The Secret Society of Lathe Trolls

Proboards got fed up with all the board-to-board squabbling and yanked BOTH OTV and Talking Machine boards from its site.

AFAIK the Talking Machine lot haven't got anything sorted but I signed on to the renewed OTV forum today.

Columbia in the US protected the centre hole of their very earliest discs with a brass grommet. I think they discontinued this practice some time in 1902.

I've seen one of those late 1950s Columbia Harmony LPs pressed on styrene too. Noisy mess, sadly. Other US makes of LP I've seen on styrene include Decca, Coral and Brunswick (mid 1950s), and some United Artists product from the 1960s, specifically some of their budget Sunset albums and some of thei...

Does this same phenomenon exist when the machine is connected to an external speaker or amp and speaker? My hunch is, the speaker is faulty. 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 prod...

I think, if these are like their early tape machines that came just after them, they had an odd push pull 6SN7 triode output stage. This tube is almost never used for that. That is a most unusual application for the 6SN7. If the 288 has the same electronics as the 180, it will have the 6SN7 for pow...

I still have my dad's 80-1 he'd bought 60 years ago. It's needed a fair amount of electronic work over the years for caps and resistors that went off spec, and the power transformer replaced (never fear, I saved the original but haven't the bux to get it rewound). Still going like always! For those ...

The only Neumann lathe I've ever seen was an AM 32 that had been upgraded to VMS 70 specs (so I was told) that had a Westrex 3D cutter, and it had the advance ball on it. It was in a small studio in Burlington, Iowa; the last time I saw it was in early 1990 when the system was sold as part of the es...

My Recordette 3 (early 1950s, 3 speed version of the Recordette models) had a Shure W56 as the original cartridge. It was apparently adapted from the traditional large format 78 rpm crystal playback cartridges of yore, but it had an added stylus assembly that used a 2 mil (which for a time was calle...

Per Morrison's disc recording book, the WE 1A feedback cutter is vertical, the 2A and 2B are lateral.

Dub Studio wrote:Are you able to sustain a full-time job from cutting vinyl?

This is something I'd like to know too! And if so, where?

God, I wish I knew where I could get some training and get into proper pro disc mastering. I've always wanted to do it, all my life, since I was very small.

NOTE--Changing from 45s to 2A3s is NOT plug-and-play even though the pin-outs of the two types are the same. The filament in a 45 pulls 1.5 amps, the 2A3 2.5 amps. Hence the current draw in a push-pull amp will jump up by 2 amps just changing from one pair of 45s to a pair of 2A3s. Also, the transco...

Dynagroove was designed to do two things: Overcome the dynamic range limitations of domestic console stereos of the era (it was introduced in c.1963) through manipulation of the frequency balances of sounds depending on the dynamics and loudness of them (somewhat compressing bass and midrange more t...

Those early inside-start Pathe discs were vertical cut, not lateral. I won one of them from a Nauction four years ago, a 14" item. Plays on the dot at 90 RPM.

Somewhere I have an LP on an obscure label (I'll post full details when I find it again ASAP) made around 1959 or 1960 of Hawaiian music that was recorded, mixed and mastered by Rudy Van Gelder. Full stereo, even has 'RVG STEREO' hand-stamped into the dead wax on both sides. The sleeve has a quite d...

It might work, but any sounds common to both horns would result in a vertical groove modulation (hey, just cut at 80 rpm, and advertise the records as mono-compatible with your Pathephone or other vertical-groove players! :-) ). I actually do have a small wind-up machine, a Columbia Grafonola made i...

Rudy Van Gelder used Fairchild 642 cutters on his Scully lathes IIRC. He may still have at least some of his disc cutting gear, though he no longer uses it....

Generally, the thread (aka chip or swarf) should throw to the spindle of the turntable. Early on, this was aided by an engineer drawing it to the spindle through the use of a chip brush. (This practice can be seen in a brief scene in the old Barbra Streisand film FUNNY GIRL.) I think one argument fo...

What a site! All my life, the one thing I wanted to be was a disc mastering engineer. I was fascinated as a kid with some 78 rpm acetate discs with my dad playing on them, and wondering how they were made, etc. Dad said the machine looked like a record player, except the arm was much bigger.... The ...