My Original scratchy 78 RPM record.
A somewhat better version from Internet Archive.
This was my favorite record when I was a kid in Berkeley, California in the early 1960s. I played it many times on my father’s Victrola (Victor Talking Machine model VV-405). It seemed to have better fidelity than other 78 rpm records I was playing at the time. It wasn’t until quite recently that I figured out why this record sounded better. If you look closely at the record label you will notice the letters “VE.” That designates this record to be a Victor Electric recording which means it was recorded with microphones and vacuum tube amplifiers. According to the internet, this record came out in 1928. The other records that have a more tinny sound were recorded acoustically. That means the musicians would gather closely around a large horn and play loud while a record was cut. The horn picked up the sound and it was connected to a diaphragm and fed into a cutting head to make a master copy. The quality of the sound depended on how loud the music was played.
I played the record on my Newcomb phonograph and recorded it into my PC computer. I believe it was the same setup that I used in the post “Dreamo Sleeping Pills.” It is extremely scratchy and I didn’t want to use much noise reduction. I wanted to preserve as much of the analog (non digital) quality as possible.
