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French Jazz Magazines circa 1960

Some highlights from “JAZZ” and JAZZ HOT,” French-language jazz musician/enthusiast magazines circa 1960.  I can picture Michel thumbing thru these while waiting for Patricia to come back from her classes at Uni.

The RV guitar amplifier, as distributed by Conn.  Beautiful little amp; it has a sort of a Carr vibe to it.

Anyone have any information on these lil fellas?  Schematics?

Benny Goodman with an RCA 77 (and some sort of horn-type instrument?)

Billy Holiday about to make you weep via an EV 636.  I have had a few of these and they can sound pretty cool.  Good cheap vintage mic.

 Studio scene circa ’60

When tracking overdubs I generally get by with a Royer (into some tube preamp/DBX comp) and a u87 (into an API/Purple comp) out on the floor.   If it don’t sound good on one, it’ll sound good on the other (or both).   Same thing but with a 77 and a U47?  Yes please.

Seems like Stimmer was a guitar (and other) pickup maker.  But what is that guitar?

Transistorized portable turntable

 

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Mullard 520 Power Amplifier c.1956

Download a four-page article from “Radio & Television News” 4/1956 regarding the Mullard 520 power amp:

DOWNLOAD: Mullard_520_amp

American industrial titan RCA offered schematics for a variety of tube-audio equipment in the back pages of their many “receiving tube manuals.”  Mullard, a prominent British maker of vacuum tubes, similarly published a book entitled “Mullard Tube Circuits For Audio Amplifiers”  (h.f. “MTCAA”). The designs are quite different from RCA’s, as Mullard promoted different tubes:  EL34 rather than 6L6/5881; EL84 rather than 6V6; GZ34 rather than 5U4; and EF86 rather than 5879.   The MTCAA also offered extensive plans for the fashioning of the actual sheet metal cabinet and transformer-cover.  The four-page article I am offering here is quite different from the one in MTCAA, but either will get you on yr way to building this unit.

This design promises 35 watts from a pair of cathode-biased EL34s.  It does require an ultralinear (IE, with screen taps) output transformer with a 16ohm winding for the negative feedback loop (such as this EDCOR model), but other than that it’s all very basic parts.  Now if I could find some good cheap EF86s…  Anyone try the new $17 Electro-harmonix EF86?

BTW, The Mullard book is still readily available as a reprint; well worth the $17 cover price IMO.  There is a circuit for a 3-stage ‘mixing preamp’ featuring EF86 pentode inputs with a 12Ax7 on the back end, the second triode of the 12ax7 wired as low-impedance cathode follower…  pretty tempted to try that one…  anyhow, you can buy ‘MTCAA’ at Amazon Dot Com or at Antique Electronics.

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RCA PA systems of the 1950s

RCA PA system heads of the 50s/60s are one of the best values in antique tube equipment.  I’ve bought a few on eBay in the $100-range and with a little work you can have a really great studio amp for gtr or bass.  Sometimes they even come with the microphone input transformers…

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Shure Adverts circa 1956

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UDPATED (4): Presto Recording Corp: Pioneers of ‘Instant’ Analog Disc Recording

Download the fifty-page 1940 PRESTO RECORDING CORP catalog:

DOWNLOAD (part 1): Presto_1940_Cat_1

DOWNLOAD (part 2):Presto_1940_cat_2

Products covered, with text, some specs, and photos, include: Presto Model A, Model B, Model F recording installations; Presto Model C, Model Y, and Model K portable recorders; Presto type 8-A, 8-B, 28-A, 6-D, 6-E, 6-F, 26-B, 75-A, 75-B, 75-C, 9-A, and 9-B  recording turntables; Type 62-A transcription turntable; Automatic Equalizer 160; blower system 400; 150 and 151 pickups; Microphone Mixer type 130-A, B, C; Preamplifier type 40-A and 40-B; Presto radio tuner 50-A and 50-B; Recording Amplifiers  85-A, B, 85-E, 87-A and 87-B; plus a range of parts and accessories including Green Seal discs, Orange Seal discs, and Blue Label discs.

Above, the Presto Model A, their top-of-the-line system circa 1940.

Presto Recording Corp was a pioneer of coated-disc ‘Instantaneous Recording.’  From 1933 through the end of WWII, Presto was the US leader in providing high-quality recording equipment to broadcasters, schools, studios, and government.  There is a detailed history of the Presto Corp provided at this website, so no need to re-tread those waters.  Basically, what Presto offered was a way to make good-sounding LP and 78 recordings that could be played back instantly on any home turntable.  Unlike earlier commercial recording technologies, there was no intermediate submaster required.  Presto was able to do this by having designed an aluminum (later, glass) disc that was coated with a special cellulose-based compound (featuring 51 ingredients!).

At right, the Presto 200-A Electronics package.  This was a complete system of microphone preamps, cutting amps, patchbay, and AM radio tuner that was designed to accompany the Model-A pictured above.  Presto’s ‘instant-disc’ technology was basically rendered obsolete by the development of magnetic tape recorders in the late 1940s, most notably, AMPEX (and to lesser degree, Magnecord).   The specs for the better Presto systems weren’t awful: 50-8000hz frequency range, 50db signal-to-noise ratio; but this paled in comparison to the German Magnetophon technology that AMPEX built on, with a high-frequency response to 15,000hz.

On a more basic user-level: you could always record-over a piece of magnetic tape; but cutting into a lacquer-coated disc (at $16/unit in today’s money) was a commitment.

Presto Model C, their top-end portable system of 1940 ($20,000 in 2011 dollars; 138 lbs)

Looking through this catalog, the most fascinating aspect is the large range of mechanical devices and accessories recommended to insure the fidelity of the audio.  Nowadays almost all audio control happens electronically; once the room is treated and the microphone carefully placed, our work as recording engineers leaves the realm of physical manipulation and enters a world of electronic control.  In the era of analog disc recording, though, a careful recording engineer needed blowers…

…to efficiently remove the bits of cellulose material that the cutting needle carved out the the recording blanks;

viscous-oil-filled dampers to regulate vertical movement of the cutting head (a mechanical audio compressor, I would imagine);

…an optical microscope to examine the grooves that you just cut for quality-control purposes…

fresh sharp needles to do the actual cutting work…and, if you wanted the ultimate in convenience, an ‘automatic equalizer’ to automatically boost the treble frequencies as the cutting head moved closer to the center of the disc (since discs spin at a constant rate, as the needle gets closer to the center of the disc, the actual linear speed of the needle relative to the surface medium gets slower, and as we know well in all types of analog recording, slower equals less high-end).

Above, the Presto 40-A microphone pre-amplifier, the one piece of equipment in this lengthy catalog that could still be of potential use to modern recordists.  It uses two 1221 tubes to deliver 55dbs of gain (from what I can gather, 1221s are interchangeable with 6C6, the 6C6 being the predecessor to the 6J7, likely making these 40As likely very similar to RCA BA1/2/11 series mic preamps).  If anyone has the schematic to the Presto 40 mic preamp, please send it to us…  coincidentally I built a preamp with 6C6s a few years ago (based on a schematic from an ancient UTC catalog) and I liked the results.

UDPATE:

Thank-you to reader EL for sending us the schem to the Presto 40-A.  Here ’tis as a download: PRESTO Type 40-A preamp schematic

…And here as well:

This must be a slightly later version of the 40-A, as the 2nd tube is a 6SJ7, which is a variant of the 6J7 that has the input grid connection in the base rather than on the top.  Other things to note: the input transformer spec’d is an ‘LS-10,’ which I can only assume means the UTC LS-10…  circuit-wise, we have the first 6J7 connected in pentode, coupled by a .1uf cap to the 2nd 6SJ7 stage, this time wired in Triode in order to more easily drive the output transformer.  A ’50M’ resistor (or as we know them, 50K ohms) provides negative feedback from stage 2 to stage one.  Thinking that this circuit could be nice as the back end to a 3-stage pre, maybe with a something low-gain like a 76 or 6J5 on the front end with a volume pot following.

UPDATE (2)

EL also provided some images of his particular 40A units… check ’em out…

Pretty amazing that these things made it all the way to Australia way back when… my lord can you imagine how much these things must have cost in their day?

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Update Sept 2013:

E.L. directed us to this eBay auction; a Presto 40a in nice condition (Nashville, TN) sold for $510.  Here are some images:

Presto_case

Presto_circuit Presto_inside2 Presto_Interior1 Presto_label Presto_output_trans************

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Anyone out there using any Presto equipment in their work?  Drop a line and tell us about it….

 UPDATE: a friend has alerted us to The 78 project, a series of new recordings of notable musicians made using just a Shure 51 mic and a Presto disc recorder.  They sound great, and in the videos you can hear both the modern production-sound of the session via the camera audio-track and the actual 78 playback.  Very interesting contrast…

 

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Weekend Update

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1960: Not A Flattering Term For ‘Recording Engineer’

Four-page article from the popular press circa 1960 which claims to describe the work of a recording engineer of the day.  “Three complete stereo channels with a fader for each finger!”

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Every House Has A Mic

Any old house, on any street;

any house where a family lived, where life happened;

deep in the basement, perhaps; isolated: its partner the Tape Recorder long gone, a likely early-casualty of its own mechanical complexity;

buried among the sawdust, the poorly chosen xmas gifts, the (few or many) power tools. The microphone is inevitable, and it persists.

It’s probably not very fancy or sophisticated;

just the most basic object necessary to reliably convert sound-pressure into an electrical signal; two for stereo, if purchased after 196X (got to be realistic, right?  life is in stereo?).

An old house without a microphone would be an unthinkable as an old house without photographs.  Whatever it is that drives us to take all those pictures also drives us to capture moments of life via the sound that surrounds us, the sound that we swim in, sound that you can’t escape by something as easy as closing your eyes.   Like the camera, the microphone is a crucial tool in the ritual process of memory-enhancement and posterity-creation; the very presence of the microphone at certain moments serves to create the discourse of ‘significance’ that we have come to expect at certain moments of life.   The microphone is an index of significance, of remembering, and of the desire to remember.  To discard or destroy it would be very difficult.  And so it persists.

 

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In The Studio

Another day of live tracking at Gold Coast Recorders.  Vocal chain working great:  Neumann U47 fet into Neve console pre into (gentle) distessor; vocalist needs to be pretty tight on the mic due to the drums, Hammond, and Super Reverb live in the room with her.  Behind the U47 is a Turner U99 dynamic amplified by one of my Altec 1566 -based mic preamps.  The perfect pairing of hi-fi & pristine / dirty and lowdown.  If you have ever thought about building your own vacuum-tube mic preamp, the Altec 1566 is a great place to start.  Here’s where I first learned about them. The 1566 is not a very clean preamp, but wow they sound great for drum fronts, toughening up acoustic gtr, etc.  We have 3 of them at GCR and they get a lot of use.  I recommend Edcor transformers for the output and power; Jensen 115 for input.

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In The Studio

Preservation Sound dot com will be less active this week because I have 7 days of back-to-back sessions booked at Gold Coast Recorders.  The first 5 days are live full-ensemble tracking and editing.  Electric string player (gtr/bass/sitar), Hammond organist, two percussionists, and one vocalist.

The Fender Super Reverb, circa 1969; perhaps the best guitar amplifier ever made; also used for bass on many of the greatest hits of the 1960s via C. Kaye.  Mic’d with the can’t-fail combination of a close SM57 and a ribbon mic a few feet off; in this case, a Shinybox 46MXL, IMO one of the best values in a current-production microphone. 

Gold Coast Recorders has a circa 1960 Hammond L-101 (at right), which sonically splits the difference between a classic Hammond tonewheel sound and a voltage-divider organ (e.g., a Farfisa).  What it lacks in sonic heft it more-than-makes up for with the amazing psychedelic effects-option board you see installed at the lower right.  On the Left is GCR’s new Hammond A100, which is the same thing as a B3 except that it has built-in speakers and a reverb section.  We’re using it with a Leslie 51.

Percussion via several Sennhesier 441s and an AKG 414 overhead.  Room is mic’d with an XY pair of Neuman TLM 103s, a great choice for room mics owing to their incredibly low self-noise and very high output.