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HD Vinyl is coming soon!!!

I remember "Music to Watch Girls By" - listened to it quite a few times. Never got me any girls though......

Thanks for posting the notes!
 
Any chance of you re-scanning that at a higher resolution? Blowing it up, I can't read it very well; it seems something which would be worth making a good printout of.
 
I have that Stereo 35MM as a pre-recorded tape. I also have quite a few other Command tapes. Command was the poster boy for Ping-Pong Stereo which was the fad in the late 1950s and 1960s. 35MM actually is an extremely high quality medium on which to record, for many technical reasons. It wasn't used very much though because of its extremely high media costs.
 
rammisframmis said:
Any chance of you re-scanning that at a higher resolution? Blowing it up, I can't read it very well; it seems something which would be worth making a good printout of.
Click to expand...
I sent it to the email address off a card you gave me when I met up with you at your place several years ago. If that's no longer any good then contact me via the link in my auto signature and I'd be happy to send you the higher res scan that I made.

Jeff
 
By the by...

While flipping through my Dad's vinyl collection I am amazed at the number of albums that are plastered with some branded latest-and-greatest claim about the grooves contained therein. "Dynagroove" seems to be just one of many. Every brand / label seemed to have some proprietary claim of their own (Dentman's being just one of many possible examples). I think it's kind of neat - historically - at what was still the dawn of the stereo age - to see how everyone was vying for attention.

But one thing that stands out, as I have listened to these albums off and on over many years, is how good that music was, and how dynamic and "real" (for the day) those recordings were.

Jeff
 
JeffMackwood said:
But one thing that stands out, as I have listened to these albums off and on over many years, is how good that music was, and how dynamic and "real" (for the day) those recordings were.

Jeff
Click to expand...

That is mainly due to the fact that in those days, mixing consoles were extremely basic. In fact, even the ability to equalize the feed from a particular microphone was very rare. Typically the feed from perhaps half a dozen microphones were sent to a mixing board which only had the function of blending the microphones into one of three channels; left, center, and right. The only processing which was routinely done was compressing vocal feeds, a necessity even today since the dynamic range of a close-miked vocal is way too wide for listening.

The typical recorder in those days was an Ampex 300, which was a 1/2" three track machine operating at 15 ips. The three channels were mixed to stereo, usually on either an Ampex 300 two track or 350 two track. Sometimes the master was directly recorded to two track tape. All of these machines and the mixing board were all-vacuum tube of course. Also the studios in those days were actual acoustic spaces with some amount of natural reverb - not like the extremely dead studios which we have today.

Some labels like Command and Everest recorded to 35mm magnetic film instead of tape. This film had 3 very wide tracks so the dynamic range was pretty impressive even by today's standards. In fact, when I was working in film mixing stages, one time we had to transfer a 35mm magnetic film master of a movie soundtrack to digital (three 3-track 35mm machines, one each for dialogue, music and sound effects with left, center, and right tracks each, blended equally together in three track) - the dynamic range was so wide that we had to lightly compress the feed from the 35mm machines otherwise digital couldn't cope with the dynamic range. And remember, analog tape does not hard limit like digital - it saturates gently so the real-world dynamic range is greater than the "measured" dynamic range, and those super wide 35mm tracks had even greater range than usual. Lowering the overall level going into the A to D converters was not really effective either since the quietest parts of the soundtrack which were fine on the 35mm film was too far in the mud for digital.
 
Great info, thanks. Love it!

Jeff the records my father left me from that time period are exactly as you described. I find really interesting. I feel lucky to have so many mint examples.
 
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