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Re: [ARSCLIST] Mercury MG10000 series listing or discography
Tom Fine wrote:
Not sure what you mean by "needle drop sound" -- something not recorded
on tape will tend to sound like, well, a grooved disk. Stuff recorded in
Prague in 1946 was definitely not recorded on tape! The first tape
sessions at Reeves, at leave for Mercury, were circa 1948. Reeves was
one of the earliest users of Fairchild tape machines, which followed by
a few months the Ampex 200.
The sound of the needle slipping into the groove..it's just before the start of
the Polka, on the LP. Not on the 78, which was dubbed straight from the Czech
original..the sequencing was changed on the LP if I remember correctly.
If that Khachaturian was dubbed from gold metal parts, the Soviet
recording setup was a decade or two more primative than ours. Some
1940's disk recording was excellent. That material is not.
It sounds much better on the Mercury 78s, except for Side 10 which is very
fuzzy and distorted. The original Soviet 78s lack the echo (which really wasn't
needed) but clean copies have a more natural sound (there are also some very
poor Soviet pressings of it). I've transferred this in all its incarnations,
although I haven't played the LP in decades. According to WERM (but denied by
others), the Khacturian Concerto was recorded on optical film and may actually
have been issued by English Decca before the Soviets brought it out.
I've heard
that Mitch Miller tale before. I doubt the bathroom thing is a factual
memory. Reeves had two live echo chambers plus an orchestra-sized studio
space, why would they need the bathroom? I think, in later years, Miller
might have done the perfectly natural thing of blending that memory of
using reverb with the oft-repeated tale of Bill Putnam's bathroom reverb
chamber used on Mercury Harmonicats records. The bathroom story sticks
in the mind and many false memories of bathroom echo chambers have
popped up over time, but the only one I know to be factual was Putnam's
old original studio in Chicago. Reeves, the major record company
studios, the big Hollywood studios, the major radio studios, and indeed
Putnam's later, bigger Universal Recording Studios in Chicago all had
very good live echo chambers plus huge studio spaces, some with
variable-reverb panels. Why would you ever use a bathroom when you have
those facilities? Also, the idea of live echo chambers -- rooms of
various sizes and designs specifically meant to be used as audio echo
chambers -- was more than a decade old by the 1940's. The original NBC
studios at 711 5th Avenue (later World Broadcasting, then WMGM, then
Fine Sound) had two echo chambers built into the eaves of the building.
That design dated from 1927. I'm sure one of the movie studios or a
record company used the idea even earlier, in the earliest days of
electronic signal-mixing.
Morty Palitz is also credited with the bathroom-echo chamber idea in 1939 or
1940..certainly the Brunswick Salon Orchestra sides from that time have a nice
reverb which other studios weren't getting, and I'm pretty sure they weren't
recorded in Liederkranz Hall. Just my uninformed opinion. But for what it's
worth, the washroom idea had legs..the CBC was known to have used it in the
early 50s, and legend has it that there were unintended results on air during a
live "Messiah" broadcast.
dl