Following fentonsteves brilliantly instructive post about the great pre-recorded cassette tape swindle (a.k.a. Home Taping Is Significantly Improving Music) yesterday – itself a response to a query from Moose – I thought it might be time for one of those threads where punters can ask anything that’s been bothering them in the hope that the AW hive mind can polyfilla over that crack in their wall of knowledge. Not so much the big threadworthy ATM stuff as the small almost-too-embarrassed-to-ask headscratchers.
And, as my man Carl Sagan said:
“There are naive questions, tedious questions, ill-phrased questions, questions put after inadequate self-criticism. But every question is a cry to understand the world. There is no such thing as a dumb question”.
And, with that in mind, I’ll set the bar at limbo dancing level by asking this.
Every now and then, while listening to seventies reggae music, I find myself wondering about combs.
In the JA Cinematic Universe it’s very clearly defined that The Dreads are the good guys and the baddies are the “Baldheads”. Yet the Dreads’ greatest gesture of defiance is to “throw the comb away”. Now, I don’t know what degree of curation is involved in maintaining a natty set of locks but it does seem to me that those “bald heads” really would be crazy not to have thrown their own comb away…?
That’s the level – over to you
Duh! Your Questions Answered
What strange or ancient practice is Sam Cooke on about when he’s urging us to “Pass the handkerchief round” at the Harlem Square Club?
Poverty + sniffles. Winters can be shocking in NYC, and they only had one hankie in the builsing because were so poor they had to buy cassettes instead of CDs (cont. p94)
Who is the masked super-hero?
In the old Cab Calloway number covered by Joe Jackson, “Jumpin’ Jive”, we learn:
“The jip-jam-jump is a jumpin’ jive
Makes you like your eggs on the Jersey side”
My question, dear Afterword friends, is: what are ‘eggs on the Jersey side’?
Are they simply eggs that are eaten somewhere in New Jersey?
Or is ‘on the jersey side’ some very interesting method of cooking eggs, like poaching or scrambling them, or something?
It simply means sunnyside up.
Whatever happened to the heroes?
Well, I believe poor old Leon Trotsky came to a bit of a sticky end. Oooh, nasty.
Similarly – who comes between Lenin and Sancho Panza in that line? It sounds like ‘Tequedo Mira’
The great Elmyra, aka master art forger Elmyr de Hory.
I have a few albums which play at 45RPM, rather than the regulation 33RPM (example: the first three Metallica albums).
I’m sure I once read the reason and benefits of this, but for the life of me can’t remember.
(I know I could probably find out through Google, but I can’t be arsed!)
Anyone?
I think Billy Bragg’s Life’s a Riot was 45rpm but then it’s very short, about 15 minutes.
I have Cooking Vinyl’s ’94 reissue of Don’t Try this at Home, also cut at 45rpm.
PiL’s Metal Box was famously cut on 3 x 12″ singles at 45rpm in a professed attempt to bust out of the album format. Of course then it was “normalised” as a double album (Second Edition)
As a hip-hop head in the late ’80s I was amused to note that US 12″ singles that I occasionally got on import were cut at 33rpm. By then did 45 rpm 7″ singles even exist in the US?
Yes, that’s why they were called “45s”
I mean in the late 80s. I feel like CD singles took over much quicker over there.
Hey dai, that’s taking the “Duh!” at the top a bit too literally….
I am here to help …
I know this one. It’s the same benefit as half-speed mastering. At 45rpm, you get nearly 50% more groove per second past the stylus = better bass, higher treble, and louder cut (so lower noise). The only downside is getting out of your chair after 2 songs.
Peter Gabriel is going through his entire works releasing albums on half-speed mastered double 45rpm vinyl. They’re not at all bad, but the 33rpm half-speed mastered versions are nearly as good at half the price. And both come with options of CD quality or high-resolution lossless download.
I think it’s also ‘cos there’s room for the grooves to be wider, which apparently means better/louder. That’s why longer songs on a 7″ are that much quieter, and why 12″ singles sound so darned ace.
Your are correct. I didn’t want to get too technical, your summary hits the nail on the head without use of terms like “amplitude modulation”.
By the same token, Queen’s Greatest Hits, at 30 mins a side, is one of the worst-sounding LPs I own.
“Queen’s Greatest Hits, at 30 mins a side, is one of the worst-sounding LPs I own.”
See also “Initiation” by Todd Rundgren. Over 67 minutes. I’m amazed they managed to cram it all on one modest slab of vinyl.
To be fair, 60 minutes of Queen on a CD is equally unbearable.
Wrongity wrong! I love Queen, always did.
Mind, it is about time now that May and Taylor let it lie. They just about got away with it when they recruited the mighty Paul Rodgers, but the latest attempt with that pretty boy Lambert is just embarrassing. And when will someone tell Brian May that the grey poodle hair is not a good look…
They should take a leaf from R. Plant esq. and do something a bit different. He seems to have done pretty well at that, so far. Maybe they could too.
As for the Grey Poodle Hair, if you’ve still got enough of it at an advanced age, why not make a feature of it.
Wish I had enough left for a grey poodle cut.
I like them really, just couldn’t resist a joke. I own Sheer Heart Attack and the greatest hits.
When I first read about Todd, I thought “What a generous gesture by Todd, giving his fans such great value for money…”
Listening suggested that I could have done with a more miserly attitude.
We want you be technical! We probably all know than wider is better*, but don’t have a clue as to why. That’s where you, our resident expert, comes in. Let your boffin flag fly!
*ain’t that the truth
45 minutes is the maximum allowed length for a vinly LP, it’s obvious, so you can get one either side of a C90.
…er.. might that be the other way around?
In my experience (see other threads) it’s more like 46 minutes and 20 seconds. These things are important.
The Times They Are A Changin’? Yes.
Bringing It All Back Home? No.
So the big question is what song do you leave off of BIABH? When my friend made me a C90 with it at Highway 61 on it he left off Outlaw Blues from BIABH and Queen Jane Approximately off of H61R. I can’t argue with the former, but the latter is way better than Ballad of a Thin Man. I was well pissed off when I finally heard the full album , I can tell you.
Yes please to the technicalities.
Always a bonus to lever long, technical words into a conversation – makes people think I know what I’m on about
better/louder
Oh yes indeed.
My 12 inch single of New Year’s Day was the first disc I ever played that allowed my amplifier to coax acoustic feedback from my damped-to-within-an-inch-of-its-life hi-fi shelf.
Glorious sounds may truly be recovered from 12 inch vinyl at 45 r.p.m.
My 12″ of Living Colour’s Cult of Personality, with a live Should I Stay Or Should I Go on the other side, is the most gloriously loud record I own. You need to put those little spongy things in your ears before you can even look at the grooves.
My 12″ 45 of Tom Browne’s “Funkin’ For Jamaica” is a bit of a belter.
Rattled the floorboards quite alarmingly in the rickety Welsh cottage I was living in at the time of it’s release.
Hey! I just had that on the other week!
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tBWHTVMnut4
So the other question I have on Vinyl is that I believe that the frequency response deteriorates as you move to the centre of the disc – hence the tendency of having slow ballads at the end of side 1 / 2 on rock albums.
How much of a degradation is this ? Assuming a more that perfect hearing of up to 20kHz, are we talking 1,2…. 5 kHz etc etc ?
Given this (and the fact Shannons sampling theorem states that al, information is captured at twice the frequency, meaning CDs are up to 22kHz), why is vinyl held up to sound so much better than digital ?
to these (admittedly ropey) ears there is no true difference between vinyl and CD. Sonically, I’m sure there is – but not that I can really notice in “general” listening.
I like both formats equally.
There is of course a whole ritual to vinyl with the unpacking, correct handling, placement of the needle, repeat process after 20 minutes.
And the 12″ Vinyl Record is a nice artefact – it may still be nostalgia on my part, but the whole package and the record itself just looks more interesting than a CD.
I like the ritual. My kids know that vinyl has no pause button. If I’m playing an LP, I am guaranteed 20 minutes peace.
Few things in life better a heavyweight black 12-incher at 45rpm. Paging Moose!
I say, steady on, old son.
The upper frequency response of vinyl is determined by the amount of groove which passes the stylus in a given amount of time. At 33rpm, that’s a rotational rate of 0.55Hz
Outer grooves of a 12″ LP are about 147mm from the centre. The outer groove perimeter is 2*Pi*147=923mm. 1/0.55=1.818 rotations per second. So that’s linear velocity of 1.818*923=1678mm/s.
Inner grooves are at 63mm radius. Perimeter is 2*Pi*63=395mm. Linear velocity of 1.818*395=719mm/s.
So, a reduction in linear velocity of 719/1678=0.428.
It isn’t quite as simple as saying maximum frequency on inner grooves is 0.428*20kHz=8.5kHz as the maximum frequency of outer grooves exceeds 20kHz.
I’m going to ignore tracking error for now, that’s a whole other subject. Distortion varies from 1% to 3% across the record, assuming a 9 inch tonearm geometry.
Is this the point at which we admit that this entire thread is about @fentonsteve ‘s magnificently abstruse technical wibblings giving the rest of us the (full-frequency-range-recorded) horn?
Perhaps the mods could do me a section where I just shout into the void, in order to get things off my chest.
Sorry, I think Bri’s late night posts may already have that market cornered.
equations and mentions of pi.
That’s made my night (yes, I am easily pleased)
I’m with you. Top quality start to Sunday.
Thanks Steve.
More importantly, who put the ram in the rama lama ding dong?
and was it the same person who put the bop in the bop shoo bop shoo bop, and put the dip in the dip da dip da dip?
The Edsels (named after a Ford car FFS) released a song called Rama Lama Ding Dong, which starts with the line ‘I got a girl named Rama Lama, Rama Lama Ding Dong’. I’m guessing that’s his term of affection rather than her actual real name. Later, Barry Mann was the first to pose the question, ‘Who put the Ram in the Rama Lama Ding Dong?’ My conclusion is that the person putting the ‘Ram’ in was the lead singer of The Edsels and writer of the original song.
Therefore, the answer to your question, @bungliemutt, is George “Wydell” Jones Jr.
According to Chuck Prophet, you did it!
My words to the Edsels:
Ram On.
And it wasn’t just bands named after Ford cars (see also The Cortinas), a whole industry was built referencing cars.
Escort, Fiesta and the Vauxhall Razzle
Some related techie questions. Probably for @fentonsteve.
Is the ATRAC file format, as used on minidiscs, a lossy format and how does the sound quality of an ATRAC recording stack up against a digital .wav recording from the same source?
I have a box full of minidiscs recorded from FM radio shows 2002-3. Is there a straightforward means of directly converting ATRAC files to .wav files without forking out for proprietary software, utilising the USB port on my Sony Minidisc Walkman?
ATRAC is lossy, similar to AAC – better than MP3, at about 320kbps.
The only other way to get at it is to buy a MD deck (try popular auction site) with a S/PDIF output and connect that into the digital input of a soundcard. Then record with Audacity or similar.
In my experience, the later version of ATRAC came very close to WAV.
Check this out:
http://www.afterdawn.com/glossary/term.cfm/atrac_advanced_lossless
Yes. 352kbps was the number I was thinking of. Well, it is about 320, give or take 10%…
It’s exactly 320 give 10%….
The thing I struggle to get my irregular head around is how exactly is a tiny thin sticking out piece of metal or diamond or whatever it is, being run through tiny grooves in a round piece of polyvinyl chloride currently giving me Carlos Santana, Michael Shrieve et all in all their Lotus glory – I mean, how on earth is that level of complexity, the fluidity of the guitar, intricate percussion, perfect sounding bass, swirly organ etc all somehow magically created from vibrations picked up by a tiny stylus. It just seems like voodoo.
I managed it with one of those new fivers. It even acts as its own amplifier too, albeit very puny:
Mind boggling.
That’s some f*cked up voodoo shit right there.
It was very difficult to hold it steady in the groove and at the optimum angle (whilst holding the camera with the other hand), hence the wobbling.
Oh dear.
Oh dear.
Oh dear.
I didn’t mean it to be Moosebait, but it somehow ended up that way.
Yeah, right…
Are you referencing Nigel Planer in the Comic Strip’s not-that-funny follow up to the Five Go Mad thing?
If you try to play the Smiths’ second album it doesn’t work. Or refuses.
My question
This is the question that keeps me awake at night – who will save rock & roll ?
Not the best, but who can argue with the fantastically named Handsome Dick Manitoba?
Another question for Fenton Steve. Back in the Stone Age I was recording an LP onto cassette. There was a quiet passage in one of the songs and upon reviewing the cassette recording a distant dogs bark could be heard that wasn’t on the lP. Explain.
In a word, microphony.
The vinyl/stylus interface is mechanical – the wiggles in the grooves are at audio frequency. At the other end of the stylus cantilever are two tiny magnets and two tiny magnetic coils. The groove wiggles move the magnets and generate tiny electrical currents in the coils. These currents are then amplified with huge gain to get the signal loud enough to drive your speakers.
As you can imagine, the pickup cartridge can act as an audio-frequency acoustic microphone. It can also detect audio-frequency magnetic fields such as those generated by the large magnetic coils in loudspeakers.
So don’t put your record deck anywhere near sources of acoustic noise or magnetic fields. It is possible to get howl-round (feedback) if your speakers are too close to your record deck or are mechanically coupled (e.g. by being on the same shelf). That’s why many turntables (e.g. Linns) are sprung-mounted.
As a teen, my record deck was next to the family telly. I was recording the Human League’s ‘Dare’ for a school friend when my dad came in to watch the news. His tape of Dare features news of the miner’s strike, and speeches by Arthur Scargill, in the track gaps.
Your school friend is probably now haunting superdeluxeeditions, Human League forums etc. demanding the reissue of the “NUM mix” of Dare.
Not sure if anyone has addressed @SewerRobot about the OP – but I think bald-heads aren’t necessarily bald. Aren’t they just “squares”, so to speak?
Whoever they are, they’re crazy and we’re going to run them outta town.
Ooh, ta BC. So they’re just bald relative to someone with four foot long dreads…
If petrol costs 115.9p a litre why does the cost never come to anything other than a whole number?
If, as I presume, they round the total up or down, why not just sell it at 116 per litre?
More nosey than dumb, my question is, what occasioned Magnus Shaw’s abrupt and comprehensive disappearance from the Parish Counsel podcast in 2015?
MS tweeted something at the time about taking a break for personal reasons, but to listen to the podcast now, it’s like he never existed.
in the last verse of Elton john’s Crocadile Rock there is (on close listening) a very close harmony part.
ever since I first noticed this I have wondered…..did Elton double up his vocal or is the part sung by a band member???
bugged my for years!!!!
I’m catching up with previous series of Line Of Duty, and they are still using cassette tapes to record interviews. This is only a year or two old, but is this right..? Really..??! Surely they use digital recording now – does anyone know? Either through being a plod….or via the other end of the experience…!
I don’t know about that*, but in my video days they could only accept lossless formats as evidence.
Compressed video formats (mpg/wmv) and so on use an occasional master frame then just encode the differences for the next few frames. So they are ‘guessed’ by the encoder and can’t be relied on. If your evidence is that the burglar had short fat square fingers (a common Mpeg artefact) how could you tell it was the bloke in the dock or just a rogue video encoder?
(*) must find out.
Assuming that cassettes are still used, I wondered if was something to do with the actual physical object – digital recordings are easily edited whereas a tape is much less easy to mess around with without it being obvious…?
From 2012
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-20556330
Especially bloody chrome tapes (see above)
Whoops a Daisy – where the hell did that come from ?