hearsedriver wrote:What makes some of these blanks record louder than others? Ive tried a couple of different brands. Is it the hardness of the cylinder?
Hearsedriver, I am glad that you asked that question!
It is a very good question and one which opens up
a huge subject.
First, let me explain that I have been working on
knowing the answer to this question for many, many
years now.
There are many factors involved, so I'll explain a few
of them as best as I can:
The loudness or quietness of a cylinder recording
has many things which influence it.
The trick when trying to compare different blanks
as far as overall loudness or quietness is that you
have to do the best you can to give them all the
same treatment as far as what recording is made on
each kind so that a fair comparison can be made.
Because, it is possible to holler your head off
at a quieter blank and make a loud recording just the
same as it is possible to talk softly to a louder
blank an get a soft and faint recording.
Temperature also has a whole heck of a lot to do
with how well or how poorly a blank records.
My experience has been that an ambient temperature
above 80 degrees F makes the best recordings.
Things continue to improve well up into the mid-90s,
then around 97 or so, things change.
Above about 97 degrees F and on up to 100 F and over
things deteriorate because you'll get echo-around
and lots of blasting.
Temperature and recording technique aside though,
the hardness or softness of a blank controls its
overall sensitivity to taking sound well.
There is a tradeoff between making a blank which is
hard enough to stand many, many playbacks, while still
being soft enough to cut well when being recorded upon.
A very soft blank can be made which records very well
but wears out quickly when played back.
Conversely, a very hard blank can be made which
can be played hundreds of times, but is very difficult
to make a nice loud robust recording upon.
What I always try to do is to strike a happy medium
of excellent recordability over a reasonable temperature
range from about 70 to 95 F, and also keep it hard
enough to be played back about 100 times at least, before
it starts sounding harsh.
I have found that all brands of stearic acid perform
slightly differently. I won't go into all of those
details now, but some stearics work great with 17.3%
added ceresin, and others work better with 18.5 %
and even 19% added ceresin.
When making blanks, if you change brands of stearic,
then you must try a standard amount of added ceresin
to see if it's correct. Then do bunch of recording
and playback tests on a blank made that way.
If it's too quiet, then add a few percent ceresin to
soften it.
If it's too loud and blasty and it does not stand up
well to many playbacks, then subtract a few percent ceresin to make it a bit harder.
These tests and adjustments can take days and even weeks
to gather meaningful data from.
But it all leads back to one thing:
The hardness of the blank.
Warmer temperatures make them much softer.
Cold temps. make them much harder.
More ceresin makes them softer. Less ceresin makes
them harder. Less aluminum makes them softer.
More aluminum makes them harder. The working range
for aluminum is from about .25% up to around .5%
by weight. That can be stretched on the low side
too. I do know for a fact that .19% aluminum by weight
works real well.
In addition to all of that mentioned so far, there's
the overall noise of the blank to consider as these
adjustments are made:
More ceresin tends to add more noise. Less aluminum
can get noisy. Too much aluminum can get noisy.
Too much or not enough saponification can get noisy.
For each tiny adjustment ever made to any wax formula,
no matter what it may be, it affects hardness, softness,
noise, overall recordability, and playback durability.
Often one or more of these end results oppose each
other. Add some tiny .2 or .3 % ceresin to tweak it
just a shade softer and boom, all of a sudden it's noisy
as heck! These non-linear results happen all the time
with the basic brown wax formula. It all hangs
upon a critical balance of roughly a dozen variables
any one of which if it is even off by some tiny fraction
of a percent can spoil the whole works!
It's non-linear.
Now that I've gone and talked about that, for sure
our friend Shawn Borri will very soon join this
thread. Shawn and I have both done lots of work
with all of these variables, and so many more that
you just don't EVEN want to know.....
I hope that kinda helps answer your question, Hearsedriver. But what it really does probably, is that
it answers one question and it brings up several more
things....
That is just the nature of Edison cylinder recording
blanks. If you really are wondering about how they
work, and you start asking and investigating, all of
a sudden there you are about 50 years later and still
asking questions then trying to find the answers.
Chuck
