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Vinyl Records: Black Magic at Work · Stuff You Should Know

0:00
Speaker 1: Hey, everybody, big special announcement at long last, we are
0:05
Speaker 1: going back on the road to do live shows. And
0:08
Speaker 1: I could not be more excited. I too, am fairly excited.
0:14
Speaker 1: I could tell it's gonna be great. Chuck. We're gonna
0:16
Speaker 1: be back live on stage for the first time in
0:19
Speaker 1: to three years. Uh. We were on stage in but
0:26
Speaker 1: at the very beginning of and we're going to yeah three, Yeah,
0:31
Speaker 1: three years since we've trod the boards and we're about
0:33
Speaker 1: to trod them boards again, Chuck. On February first, second,
0:37
Speaker 1: and third, we're going to Seattle in Portland, or Portland
0:41
Speaker 1: and Seattle, and then for sure on February three, we're
0:44
Speaker 1: going to wind the whole thing up in San Francisco. Right,
0:47
Speaker 1: that's right, We're going back to sketch Fest are usually
0:51
Speaker 1: January home, but early February home this year, for my money,
0:54
Speaker 1: the best uh comedy festival in the world, and we're
0:59
Speaker 1: gonna be going to sketch Us. And again, we're not
1:01
Speaker 1: sure the order yet. We don't have ticket links yet,
1:04
Speaker 1: but we do have a little bit more information. We
1:06
Speaker 1: just couldn't wait to tell you guys. So tickets are
1:08
Speaker 1: actually going to be on sale very soon. October six,
1:11
Speaker 1: there's going to be a pre sale with a password
1:14
Speaker 1: UH and we will probably put those out on our
1:16
Speaker 1: social links. I'm not sure how you'll find out, but
1:19
Speaker 1: you'll find out, and then on October seven there will
1:21
Speaker 1: be general sale. We'll give you more information as we
1:24
Speaker 1: get it. But again, we just couldn't wait to tell you, guys,
1:27
Speaker 1: because we're too excited. That's right, and you know what
1:29
Speaker 1: we're doing. We've got a great uh working with some
1:32
Speaker 1: great new people with our social media stuff. So you
1:35
Speaker 1: might have noticed that our Instagram and our Facebook have
1:38
Speaker 1: some new and exciting things happening. So that's a great
1:40
Speaker 1: place to find information about the tours. Very nice. So
1:43
Speaker 1: we'll see you guys in the Northwest coast this February
1:46
Speaker 1: and the rest of you, who knows, could be a
1:50
Speaker 1: wild year. Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production
1:55
Speaker 1: of I Heart Radio. Y hey, and welcome to the podcast.
2:04
Speaker 1: I'm Josh, There's Chuck, Jerry's here, and Jack Black's lurking around,
2:09
Speaker 1: which makes this stuff you should know. We got the
2:12
Speaker 1: facts on wax w s y s K. That's pretty great. Sorry,
2:18
Speaker 1: pretty you should have been a radio personality. I used
2:24
Speaker 1: to want to be I wanted to be a DJ.
2:27
Speaker 1: You came awfully close. Man. I have to say that
2:29
Speaker 1: was a pretty pretty close to a realized dream if
2:32
Speaker 1: you ask me. Uh well, and what's funny is is
2:35
Speaker 1: the saying wax and like are one of our local
2:40
Speaker 1: record stores. Here's wax and facts and old DJ saying wax.
2:45
Speaker 1: In this episode you will find out why they say wax. Yeah,
2:50
Speaker 1: it's hopelessly outdated, but yeah, it's still still applies to
2:54
Speaker 1: us the next time. Let's do this. This is pretty fun.
2:57
Speaker 1: I'm excited. Do you collect final, Lenny? I think you
2:59
Speaker 1: do a little bit right, Yeah, a little bit. Um.
3:02
Speaker 1: I don't like collected. I just buy stuff that I want.
3:05
Speaker 1: But you know, I'm vinyl, but I'm not just like, look, everybody,
3:09
Speaker 1: check out my collection. I just have a selection of records.
3:13
Speaker 1: How about that? Yeah? My deal is I have my records,
3:18
Speaker 1: most of my records that I had growing up. Never
3:20
Speaker 1: got rid of him, moved him every time like a dummy.
3:25
Speaker 1: I got uh inherited while still alive my um stepfather's
3:32
Speaker 1: record collection. He didn't pass away, but he just said here,
3:36
Speaker 1: I'm done with these. I'm so sick of music. It's ridiculous.
3:39
Speaker 1: But that's where I got all that good Like he
3:41
Speaker 1: has all the all that prog rock from the seventies.
3:44
Speaker 1: He was way into that stuff. Uh. And then I
3:47
Speaker 1: started buying just sort of classic favorites of mine, basically
3:53
Speaker 1: kind of filling out newer classic favorites from when I
3:57
Speaker 1: stopped buying records up to this point. So I'm kind
4:01
Speaker 1: of running out of room on my little three banger shelf,
4:03
Speaker 1: so I'm slowing down the rate of purchase. But it's
4:09
Speaker 1: it's good, and through the miracle of modern technology, I
4:11
Speaker 1: can play a record through a Bluetooth set of Bluetooth speakers.
4:15
Speaker 1: That is amazing, but it's also a tragedy. Well, yeah,
4:19
Speaker 1: I wish I had a plugged in what hi fi
4:22
Speaker 1: system I've got them. I've got some like just Rockford
4:26
Speaker 1: or rock File or whatever shelf speakers that are plugged
4:30
Speaker 1: into an UM I guess a post amp or preamp,
4:33
Speaker 1: I don't know, one of the amps, but it's not
4:34
Speaker 1: part of the record player and the record players plugged
4:37
Speaker 1: into that. And it seems clugy enough that I'm like, Okay,
4:40
Speaker 1: this seems pretty authentic. Yeah, I mean, you can tell
4:43
Speaker 1: we're experts here with our use of Rockford Files and
4:46
Speaker 1: pre post SAMP, right, so, I but I mean still,
4:51
Speaker 1: you don't have to be a total expert to to
4:53
Speaker 1: talk about vinyl, although there will certainly be um record
4:57
Speaker 1: store guys, the music equivalent of com book guy, who
5:01
Speaker 1: will right in and tell us how how much we
5:03
Speaker 1: just totally suck forever and like just got every single
5:06
Speaker 1: thing wrong. But this is not for those people. It's
5:09
Speaker 1: for everybody else who just wants to know how vinyl
5:11
Speaker 1: records work. How about that? I think that's great? Uh,
5:15
Speaker 1: And I think a few of these stats before we
5:16
Speaker 1: dive into the history or in order thanks to Dave
5:19
Speaker 1: Rouse who pointed out that obviously in the uh fifties, sixties, seventies,
5:26
Speaker 1: and into the eighties some um, certainly into the eighties,
5:30
Speaker 1: vinyl records were sort of the thing, uh, and their
5:33
Speaker 1: peak in the seventies there were more than fifth, sorry
5:39
Speaker 1: and thirty million records bought each year each year, which
5:44
Speaker 1: is about six with eight track making up for the rest.
5:47
Speaker 1: Because of course you had to play something in your
5:49
Speaker 1: conversion van, right, you couldn't really, most most cars weren't
5:54
Speaker 1: outfitted with record players, that's right. But then the cassette
5:58
Speaker 1: came along and the c D and all but killed Vinyl. Uh.
6:03
Speaker 1: They accounted for point one percent of music sales at
6:06
Speaker 1: some point in the nineties, which is a pretty big drop,
6:10
Speaker 1: I would say, but then made a comeback in the
6:13
Speaker 1: two thousand's because of nostalgia and because of hipsters and
6:19
Speaker 1: audio files and certain movies and Record Store Day and
6:23
Speaker 1: all other reasons. Yes, But I mean like if you
6:26
Speaker 1: if you could rewind back to seven and you asked
6:31
Speaker 1: somebody if if they would ever, you know, see Vinyl
6:33
Speaker 1: albums again, they would just laugh in your face like
6:36
Speaker 1: they were done. They were goners, right, And so the
6:38
Speaker 1: idea that it came back is pretty it's pretty remarkable
6:42
Speaker 1: as far as comebacks go. And then in twenty I
6:45
Speaker 1: believe Vinyl Records outsold CDs for the first time since
6:50
Speaker 1: Night six. That's a check of a comeback. And that's
6:54
Speaker 1: not even to say that CDs were doing that poorly.
6:56
Speaker 1: CDs actually had increased in sales over the past few
7:00
Speaker 1: years as well, So it wasn't like CDs were just
7:03
Speaker 1: tumbling downward while Vinyl was kind of slowly creeping upward.
7:06
Speaker 1: They were both creeping up and Vinyl just overtook CDs.
7:10
Speaker 1: I think in the year that vinyl overtook CDs UM,
7:14
Speaker 1: twenty seven and a half million Vinyl records were sold
7:18
Speaker 1: around the world. One it jumped up to forty one
7:21
Speaker 1: point seven million. Yeah, baby, So yeah, Vinyl is definitely back,
7:26
Speaker 1: and there's a lot of reasons why it's back, And um,
7:29
Speaker 1: I say we start with the history of the whole
7:31
Speaker 1: thing to maybe explain why people like vinyl. I think
7:33
Speaker 1: that's where you kind of find the birth of the
7:35
Speaker 1: whole thing. Uh, totally some other good news by the way,
7:39
Speaker 1: just to drag that out a bit, is that cool
7:42
Speaker 1: video I sent you from how It's made? Uh? They
7:45
Speaker 1: went to that music record that record pressing plant in Nashville,
7:50
Speaker 1: which is, as thinks, still one of the biggest ones,
7:53
Speaker 1: and they had to re expand and they were like, hey, everybody,
7:56
Speaker 1: remember when we shut down almost Well we're we have
8:00
Speaker 1: open up a bigger place now, which is awesome and
8:03
Speaker 1: it's a great comeback story. Yeah. And I would guess
8:05
Speaker 1: the people who were buying the point one percent of
8:08
Speaker 1: music sales as vinyl in the eighties and nineties, I
8:12
Speaker 1: had to just be exclusively DJs, right, Oh No, I
8:16
Speaker 1: mean there were always Vinyl collectors. Um, they were just
8:20
Speaker 1: not nearly as many. For a while. It wasn't exclusively
8:24
Speaker 1: DJs because did DJ and they didn't even use records anymore,
8:29
Speaker 1: did they. I mean, that's a pretty recent phenomenon. They
8:31
Speaker 1: were using vinyl like throughout the eighties and nineties for sure.
8:36
Speaker 1: When I guess we should look into that, like when
8:38
Speaker 1: they switched to the carts, Um, I would say in
8:41
Speaker 1: the tens maybe, really, I'm just guessing. But if it
8:47
Speaker 1: gets a response like that out if you all guess
8:49
Speaker 1: every time, I don't think so. I think they've had
8:51
Speaker 1: the carts for a while. So the two thousand odds,
8:57
Speaker 1: I mean, I think before that someone will know and
8:59
Speaker 1: tell us. Whatever I do work for a major radio company,
9:03
Speaker 1: we should just ask somebody. We'll ask somebody, We'll get
9:06
Speaker 1: him on the phone, we'll call in will be the caller.
9:11
Speaker 1: I love it. So we're talking the history now, Chuck,
9:14
Speaker 1: I'd say, um, and we're talking vinyl records. But you
9:17
Speaker 1: can't really talk about vinyl records without like the beginning
9:20
Speaker 1: of records a recorded sound in general. Um, And most
9:23
Speaker 1: people say, who came up with recorded and played back sound?
9:27
Speaker 1: Thomas Edison, Of course it was you know, the last
9:32
Speaker 1: quarter of the nineteenth century, I think, And you're right, like, yes,
9:36
Speaker 1: Thomas Edison definitely gave us what we kind of understand
9:40
Speaker 1: is recorded and played back sound. But um, there was
9:43
Speaker 1: a guy who came a good twenty years before him,
9:46
Speaker 1: although apparently Edison wasn't aware of his work. But he
9:49
Speaker 1: was a guy from France, Edward Leon Scott de martin Ville. Yes,
9:54
Speaker 1: and um, I've seen him referred to as Scott apparently
9:57
Speaker 1: that's his last name, and I guess he's from Martinville.
9:59
Speaker 1: Frank Okay, oh, that would makes sense. So, um, Scott
10:04
Speaker 1: was tinkering around with something called a phone autograph and
10:08
Speaker 1: if you um look into it and we'll talk about
10:11
Speaker 1: how how vinyl records are made later, but like he
10:14
Speaker 1: basically said, here's how we're going to make records from
10:17
Speaker 1: here on out. Here's the at least the rough contours
10:21
Speaker 1: of the whole thing. Yeah, and it's it's very rudimentary.
10:25
Speaker 1: But as you will see when we describe it compared
10:28
Speaker 1: to what they did later on, it's sort of the
10:30
Speaker 1: same idea, which is, and we'll get into how he
10:33
Speaker 1: did it, but which is basically using a vibrating tool
10:39
Speaker 1: to cut and it vibrates because of sound, and it
10:42
Speaker 1: makes a vibrating representation of whatever sound you're making and
10:46
Speaker 1: cuts that into something. Yeah, what's astounding. This is the
10:50
Speaker 1: most astounding thing that I've learned in a really long time,
10:54
Speaker 1: is what is captured on record is a natural language
10:59
Speaker 1: of sound that humans stumbled upon. And one of the
11:03
Speaker 1: first people, possibly the first person to stumble upon it
11:06
Speaker 1: is is edwardley On Scott to Martinville and like, like,
11:10
Speaker 1: this is this has always existed, we just never tried
11:13
Speaker 1: to capture it. It It just didn't occur to us. But
11:15
Speaker 1: when you look at a record, you are you are
11:18
Speaker 1: holding in your hands a captured, encoded representation of a
11:23
Speaker 1: sound that was made at some point in time. And
11:26
Speaker 1: Scott was the first person to figure out how to
11:28
Speaker 1: capture this. Yeah, And it's funny, even after having learned this,
11:32
Speaker 1: watched all the videos, being able to regurgitate how it's done,
11:37
Speaker 1: it's still a bit like black magic to me. How
11:41
Speaker 1: you say something into a microphone and it ends up
11:44
Speaker 1: being cut into a vinyl record and a needle can
11:48
Speaker 1: bring that sound back out. It's it's still just sort
11:50
Speaker 1: of mind blowing to me. Yeah, there is like definitely
11:52
Speaker 1: a certain amount of black magic to it. And it's
11:55
Speaker 1: pretty cool. Like it's the cool kind, you know what
11:57
Speaker 1: I'm saying. It's not the kind where like somebody breaks
11:59
Speaker 1: a leg because of it. All right, So should we
12:02
Speaker 1: talk about the phone autograph? Yeah, So what Scott did
12:06
Speaker 1: was he took a um and I'm not quite sure
12:09
Speaker 1: what inspired him to do this, but he took an
12:11
Speaker 1: acoustic trumpet, you know, like the old gramphone the crank
12:14
Speaker 1: record players that had like the big horn coming out
12:16
Speaker 1: of it. Why did you say, Sonny? Exactly, that's an
12:19
Speaker 1: acoustic trumpet. And he put a little membrane over the
12:23
Speaker 1: small and the narrow end of it, and he attached
12:27
Speaker 1: a boar's hair, one single boar's hair to that membrane,
12:31
Speaker 1: and then, uh, the boar's hair was touching a glass plate,
12:35
Speaker 1: i think. And on the glass plate he had put
12:37
Speaker 1: something called um lampblack, which is like soot basically, just
12:41
Speaker 1: put a nice coating of it. And then he spoke
12:44
Speaker 1: into the large end of that acoustic trumpet and that
12:47
Speaker 1: black magic started, That's right. And so what happened is
12:52
Speaker 1: that boar's hair bristle would uh wiggle and vibrate along,
12:58
Speaker 1: you know, to match whatever sound he was making, and
13:02
Speaker 1: it drew basically what Dave refers to I think astuteley
13:06
Speaker 1: as a sonic fingerprint. Uh. Through that soot, it drew
13:10
Speaker 1: sort of the visual representation of sound for the first time. Um.
13:16
Speaker 1: At the time, I think he called it a natural stenography,
13:20
Speaker 1: is what Scott called it. But at the time he
13:23
Speaker 1: was like so great. Um, I promised that this thing
13:27
Speaker 1: maybe one day we'll be able to make a sound,
13:29
Speaker 1: but we don't know how to do that, and everyone went,
13:31
Speaker 1: what are you even talking about, dude? Um. But through
13:36
Speaker 1: the miracle of science, they actually got a computer to
13:40
Speaker 1: uh virtually play virtually as in you know, not like
13:45
Speaker 1: virtually like it actually did, but they use a virtual
13:49
Speaker 1: digital stylists to actually be able to play these early
13:54
Speaker 1: recordings of this dude like singing French songs and saying things,
13:59
Speaker 1: oh yeah frera jacka and all that. It wasn't far
14:02
Speaker 1: a jacka, it was well then who cares? Now I've
14:05
Speaker 1: got the song in here somewhere. But uh, I mean,
14:08
Speaker 1: you know, it's kind of creepy sounding, but it is.
14:10
Speaker 1: And then some of it is just sort of hums
14:13
Speaker 1: and noises, but it is a human being. Uh, it's
14:17
Speaker 1: all Claire de la loun. Uh. It is a actual
14:21
Speaker 1: human being speaking words and singing words. And long before
14:26
Speaker 1: Edison did so. Yeah, it's a good twenty years before Edison.
14:30
Speaker 1: And there was one other thing that Scott figured out,
14:33
Speaker 1: UM that was really important, and he figured it out
14:36
Speaker 1: right out of the gate. Is that when you um
14:39
Speaker 1: are are etching on that um, that glass plate covered
14:43
Speaker 1: in lamp black with the boar's hair, the boar's hair
14:47
Speaker 1: is just kind of wiggling right. The sound vibrations are
14:49
Speaker 1: making it wiggle, and that wiggle is transferring acoustic waves
14:54
Speaker 1: into mechanical energy that's being captured in those etchings. But
14:59
Speaker 1: since the boy as um the boar's hair is just
15:02
Speaker 1: in one place, you have to move that glass plate
15:07
Speaker 1: and you can't just move it at any rate. It
15:09
Speaker 1: has to be a specified rate. And he figured out
15:11
Speaker 1: how to move that glass plate and I think one
15:14
Speaker 1: m a second, which is really fast, UM. And that
15:19
Speaker 1: means that if you read, if you put that thing
15:22
Speaker 1: the other direction, UM at one m a second, then
15:26
Speaker 1: it would play. And what he figured out was that
15:29
Speaker 1: RPMs rotations per minute what would come to to be
15:32
Speaker 1: a huge part of record playing was essential because if
15:35
Speaker 1: you do it too fast, you have the same amount
15:38
Speaker 1: of information, it's just compressed time wise, because you're moving
15:42
Speaker 1: that glass plate faster than one meter a second, so
15:44
Speaker 1: it comes out sounding like Alvin and the Chipmunks. If
15:47
Speaker 1: you move it too slow, less than one meter a second,
15:50
Speaker 1: it's that same amount of information, but it takes up
15:52
Speaker 1: a longer amount of time and you come out sounding
15:55
Speaker 1: like us on you know, half speed or something like that,
15:58
Speaker 1: which people like to do when they marijuana cigarettes. I here,
16:02
Speaker 1: although to be clear, he was not using revolutions because
16:05
Speaker 1: it wasn't spinning yet know what as RPMs, But it
16:10
Speaker 1: has to do with adjusting like a set frequency. It's
16:13
Speaker 1: extraordinarily important that the playback and the recording are done
16:16
Speaker 1: at the same frequency. And Scott figured that out out
16:18
Speaker 1: of the gate. That's right, so put a pin in that. Uh.
16:21
Speaker 1: Edison comes along and um wasn't really working from Scott's work,
16:27
Speaker 1: but was arrival of Alexander Graham Bell and was working
16:34
Speaker 1: on telephone products and decided to try and record phone calls.
16:39
Speaker 1: And he had a big breakthrough when he attached the
16:42
Speaker 1: stylust to a diaphragm, a lot like Scott did. And
16:46
Speaker 1: I keep wanting to call him Martinville. I know Scott
16:48
Speaker 1: from Martinville. Sure, um, And then the you know, exactly
16:53
Speaker 1: in the same way the vibrations of the diaphragm were
16:56
Speaker 1: etched in this case onto a sheet of paraffin wax
17:00
Speaker 1: with a needle. And he was basically like, wait a minute,
17:04
Speaker 1: we can record. It doesn't just have to be phone calls.
17:07
Speaker 1: We can record all kinds of things, like one day
17:09
Speaker 1: there shall be rock and roll. And he figured that out.
17:12
Speaker 1: He was like, yeah, no, forget the phone. I'm doing
17:15
Speaker 1: something else with this. So he moved from that paraffin
17:18
Speaker 1: wax sheet to metal cylinders wrapped in aluminum floor right. Yeah.
17:22
Speaker 1: And it's it's almost like the I mean sort of
17:25
Speaker 1: in a way, it's almost like the inverse of how
17:28
Speaker 1: a music box works. Like it's a metal cylinder, but
17:31
Speaker 1: with a music box they're little nubs that uh prick
17:35
Speaker 1: metal combs of different pitches. In this case, you're you're
17:39
Speaker 1: cutting a groove. Uh. And you know, if you had
17:42
Speaker 1: a sheet of tinfoil at home and got a toothpick,
17:44
Speaker 1: you know you can drag it along and make an impression.
17:47
Speaker 1: That's essentially what he was doing, right, So the fact
17:51
Speaker 1: that he moved over to cylinders was pretty progressive. That
17:54
Speaker 1: actually was um, the way that music was captured and
17:59
Speaker 1: played back for a while, UM was on these cylinders.
18:03
Speaker 1: And Alexander Graham Bell was the one who took these
18:06
Speaker 1: cylinders and changed them from aluminum foil into wax. Yeah,
18:12
Speaker 1: so wax cylinders were really popular. That was how you
18:16
Speaker 1: listen to music back then, how you recorded music and
18:18
Speaker 1: listened to it. And UM, I have a little anecdote
18:21
Speaker 1: from you me. Actually she found out that when she's
18:26
Speaker 1: she I'm gonna tell it on her behalf, but I'll
18:29
Speaker 1: put on a wig and try to tell him a
18:31
Speaker 1: higher pitch before. So, Um, she found out that this
18:36
Speaker 1: some guy who had like the best record collection in
18:38
Speaker 1: the country, possibly the world, lived like thirty minutes away
18:42
Speaker 1: from her. So she and some friends went and visited.
18:44
Speaker 1: This guy's name is Joe Bussard, and he's still around
18:47
Speaker 1: and he still has this fantastic record collection, um, and
18:51
Speaker 1: most of it is pre nineteen fifties stuff, but he
18:55
Speaker 1: has original whax cylinders, like from the nineteenth century that
18:59
Speaker 1: he played for them, and she said they were like
19:01
Speaker 1: African American spiritual. She's like, it was clearly people sitting
19:05
Speaker 1: on a porch singing this stuff. And it was like,
19:08
Speaker 1: did they these people had sung this in one take
19:12
Speaker 1: on a porch in like the eighteen nineties or something
19:15
Speaker 1: like that. And there she wasn't you know, two thousand
19:17
Speaker 1: whatever listening to it played back, which is pretty sweet,
19:20
Speaker 1: and she said, this is lame. I want to hear
19:24
Speaker 1: some rock indoor rule. Uh, that's an awesome story we had.
19:28
Speaker 1: It made me think, or remember rather that we had
19:30
Speaker 1: a a hand crank phonograph growing up in my house.
19:36
Speaker 1: My I guess my dad got it at some point
19:39
Speaker 1: and it was cool. You know, we had old records
19:41
Speaker 1: and we didn't sit around and listen to him, but
19:44
Speaker 1: my brother and I would put on one of those
19:46
Speaker 1: old records and crank it up every now and then,
19:47
Speaker 1: and uh, you know, it's cool. It sounds kind of
19:52
Speaker 1: like a horror movie, but it's like it's just it's
19:55
Speaker 1: a neat experience to see sort of the early technology
19:57
Speaker 1: at work. There is something really unsettling about a nineteen
20:01
Speaker 1: twenties record being played. There's just something about it. It's like,
20:06
Speaker 1: for some reason, it always seems like the singer wants
20:08
Speaker 1: to harm you, but it's pretending they don't, I know,
20:12
Speaker 1: even especially because they're they're always singing about times a
20:16
Speaker 1: little like warble and you're like, no, no no, no, you
20:18
Speaker 1: got a knife in your hand exactly, slick back hair
20:22
Speaker 1: and some crazy huge smile. Um. Alright, so Edison uh
20:27
Speaker 1: and Bell are both working on this stuff. Bell has
20:30
Speaker 1: got his wax cylinder going. Um. He played it back
20:34
Speaker 1: on something called a graphophone. This was an eight seven.
20:39
Speaker 1: You crank that handle, it rotates that wax cylinder and
20:43
Speaker 1: it plays it back through an acoustic trumpet um which
20:47
Speaker 1: I think we had one on ours. That was just
20:49
Speaker 1: for show, but there was an actual kind of rudimentary
20:52
Speaker 1: speaker underneath, and that's what amplified the sound. And then
20:56
Speaker 1: of course later on the hand crank was replaced with
20:58
Speaker 1: a motor. And just to explain the hand crank too,
21:01
Speaker 1: you don't have to keep cranking it. You would crank
21:04
Speaker 1: it a bunch and then kind of hit go and
21:06
Speaker 1: then it would store up that mechanical energy and rotate
21:10
Speaker 1: the player. Right, But that was still cylinder, right, That
21:14
Speaker 1: was still the wax cylinder. Not obviously at my house,
21:17
Speaker 1: we didn't have those but yeah, but still we're working
21:20
Speaker 1: not even necessarily just wax, but we're working with cylinder.
21:22
Speaker 1: That was how you played back or recorded sound. And
21:26
Speaker 1: it was like that until a guy came along, I
21:28
Speaker 1: think in the eight nineties named Emil Berliner. He was
21:31
Speaker 1: German American and he came up with the gramma phone,
21:34
Speaker 1: which probably sounds familiar because Berlinard's invention, which was shellac records,
21:40
Speaker 1: he was the first one to say, forget these cylinders,
21:42
Speaker 1: let's put let's put the stuff on disks and come
21:46
Speaker 1: up with rotations per minute and just he made all
21:48
Speaker 1: these innovations. Um, his invention was the standard from the
21:54
Speaker 1: nineties to nineteen fifty. That was how you listen to music.
21:57
Speaker 1: Was this guy's invention, the gramaphone, Yeah, which you know.
22:01
Speaker 1: The main reason why is because you could actually reproduce
22:03
Speaker 1: these on mass You could create like thousands of copies
22:07
Speaker 1: of disc records, which was not something you could really
22:10
Speaker 1: do with the wax cylinders. It was very expensive, it
22:13
Speaker 1: took a lot of time to reproduce them. Uh. He
22:16
Speaker 1: figured out how to make these molds of a master
22:19
Speaker 1: recording and press them into records. Which is it really
22:23
Speaker 1: set the stage. I mean things have changed a little bit,
22:25
Speaker 1: but it really set the stage for how we still
22:27
Speaker 1: do it today. Yeah, I mean it's it's virtually the same.
22:30
Speaker 1: It's just you know, a little more advanced today. But
22:32
Speaker 1: the principles are were certainly the same. The big difference though,
22:36
Speaker 1: is this was not vinyl that this guy was making.
22:39
Speaker 1: Like I said, it's shelack, and shelac is a natural substance.
22:42
Speaker 1: That was basically, uh, it's a natural polymer. It's like
22:45
Speaker 1: natural plastic. Basically it comes out of the lack bug,
22:49
Speaker 1: which I think is native to Southeast Asia, if I'm
22:51
Speaker 1: not mistaken. So it was expensive to produce to shelack
22:55
Speaker 1: enough shellack to make a record, because again, the stuff's
22:58
Speaker 1: coming out of a bug, not gen on that it
23:01
Speaker 1: was from the female lack. Is that why it's called
23:03
Speaker 1: she lack? Maybe? I think it is. That's pretty great.
23:08
Speaker 1: If it is, that's wonderful. That's a great old timey
23:11
Speaker 1: play on words. Well I'm gonna say that's fact. Okay,
23:15
Speaker 1: that's all you have to do these days, right, just
23:17
Speaker 1: say something. Yeah. Anybody who could contradict that as long
23:20
Speaker 1: dead anyway, So it's all good. Well, I think you know,
23:23
Speaker 1: we put a pin in this whole revolutions per minute?
23:26
Speaker 1: Should we go ahead and explain that, yes, because Scott
23:30
Speaker 1: was the one who figured that out, and uh it
23:33
Speaker 1: just became a it's it's essential to reproducing or recording sound,
23:38
Speaker 1: right like you have to have it um recorded at
23:41
Speaker 1: a set frequency because the frequency effects is that the
23:44
Speaker 1: pitch where it goes really high or really low? Is
23:47
Speaker 1: that pitch? Sure? Okay, all right, I forgot yourself taught. Yeah, okay,
23:54
Speaker 1: So it affects somehow because again, the like a sound
23:59
Speaker 1: wave makes a way, even if you compress it, it's
24:02
Speaker 1: still the same amount of information, it's just over a
24:04
Speaker 1: shorter amount of time, and that makes it again sound
24:07
Speaker 1: like Alvin and the Chipmunks. That's right. Uh So what
24:11
Speaker 1: the old records from kind of up into the nineteen
24:15
Speaker 1: fifties I think, or maybe it was later than that.
24:18
Speaker 1: When did they changed, you know, from seventy eight to
24:20
Speaker 1: thirty three and the third uh well, the first one
24:23
Speaker 1: came out in like nineteen so okay, I'm sure they
24:27
Speaker 1: were still selling those shellac seventy eight into the fifties.
24:30
Speaker 1: All right, So seventy eight RPMs was the standard for
24:33
Speaker 1: a while, and if you're wondering how they came up
24:35
Speaker 1: with this RPMs, It's very easy. It's because the motors
24:39
Speaker 1: that they used at the time ran at thirty six
24:43
Speaker 1: hundred revolutions per minute. If you tried to think about
24:47
Speaker 1: either manufacturing a record or playing a record at thirty
24:52
Speaker 1: six d revolutions per minute, that's pretty funny to think about.
24:56
Speaker 1: It's impossible, basically. So that's where gears, your old and
25:00
Speaker 1: gears come in because the purpose of a gear is
25:02
Speaker 1: to step down the speed of a motor. Uh and
25:06
Speaker 1: in this case, they had a gear with So when
25:10
Speaker 1: you divide those revolutions, you step it down with a gear,
25:15
Speaker 1: and you eventually get down to uh eight technically seventy
25:20
Speaker 1: eight point to six rpm. S. Yeah, I still don't
25:23
Speaker 1: understand all that, but I accepted as as real. Well,
25:27
Speaker 1: I mean, yeah, it's it's what we should do something. No,
25:30
Speaker 1: never mind, I don't want to do how gears work
25:32
Speaker 1: because it's way more complicated than it seems on the surface. Okay,
25:36
Speaker 1: well that sounds like right up our alley. We can
25:39
Speaker 1: we can confuse everyone further with that one. But at
25:42
Speaker 1: any rate, it steps down that motor via a gear,
25:46
Speaker 1: and we just do simple division and that's how you
25:49
Speaker 1: got the seventy eight. So seventy eight is pretty fast.
25:52
Speaker 1: I mean it's more than twice as fast as a
25:54
Speaker 1: normal like uh LP album today spins and it's shell
26:00
Speaker 1: which is pretty hard and brittle. So you can imagine
26:03
Speaker 1: if that thing flew off, it could take great Aunt
26:06
Speaker 1: Edgar's head clean off in the in the conservatory. Sure
26:11
Speaker 1: like the recording artist intended, right, that was an abandoned clue,
26:16
Speaker 1: uh murder weapon. Yeah, he did it. He did it
26:20
Speaker 1: with a record, right, So the RPM is really important,
26:25
Speaker 1: Chuck um for a couple of reasons. One, Um, it
26:28
Speaker 1: was really fast in it, so it was dangerous at
26:30
Speaker 1: least in my opinion. But more importantly, because they were
26:33
Speaker 1: spending so fast, you had less time to get the
26:36
Speaker 1: information across. So that meant that you had you know,
26:39
Speaker 1: maybe I think a twelve inch record could hold four
26:42
Speaker 1: to five minutes of music or of sound on each side. Right,
26:48
Speaker 1: it's only like nine songs back then, right, So, um,
26:52
Speaker 1: there were a lot of problems with these shellack seventy
26:55
Speaker 1: eight but um, they were a huge advance, hugely forward.
27:00
Speaker 1: But when vinyl came along, it changed everything and Chuck
27:02
Speaker 1: we are almost thirty minutes into this episode. I say,
27:05
Speaker 1: we take our first commercial break. Wow wa wow, let's
27:08
Speaker 1: do it, okays skul Alright, So we are moving into
27:30
Speaker 1: the twentieth century and finally vinyl comes along. Um. It
27:35
Speaker 1: is called polyvinyl chloride or PBC. So those white PBC
27:40
Speaker 1: pipes you see in the big box, uh hardware store,
27:44
Speaker 1: it's the same same thing. It's a type of plastic.
27:47
Speaker 1: And in the nineteen thirties is when record companies started
27:50
Speaker 1: to kind of experiment with this because I'll the aforementioned
27:54
Speaker 1: problems with shellac being very breakable and being very brittle.
27:58
Speaker 1: And I believe Victor, which was a division of our
28:02
Speaker 1: c A, was the first producer of vinyl records in
28:06
Speaker 1: nineteen thirty. But it did not go well because it
28:10
Speaker 1: took a little while before they had they had all
28:12
Speaker 1: the playback equipment sort of SYNCD up working well together.
28:17
Speaker 1: So in this case, uh, the pickups used to amplify
28:20
Speaker 1: to send the signal to the amplifier. It's sort of
28:23
Speaker 1: like a guitar pickup. They were too heavy and it
28:26
Speaker 1: cut through the vinyl because it was uh not shelack.
28:30
Speaker 1: It was used as shelack, so they had to sort
28:32
Speaker 1: of rejigger everything, and it wasn't until after World War
28:35
Speaker 1: Two that they really put in like a kind of
28:39
Speaker 1: all their efforts stored making vinyl work. Yeah, because there
28:42
Speaker 1: was a shelak shortage during World War two, so everybody's like, Okay,
28:45
Speaker 1: we need to figure out this vinyl stuff for a
28:47
Speaker 1: bunch of different reasons. But one of those things that
28:50
Speaker 1: came out of it was the vinyl record. And most
28:53
Speaker 1: people credit a guy at CBS named Peter Goldmark for
28:57
Speaker 1: inventing the vinyl record that we know and love today.
29:01
Speaker 1: That's right. Uh, He basically said, he figured out how
29:05
Speaker 1: to make it stronger. Uh, he figured out how to
29:08
Speaker 1: etch the grooves smaller so you could fit more stuff.
29:11
Speaker 1: So he got it down to point zero zero three inches.
29:15
Speaker 1: I think she lax maxed out at point o one inches,
29:19
Speaker 1: so a lot more music basically per record. Yeah, because
29:23
Speaker 1: in addition to more grooves, which means more information, which
29:26
Speaker 1: means more length of time of recorded sound on one side,
29:31
Speaker 1: it also played at a slower RPM, so it had
29:34
Speaker 1: more time to play all that information too, So you
29:37
Speaker 1: could just pack I think twenty two and a half
29:40
Speaker 1: minutes per side on a on a thirty three and
29:43
Speaker 1: a third RPM UM LP, which is what they're called
29:47
Speaker 1: long play albums, the basically the vinyl record that gold
29:52
Speaker 1: Mark invented. That's right. And here's a fun little tidbit
29:55
Speaker 1: that Day found. I never realized, but UM album actually
29:59
Speaker 1: pre dates the invention of the vinyl LP because when
30:03
Speaker 1: people only had the seventy eights, they stored them in
30:07
Speaker 1: sleeves called albums, and I think when the LPs finally
30:12
Speaker 1: came out, it held about the same amount as an
30:15
Speaker 1: album worth of seventy eight, so they called them albums. Yeah,
30:18
Speaker 1: like one record, one vinyl record could hold probably five
30:21
Speaker 1: or six UM shellac records worth. Yeah, so that's kind
30:26
Speaker 1: of a boast. I guess this this one records an album,
30:29
Speaker 1: you sucker. But now we get to UM. You know,
30:33
Speaker 1: basically what Dave called the War of speeds. Uh. You
30:36
Speaker 1: mentioned the UM seventy eights finally came down to thirty
30:40
Speaker 1: three and the third. Uh So Columbia Records reduces the
30:44
Speaker 1: first LP and UM and our Cia is who released
30:49
Speaker 1: the forty five, which you know people collect forty five two.
30:52
Speaker 1: They're the smaller ones that only have a song on
30:55
Speaker 1: each side. It's like thick a single. Yeah, that's just
30:58
Speaker 1: exactly what it is. So our c a victor in Columbia,
31:01
Speaker 1: had that that war of the speeds that you mentioned
31:03
Speaker 1: to try to say, you know, the thirty three LP
31:06
Speaker 1: is um our p MLP is better. No, the forty
31:09
Speaker 1: five RPM single is better, and the public just said
31:13
Speaker 1: peace everyone piece, Well, let's let's have them all. Yeah.
31:17
Speaker 1: I mean all you needed to do was have a
31:19
Speaker 1: machine that can vary its playback speed, and you can't
31:24
Speaker 1: have both. There didn't need to be one of the other.
31:25
Speaker 1: And they they did realize that there are some people
31:28
Speaker 1: who who just want the single version. Like I guess
31:32
Speaker 1: since there's been music, there have been people that like singles.
31:36
Speaker 1: I remember my first forty five? Do you remember what
31:38
Speaker 1: yours was? I didn't collect forty five, so I actually
31:44
Speaker 1: got into forty five. I was never a big time
31:46
Speaker 1: into them, but I got into him because I just
31:48
Speaker 1: wanted one single song. Uh. It was Sweet Georgia Brown
31:54
Speaker 1: because my family had gone to a Globetrotters game and
31:57
Speaker 1: I was like, I really like that song. So my
32:00
Speaker 1: parents took me to Peaches Records and I got Sweet
32:03
Speaker 1: George Brown, and I must have driven my family crazy
32:05
Speaker 1: without realizing it played Sweet Georgia Brown over and over.
32:09
Speaker 1: That's adorable. And then do you remember what your first
32:12
Speaker 1: LP was? Absolutely Billy Joel's Glasshouses. Oh that's a good one.
32:17
Speaker 1: How old were you? Well, it was whenever that came out.
32:21
Speaker 1: I feel like I was tennish, but I'd have to
32:24
Speaker 1: look at the date. My brother and I adorably split
32:28
Speaker 1: the cost, so it was like five bucks and each
32:31
Speaker 1: threw into fifty and got glass houses. That's awesome. Um
32:35
Speaker 1: My first LP was seven in The Ragged Tiger, the
32:38
Speaker 1: Duran Duran right, good record. Um, I think I got
32:42
Speaker 1: it around second grade. I was always I think I
32:45
Speaker 1: mentioned this too. I was always a late adopter, so
32:48
Speaker 1: I was buying records long into the cassette run. I
32:51
Speaker 1: was always like no, I didn't want to believe it.
32:54
Speaker 1: It was like taking over. And then I was buying
32:56
Speaker 1: cassettes far into c d s, and I was buying CDs.
33:00
Speaker 1: I mean I have CDs that are four or five
33:02
Speaker 1: years old. Wow, from now, I didn't even know you
33:06
Speaker 1: could get those anymore. Yeah. Well the problem was to
33:10
Speaker 1: have a probably older than that, because my pickup truck
33:14
Speaker 1: that I will never sell is now just sort of
33:16
Speaker 1: our work in camping truck. It has a CD player
33:20
Speaker 1: in it, So yeah, I was buying CDs for that. Yeah,
33:22
Speaker 1: I can see like not giving up the ghost because
33:25
Speaker 1: number one, you're very loyal person, so I could see
33:27
Speaker 1: you being loyal to records. And then also at the time,
33:30
Speaker 1: you didn't know you were ever going to have a
33:32
Speaker 1: choice again, so you were fighting against the death of
33:35
Speaker 1: the LP vinyl record because that's what it seemed like
33:39
Speaker 1: when cassettes and then CDs came out. Yeah, I have
33:42
Speaker 1: no cassettes and in fact made my switch to CD
33:44
Speaker 1: s because someone stole my one cassette carrier out of
33:51
Speaker 1: my friends trunk of my car and little five points
33:53
Speaker 1: when I went to a show at the Variety Playhouse
33:56
Speaker 1: where you and I performed, yeah and sold out. If
33:58
Speaker 1: I'm not mistaken, that's right. So they stole that and
34:01
Speaker 1: I was like, all right, I guess I gotta buy
34:02
Speaker 1: CDs now. So yeah, that's it for me, everybody, I'm
34:07
Speaker 1: done with his sense. So one other thing that kind
34:09
Speaker 1: of came out of vinyl records too, is because you
34:12
Speaker 1: could put more information into one, they figured out how
34:16
Speaker 1: to actually create stereo records starting in ninety and I
34:21
Speaker 1: can't imagine what this must have seemed like to the
34:25
Speaker 1: people back in ninety eight, because up to that point
34:28
Speaker 1: everything was mono. It was one channel, so all of
34:31
Speaker 1: the sound came through one channel, and you could have
34:33
Speaker 1: two speakers, five speakers, ten speakers, it wouldn't matter because
34:36
Speaker 1: they were all playing the exact same information, and it
34:40
Speaker 1: didn't it just what You could just sit in front
34:42
Speaker 1: of one speaker and get the same experience. With stereo,
34:46
Speaker 1: you have two different channels coming out, usually right and left,
34:50
Speaker 1: and rights going to the right speaker, less going to
34:52
Speaker 1: the left speaker, and when you sit between them, you
34:56
Speaker 1: don't get the sensation that the sound is coming out
34:59
Speaker 1: of either speaker. It seems to be coming out of
35:01
Speaker 1: the space between the speaker in front of you and
35:04
Speaker 1: gives you this much more immersive, rich experience. And they
35:07
Speaker 1: figured out how to do that on a vinyl record, which,
35:09
Speaker 1: if you're talking about black magic to begin with, just
35:12
Speaker 1: just for creating a record, creating a stereo record is
35:16
Speaker 1: even more impressive if you ask me, Yeah, they did it.
35:19
Speaker 1: They figured out how to etch the walls of the groove.
35:23
Speaker 1: One side of the wall, the outside wall was the
35:25
Speaker 1: right channel, the inside wall was the left and when
35:28
Speaker 1: you play it back, that needle reads both sides at once.
35:32
Speaker 1: The Beatles were one of the first Uh well, yeah,
35:36
Speaker 1: I could safely say one of the first bands to
35:38
Speaker 1: really experiment with stereo recording. And all of a sudden
35:41
Speaker 1: you had like Paul in one ear, John and the
35:45
Speaker 1: other singing harmonies. Um, and you know when headphones became
35:49
Speaker 1: more and more the norm. This is when this really
35:52
Speaker 1: paid dividends. Yeah, like Mitch Kramer listening to music in
35:56
Speaker 1: his room at the end of the night and dazed
35:59
Speaker 1: and confused that guy Wiley Wiggins works in podcasts some
36:03
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, hey, Wiley Wiggins, how are you doing? I know.
36:06
Speaker 1: I was listening to the Great Great podcast you must
36:08
Speaker 1: remember this from Karina Longworth the movie podcast and at
36:12
Speaker 1: the end of one of the episodes, actually sat through
36:14
Speaker 1: the credits and it said additional research and transcription by
36:18
Speaker 1: Wiley Wiggins. That's awesome, man, that's super cool. I don't
36:22
Speaker 1: know if he's still doing that, but hello to both
36:25
Speaker 1: of you. It's so um. I watched yeah for real,
36:28
Speaker 1: I watched. Um have you ever seen Waking Life? Yeah? Yeah,
36:34
Speaker 1: he started now that was he did creating that, but
36:36
Speaker 1: also just in Days and Confused, He's always going to
36:38
Speaker 1: be much Cramer to me. But I watched Days and
36:40
Speaker 1: Confused the other day I was like, this movie still
36:43
Speaker 1: holds up. And then I was like, there was no
36:46
Speaker 1: reason for Matthew McConaughey to do any other character ever,
36:50
Speaker 1: because everything he does is Waterson. Is Waterson in space
36:55
Speaker 1: for Interstellar, it's Waterson, like as a lawyer and the
36:58
Speaker 1: Lincoln lawyer. Like it just Waterson all the time. And
37:02
Speaker 1: like you, if you go back and watch Stays and Confused,
37:04
Speaker 1: you're like, yeah, he and Waterson are one and the
37:06
Speaker 1: same person. Basically, it's Waterson selling Cadillacs or whatever that is,
37:11
Speaker 1: which one doesn't he Is it Cadillacs or is it
37:15
Speaker 1: Lincoln that he does the commercials for. Oh yeah, yeah,
37:18
Speaker 1: Lincoln where he just drives around and waxes philosophical exactly. Totally.
37:23
Speaker 1: I forgot about the ag campaign. That was all right,
37:26
Speaker 1: it was alright, alright, alright, alright, well let's take our
37:30
Speaker 1: final break and we're gonna come back and no doubt
37:33
Speaker 1: stumble through how records are actually made. Right after this
37:46
Speaker 1: that's watched, sk should know. Okay, record store guys, this
37:59
Speaker 1: is the point where you can just leave us and
38:01
Speaker 1: we'll say thank you for listening up to this point. Yeah,
38:06
Speaker 1: I mean this is gonna be a little clumsy because
38:08
Speaker 1: it's a little black magic e and it's um. They're
38:11
Speaker 1: also made different ways depending on who's producing the record.
38:15
Speaker 1: It's generally the same process, but uh, you know every
38:18
Speaker 1: cook has their own recipe. Yeah, so the essential process,
38:24
Speaker 1: I guess is you you it's ridiculously similar to what
38:29
Speaker 1: Scott and Edison and Alexander Graham Bell were doing, which
38:33
Speaker 1: is you basically put sound or music into some sort
38:38
Speaker 1: of amplifying device, no longer an acoustic trumpet instead some
38:43
Speaker 1: again amplifier that that makes a little needle wiggle. And
38:49
Speaker 1: as that needle wiggles, it's etching that transcription of that
38:54
Speaker 1: sound wave into a mechanical record of it. That's why
38:57
Speaker 1: records are called records. It's a record of that sound ound.
39:01
Speaker 1: And they do this with basically a turntable called the
39:05
Speaker 1: cutting lathe. And that now I understand why they call
39:08
Speaker 1: it cutting a record. I had no idea until I
39:10
Speaker 1: guess yesterday, Um, why they call it that. Yes, Impressing
39:14
Speaker 1: makes sense too, and it will in a second. But
39:16
Speaker 1: it's just like this turntable, but it looks like a
39:19
Speaker 1: turntable and like an industrial, an industrial turntable, and that's
39:23
Speaker 1: exactly what it is. Yeah, it's just a a large machine. Uh.
39:28
Speaker 1: The one that the video I saw was the one
39:31
Speaker 1: in Nashville. I don't know if they're different chisels, but
39:35
Speaker 1: they use an actual ruby gemstone chisel at their factory. Uh,
39:41
Speaker 1: and that vibrating ruby chisel cuts that groove and a uh.
39:45
Speaker 1: They still use lacquer, at least at this place, and
39:47
Speaker 1: use a lacquer disc and this is called the mother disc. Um.
39:52
Speaker 1: It's kind of cool. In the end you end up
39:54
Speaker 1: with or you can end up with as much as
39:58
Speaker 1: feet of groove lines, which is seven football fields. I
40:03
Speaker 1: don't know how many big max. But if you took
40:05
Speaker 1: like the lines of an LP, uh and I don't
40:09
Speaker 1: I don't know if that's both sides or one side,
40:11
Speaker 1: is that just one side, that would be seven football
40:14
Speaker 1: fields long, which is pretty amazing. Okay, So so no,
40:17
Speaker 1: for some reason, on the Shellac record, the mother record,
40:20
Speaker 1: they fit way more information. And from what I saw,
40:23
Speaker 1: I saw that an LP, the average LP like twenty
40:26
Speaker 1: two minutes is like um about one and a half
40:29
Speaker 1: football fields long. Really, that's what I saw. But I
40:33
Speaker 1: saw what you were talking about in that video, and
40:35
Speaker 1: I'm like, where's the distinction here? And I couldn't figure
40:37
Speaker 1: it out. So anywhere between one and a half to
40:39
Speaker 1: seven football fields that one groove. And by the way,
40:42
Speaker 1: if you look at a record those grooves, that's one long,
40:46
Speaker 1: concentric groove that you could stretch out as a single line.
40:50
Speaker 1: Had never occurred to me. Did you realize that before? Yeah? Sure,
40:55
Speaker 1: because where would it end? It's a spiral. I don't know.
40:59
Speaker 1: I hadn't really thought it through. But that's a great
41:01
Speaker 1: trivia question. Then you could get a lot of people
41:03
Speaker 1: on how many grooves are on the average LP record
41:06
Speaker 1: and the answers to one for each side. Yeah, although
41:10
Speaker 1: what about the little space? I didn't really look up
41:13
Speaker 1: how they did that, the little space between the songs.
41:15
Speaker 1: It's still yes, but it must have just a blank.
41:20
Speaker 1: There must not be any etchings in that groove. It's
41:22
Speaker 1: still tell all the musicians like, shut up, Yeah, what's
41:27
Speaker 1: it called room tone? Yeah? Room tone? And by the way,
41:30
Speaker 1: this is this is how records are mass produced. Like
41:33
Speaker 1: if you go to Third Man Records in Nashville, and
41:36
Speaker 1: sit in the little booth like it literally cuts the
41:39
Speaker 1: sound you make directly onto a record that you take home.
41:41
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, I think that guy that you me visited
41:44
Speaker 1: head is on like you could if you have dollars
41:46
Speaker 1: to spend to mess around with, like you can get
41:49
Speaker 1: yourself a cutting life. But so you've got that mother
41:52
Speaker 1: record that's made from shellac, you said, right, right, And
41:56
Speaker 1: then they take that and they coat it with some
41:58
Speaker 1: sort of metal. I don't know if it's platinum. I
42:00
Speaker 1: think they said Nickel was involved, but they use electrolysis
42:04
Speaker 1: and they make a negative of that record, so they
42:07
Speaker 1: get the metal in all of the grooves. And when
42:09
Speaker 1: they pop the metal off of that mother shellac record
42:13
Speaker 1: they have they have the mirror no, yeah, a mirror
42:16
Speaker 1: opposite image of it. Rather than grooves and and etchings
42:20
Speaker 1: and valleys, it's bumps and ridges and mountains. And that's
42:24
Speaker 1: what they use to press records from. Right. Yeah, that's
42:28
Speaker 1: called the master stamp. Uh. And that master stamp can
42:31
Speaker 1: make about a hundred thousand records. I think it is
42:35
Speaker 1: Nickel or at least what they use it. This one
42:38
Speaker 1: company that I saw, the largest one, uh, and that
42:41
Speaker 1: will harden up into silver, and you peel it away
42:44
Speaker 1: and then you kind of cut it and trim it
42:46
Speaker 1: up so it's actually round. And then when you go
42:48
Speaker 1: to press the actual vinyl, they dump and we'll get
42:51
Speaker 1: to why they're black in a second, because that's super interesting.
42:53
Speaker 1: But you get these black polyvinyl pellets, you melt them down,
42:58
Speaker 1: uh in a hopper basically, and what plops out is
43:02
Speaker 1: a little puck shaped like a little biscuit basically of vinyl. Uh.
43:07
Speaker 1: You put the label on it because that helps center
43:09
Speaker 1: things apparently, and then you have, you know, the one
43:12
Speaker 1: side of the record on top and the other side
43:14
Speaker 1: on the bottom these silver stamps and you apply about
43:18
Speaker 1: sixty tons of pressure and it just squishes it out
43:22
Speaker 1: and presses it into thin vinyl. Uh. If you think
43:25
Speaker 1: it might be a little messy around the edges, you
43:26
Speaker 1: were absolutely right. Um. They trim that off with a
43:30
Speaker 1: machine so it's perfectly round, and that excess stuff is
43:33
Speaker 1: called flash, and they actually just throw that back to
43:36
Speaker 1: use later on it's recentled They re melt it right,
43:40
Speaker 1: which is awesome. Totally. There are I saw I saw
43:44
Speaker 1: people online who say that records made from that reused
43:49
Speaker 1: flashing do not sound as good as other records. I'm like, dude, really,
43:54
Speaker 1: yes on man, you need another a second hobby. It
43:59
Speaker 1: doesn't just w record collection. And they didn't use the
44:02
Speaker 1: word actually at all, right, no, not at all. They
44:06
Speaker 1: were just daring you to say something. So um, so
44:09
Speaker 1: that's it, like that's what, that's how one record is made.
44:11
Speaker 1: And you said you can use one of those um
44:14
Speaker 1: uh master uh negatives for a hundred thousand records. So
44:18
Speaker 1: I guess they make a few of those and they
44:20
Speaker 1: have a run and that's that you have your your
44:23
Speaker 1: whole run of records created. Um. And you mentioned something
44:27
Speaker 1: about records being black, like they don't have to be black.
44:30
Speaker 1: I think I have at least one or two that
44:32
Speaker 1: are colored um like red. Yeah, yeah, it is cool.
44:37
Speaker 1: It's definitely different. But um black is the color of
44:41
Speaker 1: choice for a couple of reasons. One PVC uh is
44:46
Speaker 1: some is like a natural insulator, so static electricity can
44:50
Speaker 1: build up in it, which is nay good because static
44:53
Speaker 1: electricity attracts dust, and dust messes up your records. It
44:56
Speaker 1: can cause them to skip and do all sorts of
44:58
Speaker 1: terrible stuff. It can clug up your needle. Um. And
45:01
Speaker 1: then so they add this stuff called carbon black. I
45:04
Speaker 1: think half of a percent of your records material is
45:07
Speaker 1: carbon black, and that actually makes it a little better
45:10
Speaker 1: of a conductor, so it repels dust a little better. Yeah,
45:13
Speaker 1: so that'll that'll help him. And apparently and I never
45:16
Speaker 1: thought of this either, but you just you see dust
45:19
Speaker 1: better on a black record. Uh, so you're you know,
45:21
Speaker 1: you're more apt to keep your records cleaner probably, uh
45:25
Speaker 1: And I never really noticed that. But yeah, on my
45:27
Speaker 1: clear records, I can't see any dust. I have to say. Um,
45:30
Speaker 1: some of the records that I have, I I got
45:33
Speaker 1: from our buddy. Van Nostrin has always been very in
45:37
Speaker 1: sending records that most people would not want to hear. Um,
45:41
Speaker 1: Engelbert Humperdink I have thanks to him. Um, I've got
45:45
Speaker 1: a one about Jimmy Carter, a comedy record, Um the
45:51
Speaker 1: disco duck. But get this, there's no disco duck anywhere,
45:56
Speaker 1: and it's just like a kind of a jazzy upbeat
46:00
Speaker 1: um covers of disco songs without the duck. I don't
46:03
Speaker 1: know where Van Nostrom found this, but it's pretty astounding.
46:06
Speaker 1: Where the records that he comes up with in sinse
46:09
Speaker 1: So thanks. I used to listen to comedy records going
46:12
Speaker 1: up to as a kid, I would get George Carlin's
46:15
Speaker 1: class Clown or how I and I'm still not good
46:18
Speaker 1: at impressions, but how I got interested was the rich
46:22
Speaker 1: little records The First Family Rides again, and you know,
46:25
Speaker 1: it was a big thing, like comedy albums, And some
46:28
Speaker 1: comedians today are are getting vinyl pressed of their specials
46:31
Speaker 1: and stuff, which is kind of cool. It is cool
46:34
Speaker 1: because those comedians are flushed with Netflix money, so all
46:36
Speaker 1: of them can afford a fifty dollar cuttingly. So we
46:40
Speaker 1: kind of explained, I think, in our own way, how
46:43
Speaker 1: they're made. But then there's the black magic of actually
46:47
Speaker 1: hearing these things. Uh, you sit around and look at
46:50
Speaker 1: those grooves all day, but you wanted what you want
46:52
Speaker 1: to do, get up and dance right pretty much, and
46:55
Speaker 1: that's that, and that's records, um chuck. If you could
46:58
Speaker 1: also afford not to to cutting lathe but an electron microscope, um,
47:03
Speaker 1: you could do worse than putting a record underneath it,
47:06
Speaker 1: because you would see some freaky stuff going on in
47:09
Speaker 1: those grooves. That groove itself holds a bunch of different
47:14
Speaker 1: little etchings and each sound has its own etching. In
47:18
Speaker 1: this groove. And again these grooves are sometimes like an
47:20
Speaker 1: eighth of a millimeter UM thick, like they've gotten way
47:24
Speaker 1: thinner than when Peter Goldmark first invented vinyl records, and
47:28
Speaker 1: they hold so much information that you can actually physically
47:31
Speaker 1: see just like Um Edward ley On Scott of Martinville
47:36
Speaker 1: Um saw himself on that class plate. If you look
47:39
Speaker 1: really really closely through an electron microscope, you can see
47:42
Speaker 1: the same thing, and you are literally looking at a
47:45
Speaker 1: physical encoding of sound. The sound wave has been transferred
47:50
Speaker 1: mechanically through that that ruby, um what do you call it,
47:54
Speaker 1: the carving thing chisel onto a record. And now if
47:59
Speaker 1: you put your record on your turntable, play it back
48:02
Speaker 1: at the appropriate rotations per minute, very important, and you
48:06
Speaker 1: put the arm down. What you're doing is you're putting
48:09
Speaker 1: down a needle or a stylus that is a very
48:12
Speaker 1: sensitive usually industrial gemstone like sapphire maybe ruby I saw
48:16
Speaker 1: a diamond most most frequently, and that that actually reads
48:21
Speaker 1: every single one of those little tiny squiggles in that
48:24
Speaker 1: in those grooves from start to finish, and it retranslates
48:29
Speaker 1: that mechanical encoding through to the cartridge, which translates that
48:33
Speaker 1: into electricity, which creates an audible sound that has to
48:38
Speaker 1: be amplified and run through speakers. And when you do
48:40
Speaker 1: all that, you're listening to a record. That's right, And
48:43
Speaker 1: I kind of compared it to a guitar pick up
48:45
Speaker 1: if uh, which one do we explain that? And was
48:48
Speaker 1: that in the les Paul, Yeah, it had to be.
48:51
Speaker 1: But it's just sort of the same idea as a
48:54
Speaker 1: guitar pickup. It's it uses copper wire and magnets um
48:58
Speaker 1: to create this, you know, electric current, and in this
49:02
Speaker 1: case it's induced at the same frequency as that little
49:06
Speaker 1: needle wiggling through the grooves. And then you have to
49:10
Speaker 1: obviously that you still don't hear anything unless you feed
49:12
Speaker 1: that through an amplifier and then eventually speakers. If you
49:15
Speaker 1: listen really closely, you can hear the faintest bit of it,
49:18
Speaker 1: but it's nothing to dance to your right, um. Dave,
49:21
Speaker 1: Dave helped us with us, right, this was a Dave jam.
49:24
Speaker 1: It was Dave. So Dave kind of drove something home
49:28
Speaker 1: for me when he talked about how the middle c
49:31
Speaker 1: on a piano is um vibrates at an amplitude of
49:36
Speaker 1: two hundred and sixty one point six three hurts, which
49:39
Speaker 1: means that that it vibrates to create that sound that
49:42
Speaker 1: middle cyano piano. It vibrates a two hundred and sixty
49:45
Speaker 1: one point six three vibrations per second. That's just one
49:49
Speaker 1: note on a piano, and that is encoded in a record.
49:53
Speaker 1: When you play a middle C on a piano and
49:55
Speaker 1: you capture it on a record. Um, you, that's just
49:58
Speaker 1: one thing. Now consider all of the different notes, all
50:01
Speaker 1: the different sounds, all the different instruments that are are
50:05
Speaker 1: encoded onto a record, and it's there. Each one is
50:08
Speaker 1: physically encoded in the right proper time, the right spot
50:12
Speaker 1: on that groove in that record, playback on that particular RPM.
50:17
Speaker 1: And when you start to put all this together and
50:19
Speaker 1: realize how complicated it is, it really gives you an
50:23
Speaker 1: appreciation for what's going on with vinyl and why people
50:26
Speaker 1: love it so much. Yeah, I mean, it's it's sort
50:29
Speaker 1: of easy to wrap your head around someone plucking a
50:33
Speaker 1: piano string or loot rather hammering a piano string that
50:38
Speaker 1: would be a harpsichord if it was plucked in a
50:40
Speaker 1: middle C like ding ding ding ding, and how that
50:43
Speaker 1: might be translated. But when you think about a groove
50:45
Speaker 1: being cut that represents like guitar feedback from Jimmy Hendrix,
50:51
Speaker 1: which is a sound, but it's not like a U.
50:54
Speaker 1: It's not like you think of a familiar note being
50:56
Speaker 1: plucked or something, or the sound of distorted guitar. It's
51:00
Speaker 1: just it's amazing. It is black magic. I'm with you. So.
51:04
Speaker 1: Um A lot of people chuck say vinyl is the
51:07
Speaker 1: only way to go, and other people say take your
51:09
Speaker 1: vinyl and shove it because digital music is the only
51:13
Speaker 1: way to go. And there's apparently a pretty big argument
51:16
Speaker 1: about all this. Yeah, I mean, you know, your vinyl
51:19
Speaker 1: enthusiasts will say it has a warmer sound. Uh, they'll
51:22
Speaker 1: say that's as close to the original way form as
51:26
Speaker 1: you can get because it's directly from a master recording
51:30
Speaker 1: and it's not digitized and compressed. Um I and Day
51:35
Speaker 1: points out, and I fully agree that part of this.
51:37
Speaker 1: You know, I'm sure there are audio files who have
51:39
Speaker 1: an ear that can really differentiate, differentiate um sounds on
51:45
Speaker 1: a really minute level. I'm not one of them. Um
51:49
Speaker 1: So for me, part of it is the the ritual
51:52
Speaker 1: of the record album. Aren't liner notes? Holding an album
51:56
Speaker 1: and looking at it while you're playing it, Like all
51:59
Speaker 1: the stuff that was Law Austwin records shrunk to cassettes
52:02
Speaker 1: and you could still sort of do it then, and
52:04
Speaker 1: you can kind of do it with CD cases and
52:07
Speaker 1: liner notes. But the record was really like it was.
52:10
Speaker 1: It was a part of the whole experience large format art.
52:14
Speaker 1: But there are people who say that, you know, like
52:16
Speaker 1: you said that digital gets rid of those pops and
52:20
Speaker 1: clicks that a lot of people like from records. Um
52:24
Speaker 1: it has a wider frequency range than vinyl does, so
52:27
Speaker 1: it can hit the highs and the lows more accurately.
52:30
Speaker 1: UM I mean, I like it all. I don't think
52:33
Speaker 1: you have to choose. I don't think you have to
52:35
Speaker 1: choose either. But um I I saw a really good
52:38
Speaker 1: description of the difference between digital recordings and analog recordings,
52:43
Speaker 1: which is what is meant to be captured on a record.
52:46
Speaker 1: There was a guy, a recording engineer named Michael Connolly
52:49
Speaker 1: who um said, Let's say that you want to measure
52:52
Speaker 1: your height, and you stand next to a door jam,
52:55
Speaker 1: and you put a pencil along the top of your
52:57
Speaker 1: head and you mark the door jam. What you've just
53:00
Speaker 1: done is created an analog of your height that mark
53:04
Speaker 1: stands in for your height. Right. Another way you could
53:07
Speaker 1: do it is stand still and hold the measuring tape
53:10
Speaker 1: and then see what your height actually is. And then
53:13
Speaker 1: you take that measurement and you transcribe it to another medium,
53:16
Speaker 1: like you write it down in a notebook. And the
53:18
Speaker 1: thing is is your analog is truer, it's more faithful
53:22
Speaker 1: because it's an actual representation of your actual height. But um,
53:28
Speaker 1: the measurement can be reproduced much more easily. You can
53:32
Speaker 1: go from notebook to notebook and just write down that
53:34
Speaker 1: same measurement every time without any loss of information. And
53:38
Speaker 1: that's not true from that door jam pencil mark, because
53:41
Speaker 1: let's say you move, you want to take a door
53:42
Speaker 1: jam with you to remember how tall you were, and
53:45
Speaker 1: you install it at your next house, it might not
53:48
Speaker 1: be quite the same, you know, height off the floor
53:51
Speaker 1: as it was before. So those are those pops and
53:53
Speaker 1: clicks that get added into it when you reproduce a sound,
53:57
Speaker 1: an analog sound, whereas with digital, yes, it's not the
54:00
Speaker 1: entire waveform of the whole thing, it's measurements of it.
54:04
Speaker 1: But it's such a mind boggling number of measurements with
54:07
Speaker 1: a mind boggling amount of information that most people say,
54:11
Speaker 1: not only can you not tell what's lost in a
54:13
Speaker 1: digital recording, some people say digital recordings are actually better, right,
54:18
Speaker 1: But to be clear, we are talking about a digital
54:20
Speaker 1: recording as in a c D, which has about for
54:25
Speaker 1: a little more than four kill a bits per second
54:29
Speaker 1: UH worth of information, which is super high. UM. If
54:33
Speaker 1: you're talking, you know, streaming something from a streaming service,
54:37
Speaker 1: there is a difference, and you don't have to be
54:39
Speaker 1: an audio file to tell UH it is a thinner sound.
54:42
Speaker 1: It's ten ear UH. It is compressed down from the
54:45
Speaker 1: CD size, which is a little over fourteen hundred two
54:48
Speaker 1: between ninety and a hundred and sixty uh kill a
54:52
Speaker 1: bits per second. So that's a lot of compression going on.
54:56
Speaker 1: And Dave points out that you um like you're probably
55:00
Speaker 1: playing that through like in a bluetooth speaker maybe or earbuds,
55:05
Speaker 1: not very good quality. If you if you do think
55:08
Speaker 1: the records sound better, it's probably because you're at your
55:10
Speaker 1: audio file friend's house who collects records and who also
55:14
Speaker 1: places it through a really high quality amplifier instead of speakers.
55:18
Speaker 1: So you know the sound between the difference between that
55:22
Speaker 1: and UH streaming something through a bluetooth speaker earbuds is
55:25
Speaker 1: just nine and day. Yeah, because so that the the stamp,
55:28
Speaker 1: the bit rate is just the number of measurements taken, right,
55:31
Speaker 1: and measurements are not exact. It's the kind of a
55:33
Speaker 1: snapshot of the thing. It's not the whole thing, like
55:36
Speaker 1: a record is the whole sound wave. But I ran
55:39
Speaker 1: across something, Chuck that just kind of puts the whole
55:41
Speaker 1: argument to bed. And I noticed it in that video
55:44
Speaker 1: you said about how records are made at that record
55:47
Speaker 1: Um manufacturer in Nashville. Did you notice that they started
55:51
Speaker 1: out with a digital file. Well, yeah, I mean yeah,
55:56
Speaker 1: it was a pro tools file. It was so they
55:59
Speaker 1: transferred a digital file onto a record. So the whole
56:03
Speaker 1: difference for anything that's ever been put to a record
56:06
Speaker 1: from a digital file is out the window. Your arguments
56:08
Speaker 1: just totally moot because you started out with a digital file. Yeah,
56:12
Speaker 1: but it's a huge digital file, but it's still digital,
56:17
Speaker 1: which means it's not in precise representation of the exact same,
56:21
Speaker 1: same thing. But other people say, well a records not neither.
56:23
Speaker 1: There's just too many, too much room for air, it
56:25
Speaker 1: can't possibly be precise. But I think you said it
56:28
Speaker 1: you don't have to choose. Yeah, I agreed you got
56:31
Speaker 1: anything else about Vinyl records because I could keep going. Man,
56:34
Speaker 1: this is fun. Uh A little fun tidbit about my mom.
56:38
Speaker 1: When she was little living in Memphis, Tennessee. She my
56:41
Speaker 1: granddad took her into I think it was called the
56:44
Speaker 1: Memphis Recording Studio that's pretty on the nose and recorded
56:48
Speaker 1: her playing um, the clarinet or something and left with
56:53
Speaker 1: a record and that later became Sun Records. So technically
56:57
Speaker 1: my mom recorded where a wasp pressly recorded. That is
57:01
Speaker 1: pretty amazing, man, I think that's true. That's a story
57:04
Speaker 1: I got. I'm sticking to it. I think there's a
57:06
Speaker 1: very charming story to end on Charles. So let's go
57:09
Speaker 1: instead to listener mail. How about that? Ah? Yeah, this
57:14
Speaker 1: is a quickie about de farting a lot after colonoscopies,
57:18
Speaker 1: which we talked about the vine. Hey, guys, I am
57:22
Speaker 1: Chuck the gastro and grology technician, huge fan of the
57:26
Speaker 1: show and I don't think I missed a single episode.
57:30
Speaker 1: I was regarding your different experiences after colonoscopies because I
57:33
Speaker 1: was super farty and you don't remember being super party, right,
57:36
Speaker 1: I was super high. That's right. Uh. Air is injected
57:41
Speaker 1: during the procedure to purposefully distend the colon for a
57:45
Speaker 1: better view of all the walls and easier passages to
57:48
Speaker 1: the holy land. And it makes your hands puff up
57:51
Speaker 1: like a cabbage patch kid, which everybody likes to see.
57:54
Speaker 1: Some facilities use air, which will result in the fart party.
57:58
Speaker 1: Some facilities use the more expensive carbon dioxide, which is
58:02
Speaker 1: absorbed by your colon breathe out your lungs and results
58:05
Speaker 1: in a more comfortable experience. This is a possible cause
58:09
Speaker 1: for the difference between your experiences. You may still get
58:13
Speaker 1: a little gassy after CEO two, um, but I can
58:15
Speaker 1: assure you that recovery rooms in the CEO two facility
58:19
Speaker 1: are not full of farts and is a more pleasant
58:21
Speaker 1: experience for the patient in general. Did you go to
58:24
Speaker 1: Bargain Bargain Barn Hospital for yours when cold to colon ascopes?
58:29
Speaker 1: Are us spatulous city or the colon Barn? I guess
58:35
Speaker 1: so it was pretty fun. I enjoyed the fart barn Um.
58:38
Speaker 1: And this is from Chuck and he says, ps g
58:41
Speaker 1: I is the best department butts in guts for the wind.
58:45
Speaker 1: Nice nice work. Chuck. Nice work you two, Chuck. Uh.
58:49
Speaker 1: Thanks man. If you want to be like Chuck, either
58:52
Speaker 1: one well, no really, the one that just wrote in.
58:54
Speaker 1: You can write into us too and send us an
58:57
Speaker 1: email to Stuff Podcasts and i art radio dot com.
59:04
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59:07
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