The Talking Machine Forum — For All Antique Phonographs & Recordings

With the need to be very close to the horn a spacious recording studio would serve no purpose, and might create unwanted echos and resonances. Only in the electric era did resonance and "room tone" become a desired effect.

And I once argued with an audio engineer that in fact they did use more than one horn in an acoustic session. I needed this pic to clinch it!

They started doing that in the mid-teens. John Scully, Larry Scully's father had developed a new design of recording lathe at the time which is what evolved into the famous Scully lathes later manufactured by his son Larry, as well as a device to which several horns could be attached which included adjustable 'stops' that controlled how much sound got through to the recorder from each horn - a primitive mixer of sorts. Paul Whiteman's account of the original acoustic recording of Rhapsody in Blue indicated that this device was used in that session.

WOAH! Courtesy of Vince Giordano my initial two pictures have made it to a Bix Beiderbeck forum where they are labeled as "previously unknown" pictures of the Gennett studios in New York City. This amuses me no end as the pictures are presumably included in every copy of the 1926 Ginn & Co book "Music Appreciation In The Schoolroom"- but since the Ginn educational records are a fairly obscure facet of record collecting (as are classroom records in general) few have bothered to read it.