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Re: 16" LPs (Friday Musings)



I'm perusing my ARCHIVES digest on a dreary Los Angeles winter Saturday
afternoon (yes, L.A. too has overcast days, on occasion, in the winter) and
reading a discussion about the irony of phonograph records requiring "special
equipment." And wondering whether anybody had actually noticed that the
original request concerned sixteen-inch disks, unplayable on your average
12-inch-LP-ready turntable?

This is an older version of the eight-inch floppy disk problem -- "you mean
they made them that big?"  (I think those had the same 156K capacity as the
1960-ish IBM hard disk I recently ran across advertised in our files.)

On the other hand, I was on the reference desk at Burbank Public Library a
couple of years ago when a teenager came up and asked if we had any of those
big black round things with music on them.  I am not kidding.

Of course, when I was a whippersnapper (born 1950) we had a recording of
Beethoven's 5th on transparent red 45's (I don't remember how many
sides)--kind of a transitional technology, microgrooved but with the same
duration as a 78, that never caught on for classical music (thank the
Goddess) but was perfect for single songs.  They were fram RCA, a company
known for backing the wrong technology: I believe they were the ones who came
out with a videodisc that was also played with a stylus, no match for the
laserdisc in that particular shakeout.

Aha! Finally, on Saturday, somebody comes through! (Or rather, Saturday in
Australia, still Friday here, maybe the next digest will reveal more.)

>From:    Ron Halstead <rhalstea@BIGPOND.NET.AU>
>
>The normal LPs were 12", but the Broadcasting industry used 16"
>'Transcription' discs to record 30 minute broadcasts, and was the usual
>method of distributing programs around the world. Pre microgroove, they used
>a 78 stylus, but rotated at 33 1/3 rpm. Used well before 'domestic'
>microgrooves.

Interesting--your commercial 12-inch 78s were also basically single-song
recordings. But a 12-inch microgroove LP could barely get 30 minutes on a
side--could a 16-inch disc manage 30 minutes on a side, or were they 30
minutes to a two-sided disc?

We also had an abridged Messiah on 78s, eighteen of those heavy
1/8-inch-thick discs --shellac, were they?-- in two 2-inch-thick album
binders (hence the term "album" for an LP of songs).  I remember the day (I
was perhaps nine or ten) when I bumped into the lid of my suitcase-style
record player and records fell in a pile, breaking the bottom one, the
Hallelujah Chorus, clean in two.  This is how artifacts become rare...

Misha Schutt
day job: Warner Research Collection, Burbank Public Library

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