78 Discussion List

I first missed the following discussion on the 78-L email list when it first appeared in Dec 2009

It wasn’t until I was cleaning out my email box that I read them more carefully, and discovered they contained a wealth of information relating to the early history of electrical recording.

And with this, it’s worth pointing out that this very situation clearly illustrates what I think is fundamentally wrong with the 78-L list in its present email form.

So many excellent emails are sent out each day from the list – that many members often express a high level of frustration in reading and processing them. Sometimes I receive up to 100 emails from the 78-L list a day on a variety of interesting topics. When this happens, things are sometimes missed – including whole topics. Was I asleep for this interesting topic??

With this discussion on the history of early electrical recording; I’ve had to condense and re-organise the original emails so that they may make sense to the researcher and the blog reader alike…

The discussion started when a member of the list asked the following questions…

I have a dumb question that’s been bugging me for a while now. Everyone knows that electrical recording arrived in 1925.

• How sudden was the change?
• Did everybody change at once?
• Did some labels continue to record acoustically for some time afterwards?
• What happened to all the acoustical gear — did they just throw it out, or did they pass it on to some other use, perhaps a cheaper auxiliary studio, or a budget label or something?
• What’s the last known acoustical recording?

The responses to these questions were interesting and varied. Essentially 1925 was noted as the beginning of electrical recording – however the real answer isn’t so simple or clear. For example, I’ve read that some transcription and early experimental electric recordings go as far back as the mid teens of the 1900’s!

For commercial labels, the general consensus is 1925.

One member of the 78-L list noted:

Pre-1925, electric recording had been done experimentally, although Marsh Laboratories had their own homebrew electrical recording gear they used for their Autograph records, and for items released on other labels including Paramount.

Western Electric refused to lease their recording gear to any other labels, so everyone else (including Edison) had to ‘roll their own’, cobbling things together from manufacturers like GE and RCA.

Brunswick began electric recording early in 1925 around the same time as Victor and Columbia, but with their vastly inferior ‘Light-Ray’ method (quickly improved by resorting to a proper microphone). Pathé and Plaza (Banner etc) began circa 1926. Edison began electric recording around September 1927.

Many of the larger companies got going with electrical recording really quickly in the first half of 1925 like Victor in the USA and HMV in the UK, for example. They re-recorded various works, especially classical, with electrical equipment and usually the acoustic equivalent records were removed from the catalogue soon after although shops would have still stocked the earlier discs in many cases.

Several of the cheaper labels (especially in the UK) continued to issue acoustic items. One good example of this is IMPERIAL. Owned by Vocalion and later Crystallate they issued a lot of european classical music and US jazz and dance band items that were recorded electrically but many of their own recordings were acoustic into late 1927/early 1928.

One member also added that the last acoustic recordings were anywhere from 1925 up to late 1930!

Victor’s last acoustics were some west coast recordings in the summer of 1925. After that, all Victors were electrical recordings.

Columbia ‘went electric’ in similar fashion, but continued using their 1923-upgraded acoustic gear for their budget labels for some time afterward. The last known Columbia acoustic matrix is 150528-1, ‘There’s a wah-wah gal in Agua Caliente’ by the Golden Gate Orchestra (the California Ramblers….labels state vocal by Jim Andrews, it’s actually Arthur Fields) recorded 23 May 1930.

In relation to what happened to the equipment – the verdict is still out. One member suggested:

Maybe some of it ended up in schools, sold off for spare parts or in music stores that made personal records??

Other suggestions include:

I also wonder if some of this stuff ended up in places like Africa, Asia, or South America for recording there?

I imagine some of the acoustical components could have been adapted to the electrical process. If they had an electrically powered cutting lathe, all one would need to do would be to put on the electrical cutting head in place of the acoustic one, right?

Non-electrical lathes were probably in use longer than you’d expect. English Columbia preferred them right through the 40s, I believe, probably because of unreliable power. I’ve heard that Decca’s field recordings couldn’t run longer than 3 minutes because that was the limit on their portable units.

I have a feeling that early on, the acoustic horn and sound box apparatus was removed from the lathe, replaced with an electrical cutting head, as many early Victor electricals look like they were done on the same machines (even down to playing at about the same speed).