[pdb-discuss] Fwd: Re: Free culture column for lud69

Wed Nov 15 20:18:41 UTC 2006

Some tips from my editor (I wrote about PD Burn for issue 69 of linux user & 
developer)...

----------  Forwarded Message  ----------

Subject: Re: Free culture column for lud69
Date: Monday 13 November 2006 11:33
From: Daniel James <danieljames at linuxuser.co.uk>
To: Tom Chance <tom at acrewoods.net>

ps. I have some experience of 78rpm records, in case you need any tips.
I use a Garrard 301 turntable with a modern Ortofon 578 stylus and a
tonearm that will supply a decent tracking weight, up to 3 grams. Some
audiophile tonearms, like the SME 3009, will only track up to a gram or
so, because they are designed for 33rpm and delicate moving-coil cartridges.

You'll save yourself a lot of digital clean-up work if you can get:

a) access to a library where the 78s have been looked after (end-user
discs have usually been hammered by blunt needles on wind-up
gramophones, while the BBC used electric turntables, like the 301 and
its ancestors, from the earliest days)

b) a deep-groove liquid vacuum cleaning machine (eg a Moth,
http://www.britishaudio.co.uk/mothrcm.htm ) with a suitable cleaning
solution, because shellac is organic and the grooves fill up with
crapola over time

c) a pre-amplifier with the correct frequency curves for 78s (the record
companies didn't standardise on the RIAA curve until 1954, when 78's
were dying out). See:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RIAA_equalization

Cheers!

Daniel

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-- 
The struggle against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting
 - Kundera