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This topic comprises 2 pages: 1 2
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Topic: The Jazz Singer (1927 version).
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Leo Enticknap
Film God
Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000
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posted 11-03-2015 11:14 PM
Audiophile Records was another small label that started up around the coarsegroove to LP transition, which tried to market high (technical) quality records to geeks by using vinyl and microgroove, but sticking with 78rpm to increase bandwidth. I have one Audiophile disc in my collection (of J.S. Bach organ music - I'm guessing it was one of very few, if not the only classical record they did), and I can't hear any improvement over early Decca FFRR LPs pressed at around the same time. I don't know if they were direct to disc or cut from tapes.
quote: Sheffield Lab article
The LPs did not compare favorably with earlier 78RPM records, which, despite their scratchiness, yielded more beautiful piano sound. In particular, the Abbey Road (EMI) recordings of pianist Artur Schnabel, recorded in the nineteen thirties, were most realistic and musical sounding.
What???!!! UK (Hayes) pressed EMI/HMV 78s from the 1930s were arguably the noisiest and nastiest ever made. EMI used a really abrasive ceramic filler in their substrate and a lot less shellac than their competitors. They claimed that this made their records more resilient to wear (and keep in mind that being played with a steel needle on an acoustic phonograph, they wore VERY quickly), but if this was true, the cost in surface noise was huge. Compared with any of their competitors at the time, they do not sound good.
I have an original 78 album set from the HMV/Beethoven Society series of Schnabel playing Beethoven's sonata #29 from 1936. The discs are in near mint condition, but they're still so surface noisy as to be almost unlistenable. Most of the slow movement is inaudible for surface noise. If this was the standard the Sheffield Lab founders were aiming to replicate, I'm surprised, to put it mildly.
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Leo Enticknap
Film God
Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000
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posted 11-05-2015 10:10 AM
Admittedly we're now going way OT from The Jazz Singer (sorry!), but the 1930s Schnabel Beethoven piano sonata recordings were a landmark, both in the history of music recording, and of significance for the performances themselves.
It was the first time anyone had attempted a classical recording project on that scale - all 32 of Beethoven's piano sonatas, direct to disc. Other leading concert pianists of the day had rejected the idea, mainly because of the difficulty of dividing them into four-minute chunks, the inability to correct minor errors without playing the four-minute section again and the sheer time commitment needed.
Minor errors didn't bother Schnabel - he infamously pointed out that Beethoven probably played his fair share of wrong notes, too, that this is what happens when you have a human being rather than a machine playing, and if the audience don't like it, that's their problem.
The series of records was sold by subscription only (you had to agree to buy the lot) - EMI would not take the project on otherwise, because they guessed that the more obscure sonatas would sell too few copies to be viable.
The playing is VERY idiosyncratic. For most of them, he takes the pace way above Beethoven's tempo/metronome markings, He plays the opening movement of the only Beethoven sonata I learned to play (no. 7 / op. 10, no. 3) at almost double the tempo Beethoven indicates. Maybe that was partly dictated by four-minute side breaks, but the down side is that even I, an amateur pianist and organist with almost no formal training, can land more fingers on right notes than he does in this recording!
So these records are a landmark in that it was the first time anyone had tried to record the lot (around 12-13 hours in total), but if you're expecting the polished, rehearsed up the wazoo style phrasing of Wilhelm Kempff or Martha Argerich, you're in for a shock!
EMI reissued them on LPs in the 1980s, and without the surface noise, the audio quality is surprisingly good. I'm guessing that either a surviving mother was played directly into a tape recorder, or new vinyl pressings made from surviving stampers and then those re-recorded. They absolutely cannot have been mastered from surviving original shellac release pressings: no matter how carefully you select the stylus pitch and tracking weight, or clean the record, you CANNOT get rid of the overwhelming frying egg surface noise on 1930s EMI/HMV shellac pressings.
Maybe the Sheffield Lab founders heard some US release pressings that were done by a different label on quieter shellac? As a general rule and with the exception of Columbias (both British and US ones are pretty quiet), I've always been struck by how much less surface noise there tends to be on American shellac records compared to British ones.
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Bill Brandenstein
Master Film Handler
Posts: 413
From: Santa Clarita, CA
Registered: Jul 2013
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posted 11-05-2015 07:57 PM
Leo, I'm enjoying presuming upon our friends here with all this OT talk of Beethoven & Schnabel, which fits only LOOSELY because they're almost of the same era as Vitaphone discs! Perhaps we need to continue such a conversation over lunch someday so we can speak more freely of 78s, Beethoven, Adobe Audition, and whatnot.
Now here's something any interested party can take note of: my familiarity with the Schnabel recording Leo mentions comes from a restoration-based website, Pristine Audio, and if you go to that link and click the player to hear samples, the first thing up is what Leo's written of. Brilliant, yes, cleanly played, no. For what it's worth, my Niemann edition (Peters) has no metronome markings at all (suggesting that those in other editions are editorial suggestions) and merely gives "Presto" for the tempo. Well, it's certainly played "Presto." Whew.
I'd love to hear what Andrew Rose would do with Vitaphone discs, or the optical masters they were cut from (is that a correct assumption?).
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