I imagine some recording machines had constantly variable speeds, like Victor home units did. I have a pile of line checks, not the same I mentioned before, that play at about 27-28 RPM. They play with a 1.0 mil stylus and sound horrible with anything else. Why the very slow RPM and smaller groove is anyone's question, a few well known transfer guys have seen these and asked the same questions I did, but they sound fantastic and were obviously professionally done line checks from the 1930s. In my 35 years of transferring things like this, I've just always found that having a selection of sizes can make a gigantic difference, unless the recording itself was poorly done to begin with.bfinan11 wrote:I've found a bunch of these, usually a typical 78 rpm stylus (Shure N78S, 2.8mm) works quite well.
Semi-related question: one stack of them from 1941 was recorded at about 60 RPM. Was this ever standard or did someone have a wildly out of tune machine?
Sean