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May. 29th, 2009 11:43 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stormdogI had the rare pleasure of listening to music on a Victrola for the first time yesterday.
A Victrola is the closest thing I've ever heard to raw, unadulterated, recorded music. There's no electricity involved at all. Just a little stylus that slides along the grooves of a vinyl disc and vibrates in sync with the sound etched into the surface. That little needle is mechanically and acoustically coupled to a resonant membrane on the brass tone arm, amplifying the vibrations into a disturbance that's redirected into an acoustic horn. From it's tiny aperture, perhaps only a centimeter across, on the internal side of that resonant membrane, the long interior of the horn twists up and around and through the tone arm, then down through the arm's base, and through the swiveling joint where the the arm is mounted to the wooden body of the instrument. At that point, the acoustic pipe is perhaps fifteen centimeters across.
From there, the horn takes another twist and turn, always expanding, until it leads directly out the front of the Victrola cabinet, in a parabolic mouth, fitted with louvers and doors to control sound and tone, that's probably fifty or a hundred times the size of the entrance at the other end of its length. And all it takes for that raw music, faithfully reproduced from the vibrations of the artist's voice, and sound waves of the instruments accompanying him, to be heard is that twisting, dancing column of air and energy stored in the springs of a hand cranked mechanical motor. Now, it was a recent enough record that it probably wasn't a true acoustic recording; after about 1925, electricity began to be used in the recording process to cut masters. But hearing these sounds produced with no electronic amplifier, or waveform conversion from digital to analog, or processing through tubes and transistors, was unlike anything I've heard. Listening to this music being produced by the simple, elegant, beautiful, hard mechanical coupling of an oscillating column of air to that tiny phonograph needle bordered on a spiritual experience.
I know that the sound reproduction from a purely acoustic turntable is lacking, technically. In comparison to the fuller range that can be achieved with newer technology, flaws in material and design result in falloff in many of the frequency bands in audible sound. To put it simply, they can sound a little distant and tinny. In fact, I'd always heard that faraway, lonesome effect in recordings of music on phonographs, but somehow it hadn't quite hit me that it would sound like that in person. And when it did, exactly, it blew me away. It was like hearing the past. And I guess it is. Standing there and listening to completely mechanical, no-electricity-required music was like being in another world for a few unearthly minutes. It's an experience that keeps playing over again in my mind. Like an old, scratched record....
A Victrola is the closest thing I've ever heard to raw, unadulterated, recorded music. There's no electricity involved at all. Just a little stylus that slides along the grooves of a vinyl disc and vibrates in sync with the sound etched into the surface. That little needle is mechanically and acoustically coupled to a resonant membrane on the brass tone arm, amplifying the vibrations into a disturbance that's redirected into an acoustic horn. From it's tiny aperture, perhaps only a centimeter across, on the internal side of that resonant membrane, the long interior of the horn twists up and around and through the tone arm, then down through the arm's base, and through the swiveling joint where the the arm is mounted to the wooden body of the instrument. At that point, the acoustic pipe is perhaps fifteen centimeters across.
From there, the horn takes another twist and turn, always expanding, until it leads directly out the front of the Victrola cabinet, in a parabolic mouth, fitted with louvers and doors to control sound and tone, that's probably fifty or a hundred times the size of the entrance at the other end of its length. And all it takes for that raw music, faithfully reproduced from the vibrations of the artist's voice, and sound waves of the instruments accompanying him, to be heard is that twisting, dancing column of air and energy stored in the springs of a hand cranked mechanical motor. Now, it was a recent enough record that it probably wasn't a true acoustic recording; after about 1925, electricity began to be used in the recording process to cut masters. But hearing these sounds produced with no electronic amplifier, or waveform conversion from digital to analog, or processing through tubes and transistors, was unlike anything I've heard. Listening to this music being produced by the simple, elegant, beautiful, hard mechanical coupling of an oscillating column of air to that tiny phonograph needle bordered on a spiritual experience.
I know that the sound reproduction from a purely acoustic turntable is lacking, technically. In comparison to the fuller range that can be achieved with newer technology, flaws in material and design result in falloff in many of the frequency bands in audible sound. To put it simply, they can sound a little distant and tinny. In fact, I'd always heard that faraway, lonesome effect in recordings of music on phonographs, but somehow it hadn't quite hit me that it would sound like that in person. And when it did, exactly, it blew me away. It was like hearing the past. And I guess it is. Standing there and listening to completely mechanical, no-electricity-required music was like being in another world for a few unearthly minutes. It's an experience that keeps playing over again in my mind. Like an old, scratched record....
