The Talking Machine Forum — For All Antique Phonographs & Recordings

A couple more pictures here of a Victor record with "Orthophonic" and VE on the label and a "VE" in a diamond.

Victor and Columbia probably cover 50%-60% of the records I have so this helps tremendously. Decca and Okeh represent most of the rest so I still have some digging to do on those.

Thanks again for all the help!

The "quickest and dirtiest" method I know is just to listen to the record. Electric recordings just have a certain extra brilliance in the treble, power in the bass, and a sense of room resonance that is hard to duplicate in acoustic recordings.

-Bill

Lucius1958 wrote:The "quickest and dirtiest" method I know is just to listen to the record. Electric recordings just have a certain extra brilliance in the treble, power in the bass, and a sense of room resonance that is hard to duplicate in acoustic recordings.

-Bill

Hard but not altogether impossible. Take, for example, the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra's 1924 Brunswick recording of Alfred Hill's 'Waiata Poi', arranged and conducted by Henri Verbrugghen (second-to-last item on my web-page http://www.horologia.me.uk/discs_1911_1925.html). The date is established by DAHR. To my ears, the only point which betrays this as an acoustic recording is the pom-pom-pom of the tubas in the quieter passages, standing in for pizzicato double-basses. (Compare the electrical version of 1926, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XvPAYf77C4). Even much earlier, in the recordings made by Gramophone & Typewriter in the Vatican in 1904, there is a distinct sense of space; http://www.horologia.me.uk/discs.html includes four of these.

This is not intended to dispute the justice of Bill's observation in, probably, 99.9% of instances; and even here the 1926 version of 'Waiata Poi' certainly has the extra brightness in the treble which he also mentions. All I wish to suggest is that the acoustic process could do much better, even with a substantial orchestral ensemble, than the cramped and lifeless studios favoured by most British and European engineers allowed it to do.

Oliver Mundy.

Frisco The Beagle wrote:A couple more pictures here of a Victor record with "Orthophonic" and VE on the label and a "VE" in a diamond.

Victor and Columbia probably cover 50%-60% of the records I have so this helps tremendously. Decca and Okeh represent most of the rest so I still have some digging to do on those.

Thanks again for all the help!

Decca records are all electrically recorded. The Decca Record Company was founded in the UK in 1929, by which time acoustic records were obsolete.