Late 78s Question

[OrthoSean]

To answer Sean's question, the Josh White 10" LP is on the Mercury label. This record doesn't "ring" when I thump it with my thumbnail, so it's probably not styrene. I guess it's just really primitive, early thick vinyl in that case.

Ah yes. Mercury 10 inch LPs weren't made from the greatest quality vinyl judging by the ones I have. I assume yours has the black label with greenish-gold (which I believe were the earliest of Mercury's LPs) or silver print? I have a few dozen of them and recently was listening / transferring some of the better stuff, I don't think any of mine were what I'd call nice quiet pressings and most of these are in really nice condition. If you have a mono 1 mil stylus, you might get better sound from that. I can't remember what I setteled on when I transferred some of my stuff this winter.

Sean

[gramophoneshane]

I think I read some time ago that if you hold styrene to a strong light you can see through it??
I've never seen a styrene pressing, as they never used the stuff out here afaik.

[gregbogantz]

I can't speak for the other major labels in the USA, but RCA did use reground vinyl in their less expensive catalog of pop records. This was going on up until around the late 1970s. RCA had in-house vinyl specification numbers because we made our own vinyl compounds in our own plant equipment. What we called V-296 was made with regrind. It can easily be identified by looking at it with an ultraviolet (so-called "black") light. Regrind records will show a moderate to a lot of light colored specks under black light, depending on how much regrind and/or filler was used in the compound, whereas "virgin vinyl" will show very few of these specks. Regrind was used on most of the LP and 45rpm "popular" product which included just about everything except Red Seal. V-341 was the RCA formulation number for virgin vinyl during the early 1970s, and it was used on Red Seal and some custom accounts if the customer wanted to pay for it. Yes, our regrind did sound noisy compared with our virgin vinyl records. Toward the late 1970s, the baby boomers were making money and buying rock and roll and expensive stereo equipment and demanding better sounding LPs, so RCA quit using regrind in all our production. From then on, we sold our scrap records to a recycling facility rather than recycling it ourselves into records.

Yes, styrene is most often colored with dye rather than solids such as carbon black which was used frequently in vinyl formulations. Dyed records will appear semi-transparent or translucent when held up to a strong light. Most records colored with carbon black and/or other solid colorants are opaque and don't pass any visible light to the observer. But that is not always the tell-tale signature of styrene. Vinyl has always been colored with dye by some pressing plants, and that is particularly true with today's production, so you can't say that a record that passes some light is necessarily made of styrene.

Since RCA didn't make styrene LPs in production, I don't have experience with 12 inch styrenes, so I'm not sure if the following observations apply to 12 inch, but with styrene 7 inch you can easily determine if they are styrene by looking for two signs: 1) Styrene records that are injection molded (all were, so far as I know) do not have the labels molded into them as do compression-molded vinyl. The label is glued onto the record after it is pressed, so you can plainly see and feel the edge of the paper label on a styrene record. 2) Injection molding produces a record with a molded, finished outer edge, usually with a quite sharp, square corner between the edge and the play surface. Under close inspection, you can see the parting line of the two halves of the press mold right along the center of the edge which is otherwise perfectly smooth and uniform. Compression molded vinyl records must have excess flash trimmed from their edge. This is done with a rotary shear or a knife cutter which will leave a somewhat non-uniform sharp edge around the circumference of the record. Most later vinyl LPs have no further smoothing of this edge, but some of the earliest LPs had their edges further ground into a smooth radius, just as had been customary with shellac record production. Regardless, the edge of the compression-molded record will not reveal a mold parting line because the edge is formed and finished after molding.

[Kirkwood]

Greg---thanks so much for the lengthy and most informative reply, I'm glad to know. You're such a tremendous source of this info! Given the experiences of others on the board with those older US LP releases, it would seem that RCA wasn't alone in using regrind vinyl.

[Viva-Tonal]

One of my two copies of Mercury MG 50001 is styrene (black label and greenish-gold print) whilst the other one is vinyl (maroon label).

And yes, I have two 10" 78s from the 1950s which are indeed on styrene. Mercury 71102, 'Seven come eleven'/'Freight train' by Rusty Draper (from 1957) and Gee 1011, 'Little girl of mine'/'You're driving me mad' by the Cleftones (from 1956).

[Shane]

To answer Sean's question, the Josh White 10" LP is on the Mercury label. This record doesn't "ring" when I thump it with my thumbnail, so it's probably not styrene. I guess it's just really primitive, early thick vinyl in that case.

Ah yes. Mercury 10 inch LPs weren't made from the greatest quality vinyl judging by the ones I have. I assume yours has the black label with greenish-gold (which I believe were the earliest of Mercury's LPs) or silver print? I have a few dozen of them and recently was listening / transferring some of the better stuff, I don't think any of mine were what I'd call nice quiet pressings and most of these are in really nice condition. If you have a mono 1 mil stylus, you might get better sound from that. I can't remember what I setteled on when I transferred some of my stuff this winter.

Sean

Mine is black with silver print. I was actually playing it on an audiophile cartridge with a very very tiny "microline" stylus. I understand this is probably a pretty poor setup to use with this type of record, due to the fact that it picks up all kinds of noise. This setup works much better on records from the 1970s and forward.

[bart1927]

..... In the 78-era it was usually the other way 'round, the Europeans using more abrasives in their pressing material, resulting in far higher surface noise. Just compare a Victor scroll label to an HMV plum label from the same period. The Victor as a rule has far less surface noise and as a result more audible treble.

Yes,but isn't this reflecting the difference in the primary type of reproduction in Europe and America? America seemed to make the change to lighter (electrical) pickups earlier than we did in Europe. The softer, quieter shellac used in American 78 pressings doesn't stand up so well to playing with heavy acoustic pick ups that were common in Europe until much later. The noisy abrasive fillers ground down the steel needle to fit the groove properly and resulted in better record wear charateristics - as far as I am aware.

Someone please correct me if I am wrong here?

S-B-H

I don't know if that has anything to do with it. I don't know when electrical reproduction became popular in America, but even Victor scrolls (and batwings) from the 1920's usually sound better than their HMV counterparts, even when those HMV's look brand new! I don't believe that electrical playback was already the norm in America in, say, 1927! Also, this phenomenon is only true for HMV records. Most U.K. Columbia records from the 1920's sound just as good as those with a VivaTonal label.