The Secret Society of Lathe Trolls

Hi Steve,

nor did I -- I only noticed how many times they had been seen. Quite a lot at first and very few at the end. Probably it became boring. But it taught me a bit about what porn distributors call their things.

Best wishes,


George

Hello, I have been thinking about how to cut up the record so that every buyer gets some relevant audio. If the circle is just split into 100 equal areas, you would get most out of the pieces close to the label. However, every piece would only be a series of short snippets that you could listen to i...

I'm sorry; I stupidly wrote "copper" for the one-turn secondary that is the driver for the cutting stylus. A lot of the effort went into reducing the moment of inertia of the components, and Blumlein and Holman chose aluminium, as it is also stated in the Blumlein book. I posted a few comments on th...

I have a further comment: the whole cutterhead is not mounted correctly. I have worked with the top view given by the seller (a very good image), and I have rotated the cutterhead assembly around the hinge that supports it. When the bridge carrying the assembly is parallel to the travel of the turnt...

Hello,

in the link given by gus to another thread I have posted a description and a warning. The Blumlein cutterhead is not complete: the integrated input transformer coil and the core are missing. It does not work.
But it still has symbolic value.

Best, Greybeard

Hello, what is offered is the mechanical part, known as the "Hayes Portable" and a Blumlein mono cutterhead fitted to that in the 1930s. The Hayes Portable in its most common form (in several museums world-wide) was developed in the early 1920s to drive the recording wax below an acoustic cutterhead...

Hello Trolls, and merry Christmas, I thought I would add a few details to the joyous message that acoustic lateral recording is now taking place again. Congratulations on your results! I myself have been down that road and I did quite a few experiments before being put to the test in 1994. It all st...

Berliner used sheet zinc for his etched records, and I had observed that the crystal boundaries are usually very obvious. Etching of a surface acts differently on a single crystal and on a boundary, giving rise to one source of noise in the master record. So, for an interesting experiment in 1995, I...

----- well I was rather questioning the idea that the cut was directly on copper, not the speed as such. I do not know quite enough about DMM, but obviously 33 1/3 rpm and 45 rpm are sufficient to maintain the chatter at 70 kHz for the vertical vibration, but I have not read anywhere that "half-spee...

I have used the cutterhead itself as a pickup for checking on the cutting noise while cutting. In a professional setup this would make the routing of the signals more complex. In my case it has been when trying out different mastering materials, and I had the time available. I like the constant-time...

I am sort of curious: who monitors the cut with a pickup while cutting?? I don't think the combination of poor knowledge and high price expectations is particularly pleasant. eBay is for the lay people. I wonder who gets laid.

The thing we want is to let the reproducing stylus make the same moves as the cutting stylus. So, if the recording has happened with a swivelling arm it means that the movement of the stylus was generally not on a radius. The reproduction would have to be the same amount "not on a radius", and if yo...

Hello, Modern pickup arm design is of two kinds: the pivoting or radial tonearm and the tangential tonearm, which uses a small carriage on a track. In the vinyl world, names like Percy Wilson, Erik Löfgren or Hans Baerwald are revered, and it is uniformly thought that Percy Wilson was the first to d...

Hi Mossy, EMI were among the last to keep up the 78 rpm format - they did not believe in the LP in the beginning. The last 78 rpm records to be phased out were records of Royalty - that was in 1962. But of course we know that 78s were produced in India and possibly Africa into the 1960s. So it is no...

- essentially, the anthology you mention (and its companion) from the AES are almost 100% reprints from what is available in database form, as mentioned by tragwag. Your academic library will be able to give you access to the AES database, and you just have to adhere to their rules if you don't want...

Hello, glass disc as a base material was caused by war shortages of aluminum. However, glass was used even post-war, and Audio Devices had a whole line about which they proved that it had much less rumble than the aluminum discs. It was simply impossible to polish aluminum to that degree, and any un...

did Lathetrolls ever have www.lathetrolls.com? I got in doubt, because that was the address in my "bookmarks" section, and this morning I had the same "password required" response. I always thought that what I had was the phpbbweb address, and I have now edited my bookmark accordingly. If Lathetroll...

We are getting into matters, which are only relevant for extreme HiFi, and you cannot get that from a stacker anyway. However, first, the rake or vertical cutting angle defines the direction of the wrinkles in the groove (wasn’t that a nice way to put it?). If you have a line contact stylus (Shibata...

Hi, Serif, my friend, you said: "I'm not keen on helping anyone drop stack change his good vinyl. I should think it's a good idea not to encourage stacked disc playback, for the safety of the grooves, even if it's easier on the ergonomics ...." However, that is precisely the beauty of the RCA invent...

Hi blacknwhite thank you very much for this exposé. Your mapping of the variety existing is much appreciated. I support your plea for adherence to the industry standard for these records; this is absolutely essential. Imagine that they changed the dimensions of "D"-cells. Or dropped the 600 Ohm tele...