Sure, the new-media music age has resulted in us all seeing enough "in the studio with..." clips and descriptions of digital-distribution technology to make anyone a budding mogul, but this 20-minute film from 1942 on the making of albums at the Victor Talking Machine Company in Camden, N.J., gives the record-making process a mystique that's been lost to the MP3 era, a time where the building that housed the alchemy that resulted in a long-playing record is now home to
pricey lofts. (Shoot, the process even involves
pure gold! And
furiously bubbling cauldrons!) Unfortunately, though, the person who uploaded the clips to YouTube has disabled their embedding. Perhaps we're supposed to think of YouTube's interface as a nickelodeon for the new millennium? Sigh, the modern age. [
Part I /
Part II via
Random Good Stuff]
Idolator
If you've picked up an arts section lately, you've probably seen a story with one (or both) of the following theses: "Vinyl is making a comeback." "If you want great sound, you buy vinyl." The hype is even starting to annoy some label folk, as it calls into question why non-audiophiles would bother buying tangible music at all. Sure, analog grooves of a vinyl record hold more information than any digital sample rate. But if an album was recorded digitally—a situation that's becoming more and more common—are you getting more information by buying it on vinyl?
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It's probably not that hard to believe, but I was certainly amused by the fact that in the '70s, the music industry tried to copy-protect its vinyl offerings by pressing a high-pitch frequency into albums that somehow ruined the "putting it to tape" process. The big problem? The more you listened to a record, the more this analog-rights management degraded: "Repeated plays of vinyl dampen the ability to reproduce high frequencies, and it seems that often the spoiler signal was either audible during regular playback, or didn't have sufficient impact upon recordings. Either way, after a few plays it was destined to disappear due to regular wear and tear on the record's groove." [
