The Secret Society of Lathe Trolls

Those little Recordette machines that used a combo play/cut cartridge are apparently better playback devices than cutters. There is no high-frequency pre-emphasis in the recording scheme, and they couldn't cut anything above somewhere between 4K and 5K even with all the planets aligned, and at nowhe...

Fresh lacquer discs and new cutting styli will give you better recordings than you'll get on any Wilcox-Gay blanks even if you tried cutting them with new styli.

There's the normal slight shedding of tape, and then there is 'sticky-shed syndrome' which is the situation in which a tape will require 'baking' to drive out the moisture absorbed by the tape binder. DO NOT bake acetate base tape! No acetate tape will exhibit sticky-shed syndrome; the offenders tha...

And the big guy with Mel Blanc is none other than arranger Billy May.

The Ampex at 14.18 is a 201....a 200A retrofitted with the full track head stack designed for the 300 and its oxide-in wind (the 200A being oxide-out like unto the AEG/Telefunken Magnetophon K4 it was modeled on).

Here are scans of the pages of the article THE FUNDAMENTALS OF RECORDING by Oliver Read from RADIO WORLD of February 1940 (along with the front cover).... http://i150.photobucket.com/albums/s88/Perisphere-photo/IMG_0002-13.jpg http://i150.photobucket.com/albums/s88/Perisphere-photo/IMG_0003-17.jpg h...

I first heard of Ewing Nunn via an article in THE ABSOLUTE SOUND some years ago. He'd used a Presto disc recorder, and (eventually) condenser mikes he made himself. After tape came into use he used a modified Magnecord deck, and toward the end, a Revox A77. I have three LPs Nunn engineered; one of t...

Yes, glass base discs do indeed have a lacquer coating on them into which the grooves are cut. Many were made by both Presto and Audio Devices.

The only studio lathe/stereo cutter rig I've ever seen used a Haeco-modified Crown DC 300 amp to drive its modified Westrex 3D head....that might be an amp to look into as well.

Good luck with your set-up though!

Do you still have the cutting head? I'd love to see that. It LOOKS great. What I made these records with was made from bits of the remains of an Orthophonic Victrola. All I was given was the induction disc motor and the board it was mounted on, and the board next to it on which the tone arm was mou...

I did a number of these in 1979 using wet paint. I used a broken talking machine's sound box to make a crude recording head (using a transistor radio speaker); a steel needle made the groove in the wet paint. I could get about one minute of sound onto these things at 78 rpm. After the paint dried yo...

http://lanarkshire.uk.openlist.org/v.asp?id=47124 This sale is for a rare 1926 Western Electric cutting lathe model D-85249. These were originally used for cutting Vitaphone discs for sound films, but they continued to be used for many decades for various disc recording needs at the studios. This on...

Here's some goodies I found at the local Salvation Army shop today.... Mostly 8" discs; they were found in this album: http://i150.photobucket.com/albums/s88/Perisphere-photo/DSCI1475.jpg http://i150.photobucket.com/albums/s88/Perisphere-photo/DSCI1476.jpg http://i150.photobucket.com/albums/s88/Peri...

Spotted on the Steve Hoffman forums:

VMS80 Lathe For Sale
Located In London England
VMS82 converted to vinyl, Sal 74B rack, SX74 Cutting head. All fully working and maintained.
£26,000 GBP +Shipping
PM me, or email barry.grint@alchemysoho.com

Must have been used for in-house ref cuts. All the Motown (Gordy, Tamla, Soul etal) records from the 1960s heyday I've ever seen were all mastered by the custom division of RCA. 45s and mono LPs on typical Scully gear, stereo LPs on Neumann gear, and all the records have (amongst various markings) t...

I tried a few discs early on with dried paint. The 'cutting' was more scratching than anything else, and things tended to flake away.

On the topic of records made with paint, 30 years ago I made a number of home-brew single sided 78s using enamel spray paint and posterboard. Part of the idea goes back to when I was about 5 years old, and accidentally dropped a screwdriver one day! Its bit happened to graze the side of the body of ...

The Talking Machine Forum has regrouped under an internet domain owned by one of the members. This way, there aren't going to be any third party hosts to pull the board down when a catfight ensues. The OTV Board lost most of its members to the Talking Machine Forum and the TMF is now much more popu...

Permanent magnet.

My hunch is, the speaker is faulty. BINGO! External sounds great, it turns out. yayyy, I successfully recapped after all! Dad's machine had such a buzzy quality when I was young, and through the 1970s it got eventually where there was no real sound from it. By 1980 it did not produce sound at all d...