| https://thevinylfactory.com/features/inside-the-worlds-bigge...
| textfiles wrote:
| We are very aware of each other.
| marcodiego wrote:
| Archive.org does a very good job in keeping recent history. I
| love that they have a movie/film collection:
| https://archive.org/details/feature_films
| css wrote:
| The trouble with digitizing analog mediums (especially vinyl) is
| how much your equipment can alter the sound. Given a different
| tonearm, cartridge, amp, etc, the same record can sound very
| different.
|
| I've had some luck digitizing some of my collection with a DP-450
| [0] and Ortofon Blue [1], but had higher end stuff end up
| sounding less interesting to my ears.
|
| This is the trouble with audio in general: people not only prefer
| different sound profiles but also perceive sound differently,
| which makes it difficult to get rips (at least in my limited
| experience).
|
| There is a lot of sibilance in the recordings I sampled from the
| OP link, whoever did the digitization would have benefitted from
| cleaner records, probably an anti-static brush, a fresh
| cartridge, and possibly some post-processing since they're
| already digital. It's better than nothing, of course, but it
| could be a lot better.
|
| [0] https://www.denon.com/en-us/product/turntables/dp-450usb
|
| [1] https://www.ortofon.com/ortofon-2m-blue-p-333
| [deleted]
| dialamac wrote:
| > This is the trouble with audio in general: people not only
| prefer different sound profiles but also perceive sound
| differently, which makes it difficult to get rips (at least in
| my limited experience).
|
| The problem with worrying about this is that even the same
| person perceives sound differently situationally and is simply
| not repeatable. In _most_ cases when someone hears a difference
| it is often just a change in their perception from one moment
| to the next.. and that's even when something measurable has
| changed! The bass sounds better because of that new amp.. well
| no.. you just happened to focus on it more the second time
| around. Longer term people's physiology changes as well.
|
| Only repeat, blinded A-B testing can clearly elicit an
| objective difference that is most likely not due to these
| perceptual inconsistencies.
|
| What does this mean.. record it with decent equipment that
| captures as much useful raw information as possible (and yes
| 96khz is ridiculous as we're not bats). People can EQ and mix
| to their preferences any given day.
|
| It's not clear there was something wrong with the cartridge.
| These are old 78 records.. they weren't mastered with much to
| begin with and the useful fidelity in them is limited. If you
| want you can post-process them with whatever fancy shit, but I
| wouldn't immediately assume the recordings weren't the best
| given what they were working with for source material.
| tingletech wrote:
| not that is changes your point, but 78s are usually shellac
| rather than vinyl.
| css wrote:
| TIL. I only have 45s and 33s. A lot of modern pressings are
| 45 RPM on 12" vinyl.
| jnurmine wrote:
| Perhaps a laser could be used to first reliably replicate the
| original pattern of an LP into digital form, then one could
| feed that pattern to a real tonearm needle somehow, vibrating
| it suitably, in a nondestructive manner.
|
| Like some kind of "fake vinyl", except the actual musical data
| could be downloadable.
|
| This way one could stream/download vinyls while still playing
| the music with all the small imperfections which create warmth
| and the vinyl sound (=crackles of noise and static and wow and
| flutter and the harmonic distortions and so on).
| gruez wrote:
| > The trouble with digitizing analog mediums (especially vinyl)
| is how much your equipment can alter the sound. Given a
| different tonearm, cartridge, amp, etc, the same record can
| sound very different.
|
| Would a scan done with a laser turntable[1] be better? The
| wikipedia article mentions that it produces a much better
| capture than regular tonearms, although they are much more
| susceptible to dust.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_turntable
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| 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.
|
| :-...\\.
| mjcohen wrote:
| Wow! There's a book in here, waiting to be written.
| intc wrote:
| Here's a short video clip from ELP (Japan):
| https://youtu.be/W_4sooWCh_Y.
| csnover wrote:
| 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+turnta
| ble...
| dialamac wrote:
| 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.
| soneil wrote:
| You might be interested to dig deeper around the archive and
| see what they're doing. Each record is transferred using four
| different styli, and then an engineer at GB picks which
| recording to use as the example - but all four are in the
| archive.
|
| They have a video up about the process too -
| https://archive.org/details/mass78rpmdiscdigitization
| doodlebugging wrote:
| I wish I had not sold my 78's to Half Price Books a few years
| back. I had a couple hundred records, some of which had probably
| never been played. I found all of them in a house we bought right
| after getting married.
|
| They were a mix of old Country music, Broadway musical shows,
| Jewish songs, and Big Band stuff. I always intended to digitize
| them before selling them but my phonograph only played 33 1/3 rpm
| and 45 rpm and had no facility for direct recording so everything
| had to be done through a connection to my pc.
|
| I bought a USB interface to a phonograph and recorded about 40 of
| my albums and some that I bought at Half Price Books because I
| really wanted a particular song. After recording each album, I
| used Audacity to compensate for the speed difference and was able
| to get some great music.
|
| It was a huge project though and I was working 7 days a week
| during this period so the spare time to complete it was just not
| available. That is why I decided to take them to Half Price
| Books. I knew that I would get almost nothing for them and that
| there was likely some very good music in the collection but I
| decided that there was a better chance for someone else to see
| them on the racks and tackle the job.
|
| I love old music. It takes me back to my childhood in the same
| way that a smell can transport me to a specific point in time.
| I'm glad that someone has chosen to preserve this music in an
| accessible format and to make it available so others can hear
| those timeless compositions.
|
| Support archive.org if you have the resources.
| justin66 wrote:
| > I wish I had not sold my 78's to Half Price Books a few years
| back. I had a couple hundred records, some of which had
| probably never been played.
|
| How much did you get for them? I assume HPB puts almost all 78s
| in the dumpster.
| doodlebugging wrote:
| 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.
| hubrix wrote:
| Is apples lidar resolution good enough to scan an LP?
| supernova87a wrote:
| I was thinking that this would've been really cool if they'd
| scanned the grooves with a laser to get the exact sound without
| the analog needle noise/imprecision. But I guess it's basically
| what I thought -- output from a record player in digital form.
| Which, I mean, is fine.
| jrowley wrote:
| Parker Higgens made a really cool Twitter bot using this project,
| which creates a little clip of a random record playing:
|
| https://twitter.com/78_sampler?s=21
| thisisparker wrote:
| Thank you for sharing! If folks are interested in the code that
| powers the bot (it uses OpenCV to find the label, then draws
| frames and animates with ffmpeg) it's available here:
| https://github.com/thisisparker/78_sampler
| textfiles wrote:
| This story has made the top of Hackernews before, but it's always
| appreciated when people find it.
|
| For context about the Great 78 project:
|
| http://great78.archive.org/
|
| For the even larger set of 78rpm recording being done:
|
| https://archive.org/details/78rpm
| bjornlouser wrote:
| Couldn't find Tchaikovsky's Pathetique with Ormandy conducting...
| the one with the interesting artwork
|
| http://shellackophile.blogspot.com/2015/04/tchaikovsky-symph...
| tzury wrote:
| This brings me right back to the national treasure Joe Bussard
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPhtR09p6zM
|
| and many others
|
| https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=joe+bussard
| johtso wrote:
| Some previous discussion:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14960597
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(page generated 2021-02-13 23:00 UTC)