High Pitch Whine

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Ampico66
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High Pitch Whine

Post by Ampico66 »

I was playing a 1927 Victor Orthophonic record on my Credenza with its rebuilt reproducer and a new needle. During the play of the record you could hear a persistent high-pitched frequency. What causes that? I've also heard it on record transfers to CD.

Damon
St. Louis, MO

syncopeter
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Re: High Pitch Whine

Post by syncopeter »

Is it present on every record? Or just at the end of certain records? It is a known fact that in some cases the cooling of the wax caused resonances in the cutting head resulting in a high pitch whine. Waxes were heated to a certain temperature and then placed on the cutting table just before recording started. But in cold weather they could cool down a little to quickly and get stiff, so the cutting stylus would have difficulty cutting the groove and could start to resonate.

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Retrograde
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Re: High Pitch Whine

Post by Retrograde »

I always figured the noise was from the needle scraping the bottom of the groove. As for CD & mp3 transfers, I've noticed there's a high pitched whine when the digital recording has too much clean up work done to it or it's a low bit rate copy of the file. Some file formats have worse whine that others.

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bart1927
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Re: High Pitch Whine

Post by bart1927 »

Perhaps you could make a little recording of the noise you mean. If it is only present on certain Victor records it is most likely the phenomenon Syncopeter described, which is also knowen as "the dog's whistle". It tends to get worse towards the end of the record.

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Swing Band Heaven
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Re: High Pitch Whine

Post by Swing Band Heaven »

Is it like the high pitch whine towards this recording of "La Boheme selection" You can faintly hear it from about halfway through and it just gets louder and louder towards the end. If so its a cooling wax master that causes this sound.

http://www.box.net/shared/7xjwanqosk

S-B-H

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Wolfe
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Re: High Pitch Whine

Post by Wolfe »

Cooling wax is the likely culprit.

It seems to appear most often on Victors of the late 1920's, and some other labels, too, like Romeo.
Never heard it on a Columbia disc.

This Pathé I posted to my You Tube channel has it starting about halfway into the record.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojEzAtenvDU[/youtube]

There's nothing to be done about it if you're playing on a vintage phonograph. For digital transfers one can try to reduce it with a notch filter, sometimes that'll work, unless it oscillates, then it's harder.

syncopeter
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Re: High Pitch Whine

Post by syncopeter »

Almost all companies suffered from the problem every now and then, although I've never come across a Columbia record that had the whine, be it an American or English recording. The speakers and head phones used for monitoring the recording process were not particularly good so it is possible that the technician simply did not notice the whine. In the late 1930s Dutch Decca made a number of recordings with a strong 50 Hz hum because of a fault in the recording amp. These were issued anyhow, because the then current professional playback systems weren't able to reproduce frequencies that low. The man who made the recordings was Jaap van den Hul, the father of the very famous Aalt Jouk van den Hul of Cartridge and Cable fame, and a great sound technician himself, who would never have had accepted this error had he been able to hear it. His late 1930s recordings sound like they had been recorded 20 years later, perfectly clear, beautifully balanced, but alas sometimes with that dreaded hum. Even on worn 78s there is treble way up to the 8k range.

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Wolfe
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Re: High Pitch Whine

Post by Wolfe »

syncopeter wrote: The speakers and head phones used for monitoring the recording process were not particularly good so it is possible that the technician simply did not notice the whine.
They couldn't monitor what was coming off the wax anyway, could they?
I haven't heard of them having pickup heads traveling behind the cutter to monitor the signal. If you could have done that without destroying the wax.

When they got the test pressings back, they could maybe detect it then, but as you said, playback equipment of the day may or may not have reproduced it, and/or, it wasn't worth it to call all the musicians back and start the session all over again. That would have been expensive.

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Swing Band Heaven
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Re: High Pitch Whine

Post by Swing Band Heaven »

Talking of what it was possible for the average gramophone / radiogram to reproduce reminded me of a chaper of a book I have called Hi-Fi for pleasure by Burnett James. There is an interesting chapter on the subject but also a useful chart which I have reproduced below in case it is of interest to anyone.

S-B-H
Attachments
Hi Fi for pleasure_0002.jpg
Hi Fi for pleasure_0001.jpg

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Ampico66
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Re: High Pitch Whine

Post by Ampico66 »

You guys get the idea, thanks for the clarifications. I thought the high-frequency whistle was from a problem with my needles (which I change every record) or record not being clean or something.

Damon

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