Reflections on the Disc (II)
THIS IS REFLECTIONS (II) because my thoughts on Total Everything last month turned out to be mostly about the good old disc. Couldn't help it. The disc Marches On, as Time, Inc. used to say. Around 1950, people began asking me if tape recording would put the phonograph record out of business. (I wasn't old enough to get asked concerning radio, back in the twenties.) Putting forth my most important prognostication voice, I would say, NO, I don't really think so. Sounded prophetic.
I'm still saying it, and it sounds as fatuous as it did then, even if true.
Just so long as there is any home sound reproduction there will be some form of disc at hand for the playing to choice, i.e. a flat recording that turns on its own axis and is furnished with a spiral sound track, visible or invisible. So that's that. Next question? Well how long, then, will the present continuously compatible disc system exist, in all its partially compatible variations from 78 to 33 and mono to quadraphonic? Summoning up my most pompous expression, I announce to you that it will last quite awhile, yes indeed. And I betcha I'm right. What with all those new TV whirling-dervish discs, the limp cellophane platter with the astronomical bandwidth, the over head travelling -crane pressure -cartridge, the radar this and the magnetic that, even the seeing eye itself, laser-style, for trackless tracking? (I'm getting my species a bit mixed but no matter.) Yes, with all of this at hand, I still opt a future for the present disc. Too good a thing to lose, just yet.
Our discs are like our cars. Both are now outdated by fast moving circum stances. Yet both involve immense vested interest in continuity, not only in the whole area of design and manufacturing but, dovetailed in with this, in the ownership end as well. The product in its environment! Even more important, both the disc and the auto represent culminations, the fruit of three-quarters of a century and more in both cases--of long, intense experience in production and in the feed back of correctives that can only come through widespread use. (Why do I talk about these things? Because this is the way it is, too, in music, in any art.) A sudden replacement-any replacement for either of these paragons of our industrial development is absolutely bound to be fouled up and full of bugs (I didn't say beetles) for at least a decade, and maybe twenty-five years.
It'll take that long before the parameters of the new design and production and the smooth mores of public usage work out once more to the present enviable sort of perfection. Pick nits if you will. Today's cars/discs are almost irreplaceable.
It is always that way. (And in art too, of course.) The new and untried has all the glamour, and the potentiality to rep resent the present age far more directly than the old. Yet the familiar product, increasingly unrepresentative, continues to gain weight and impressive forward inertia to a degree (in automobiles, discs and Bach) that is awe inspiring.
So-if we are to have electric vehicles and fuel cell buggies or, maybe, nothing but mass transport in every back yard, if we are to have wholly new forms of disc that will outmode present home equipment, then won't we lose more (II) than we will gain? This is the stuff that revolutions are held back with! Eventually, the biggest inertial force can't stop change, but in the face of such challenges we all go conservative we have to. Too much is at stake. There fore: The automobile will survive awhile longer, mildly modified and in the tradition. So will the present disc. No miracle -technology except the Bomb will dislodge either one of them to morrow morning or next month.
So saying, let us move on to a more pettifogging look at the continuing disc, sidestepping quadraphonics (a mild modification), for the moment.
The disc may be a culmination, but we get a lot of complaints. Evidently some discs are unworthy of so great a tradition and the people who buy them are annoyed. These gripes center in two areas and it might be worthwhile to speculate on them from a consumer's point of view. No use blowing off steam up the wrong trees, if you see what I mean. For some people it is poor disc material--too much noise, ticks and pops and intermittent hisses, the normal ills of less-than-perfect vinyl. For others it is the physical aspect of the disc it self, warps, off-center holes and so on.
Today indeed is a bad time for quality standards, as it always is in a period of inflation, which tends to induce sagging quality as prices soar.
Funny, then, that the records I receive for review have never been better. I have no complaint. Only wonder. No ticks, no pops, no warps, no wows. Very seldom, anyhow. It appears that review copies sent to magazines are of better quality than at least some of those sold in the stores. Nefarious?
I think not. First, review copies are necessarily early pressings, straight off the first and the best stampers. Second, consider that no company has the man power to select good pressings to send out perhaps to 300 magazines and news papers and hundreds of radio stations.
Not individual discs, anyhow, and how else can one avoid warps, unusual noise, and so on? The most that even a big company could do would be to select individual runs or batches known to be of good quality--but as I say, this is automatic in any case. It's the occasional bad run that is the exception, and that doesn't get to reviewers on purpose, you may be sure.
Yes, I'd say that in general, and in the large, U.S. pressings are inferior to those pressed in Europe, with individual exceptions of course. This is my strong impression, over the years and very much still today. Why? My guess is that it is mainly a matter of manufacturing attitudes, not economics.
European manufacture continues to be constructively conservative, slower moving, more concerned with high standards in a smaller market. (Or, for that matter, in a larger market.) Why else are Philips, Deutsche Grammophon and Telefunken discs so wondrously smooth and shiny and quiet? They want them that way.
We are not quite so concerned, on the average. We can always make it up in advertising. If it isn't good enough correct the public relations. That habit seems to me the most dangerous one that Americans have ever devised, because it allows us to undercut our own production standards. The worst of it is that it works, superficially, and works well. Here. So ... to get back, it would seem that (a) our overall quality standards do tend to lie lower than those which subtend in Europe and (b) things being what they are, even these standards are involuntarily slipping a bit, here and there, under present pressures and worry.
Note that in tell-tale fashion the finest discs made in this country now come from small companies, via many an independent pressing plant. They care more. They have to. And they have every bit of technique they need. Note also that flagrantly bad discs show up most often in pop records, though some pop records are miracles of loud volume, high cutting level and clean sound. Of course we can do it when we want to.
We very often don't. And you may read this as you wish. After all, we have to tailor the product to the market, don't we? All those cheap machines, kids, nobody cares. (Ah yes--but the cheap-machine people talk about all those cheap records.) Cynically, what's the diff if a few clunkers get into the stores.
Surface noises, specifically? First, the vinyl itself. But some noises are induced by the pressing process, bubbles and the like. Either way, oddly enough it is the small companies again who put more pressure on their (small) pressing plants for the good stuff and the right job. Alas, the big outfits can't do as well with their own built-in pressing plants.
They are prone to that insidious inner lack of self-criticism--who dares endanger his job?--which is the bane of big business. Sometimes I am shocked at what can get by in these outfits, huge as they are, and I am sure their responsible officials are well aware of the problem. Then, too, a big company can sink for a long time and yet still swim.
A small company does it right the first time, or else. Funny world.
Warps? That would seem to be all in a different area, the actual pressing process. If I am right, most such deformities are directly concerned with time and temperature, not with the vinyl mix itself. Somebody isn't keeping his machine up to scratch (!). Or could it be a discontinuity in the character of the vinyl-different melting tempera ture or such? I wouldn't know, but I suspect the pressing cycle is the prime fault maker. Warps, I should note, would not get into envelopes and out to the public if caught in time-but that brings up another possibility. Shellac records used to "pour" if left too long in even a moderately warm place. Fluid.
Vinyl will pour too if heated and, I think, if deformed for too long a period.
Shipping? Storage in the record shop? I still put my bet for most warps on the pressing cycle itself.
Wrong-sized center hole? Here we have to do simply with a matter of industry agreement. Both the record makers and the record player makers.
Even the tiniest looseness at the spindle can cause an audible wow in your music and it is right to have a taut fit with no "play." But not too taut. The dividing line, or circle, is microscopic and complicated by the automatic turntable, where the disc must slip all the way down every time or foul the whole operation.
Obviously there is minor disagreement, and we err (rightly) more often on the side of the too tight fit than the too loose one. Remember that this agreement on size is world wide, not merely American. Remarkable that it is as close as it is. I shudder when I remember the quickly-worn 78 holes that slipped back and forth with hideous wowing! I used to mark the rims of each record, where you should push so that the wow would to some extent cancel out. It was that bad.
We'll still make a profit. Give 'em a replacement if they insist. That's one local philosophy, anyhow.
Off-center holes? How do you determine the mathematical center of an irregular spiral? A nice question, and it used to be solved manually by a little man in the processing shop-I once saw him in action at Columbia. An elaborate whirligig and at the crucial moment, when all the gauges said OK (no eccentricity) you PUNCHED something, I forget what, and that was that. Now I gather it is done automatically. Anyhow, we used to have agonizing quantities of eccentric discs that wowed, even into LP times, but now a disc that wows is as rare as a bird that barks. An off-center hole, then, is a basic defect and the record is a dud, if ever there was one. I do note, however, that warping and stretching of the vinyl, out of a true spiral, can produce a wow even without the center hole being off. An other cause, and see above.
A last thought--don't blame the record for a fault that is elsewhere, and notably in your own playing equipment.
It's often done. I have a fine flutter at the moment on piano records (it is masked in most other music) which I have traced to the tiny spindle on the phono motor. It wobbles precisely in time with the reproduced piano. Got bent somehow. A bent turntable can make a good wow, until you realize that all records have it, not just a given disc. Distortion, groove jumping (see Shure's ads) and other record faults are not necessarily in the record; you must be selective, at all costs. Few people are.
And, as you can see (if you don't already know), you must also be very selective in assigning specific blame for faults in the discs you buy on the open market.
Sometimes it isn't easy to pin them down, and not only the sales people but the record company officials may be mystified as to how it could have happened.
Oh yes--one final characteristic, obvious enough but not often kept in mind in the heat of disappointment.
Some faults are serial--they go through a whole set of discs, a run, a batch, a carton, maybe an entire pressing. Others are in the individual disc, mainly warps, with no two alike. If you get a replacement, try it quick, for you may have exactly the same problem all over again, and no blame at all on the salesman.
I would say that it pays everybody, all the way along, to report all faults of this sort or that--but in every case the letting off of steam should be informed and constructive. Hence these modest reflections, and I expect we would welcome any sane contributions you may have to offer us, either to confirm or deny what I have said.
After all, it's feedback that makes the disc go 'round.
(Audio magazine, Apr. 1974; Edward Tatnall Canby)
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