Direct mp3 download or play: Dreamo Sleeping Pills
This is from a recording my father made with a friend sometime in the 1940’s before he was married to my mother. I think it was made on a machine that records sound and cuts a record as well. The record itself is made of cardboard and is coated with some sort of material like vinyl. This one is bright orange and is I think seven inches in diameter. The disc has two holes, the regular one in the middle for playing and another one out about an inch from the middle. I guess the second hole was there to secure the disc when a recording was made. The record plays at 78 rpm and the condition of the surface is so poor (the vinyl like surface is actually cracking) that it is almost not playable. I did manage after several attempts to play and record it into a computer. The record was played on a Newcomb phonograph fitted with a General Electric variable reluctance magnetic cartridge. This unit is all vacuum tubes monophonic and is a combination portable PA system and record player with a twelve inch speaker. What is really nice about the amplifier in this unit is that it has a line level output built in and a dual triode 12AX7 vacuum tube as a phono preamplifier. We had one of these at Alhambra High School in Martinez, California where I lived as a teenager and beyond. The recording was done on a PC computer running Windows 2000, with an older Creative Soundblaster Audigy soundcard. I think it was the same computer that I recorded “Ambience Recording June 28th, 2008″(you ought to check that out too) before it was upgraded to Windows XP. I had to use lots of noise reduction and dipped the highs around 6700 hertz down to -3 db to combat the extreme surface noise with Adobe Audition. I don’t think I was very successful, but the surface noise was even worse before processing. The sound here is an MP3 at 128 kilobits per second.
Dreamo
