78 Collectors: Why are they so weird?

http://www.78rpm.com/images/auction/5790_BabyBonnieGE.gif

http://www.78rpm.com/images/auction/5902_SloppyHenryOK.gif

Do you also play them, Ian? Just curious.

Yeah. I bought a portable turntable with a 78 speed option, for the living room. I plug old computer speakers into it. Audiophiles and serious 78 collectors would probably be appalled.

anybody know where i can get a good sounding 78 record player? preferably one that i can hook up to my stereo, not one of those old-school windup ones.

i believe numark has a fairly affordable model that will play 78s (as well as LPs and 45s of course.)

http://www.turntablelab.com/dj_equipment/1/132/5007.html

good prewar blues-related article in this month's Harper's -- with this tidbit relevant to this thread: "“The serious blues people are less than ten,” one who contributed to Pre-War Revenants told me. “Country, seven. Jazz, maybe fifteen. Most are to one degree or another sociopathic.” Mainly what they do is nurse decades-old grudges. A terrifically complicated bunch of people, but, for reasons perhaps not totally scrutable even to themselves, they have protected this music from time and indifference. The collectors were first of all the finders. Those trips to locate old blues guys started out as trips to canvass records. Gayle Dean Wardlow became a pest-control man at one point, in order to have a legitimate excuse to be walking around in black neighborhoods beating on doors. “Need your house sprayed?” Nah. “Got any weird old records in the attic?”"

oh man i should check that out.
i have met a fair few weird 78 guys in past couple years. i really had no idea the numbers were that low, though who knows what constitutes a "serious" collector. i mean, i'm not a serious anything guy, so does that mean i have a chance of winning lesser condition discs if all the older 78 collectors already have copies in better than V condition? it's a funny thing to think about. weird old men. is there a single female 78 collector?

well, yeah "serious" to this guy must mean someone with an insanely deep collection and a willingness to spend fortunes on single records ....

right. but you wonder how big the intermediate community is. or i do, anyway. people not willing to spend much money on a single record, competing over beat-up and worn copies of records the guys with big bank accounts wouldn't deign to touch.

talking about the american primitive II collection (same article):

To do it right entailed remastering everything fresh from 78s, which in turn meant coaxing out a transnational rabbit’s warren of the so-called serious collectors, a community widespread but dysfunctionally tight-knit, as by process of consolidation the major collections have come into the keeping of fewer and fewer hands over the years.

i guess as the older guys die off they might leave their collections to other record collectors.

Earlier this year a fairly advanced collector in New York donated his collection to Syracuse University upon his passing, and it was transported to the campus in something like six or seven FedEx trucks.

http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/07/05/record.collection.ap/index.html

yeah i think i read about that -- was it mostly classical? anyway, that's great that some major universities are interested in preserving alla that, like the santa barbara cylinder project thing. reading about these "single copy" records makes you realize how ephemeral a lot of that stuff is. makes you want to become a weird 78 collector!!!

ah, guess not: "Included are recordings from 1895 to the 1950s, with big band, jazz, country, blues, gospel, polka, folk, Broadway, Hawaiian and Latin among the genres. The collection also contains spoken-word, comedy and broadcast recordings, and "V-disks," which were distributed as entertainment to the U.S. military during World War II."

50 tons! Will be interesting to see if anything cool turns up with the v-disks. I think I was reading something recently about some lost early Charlie Parker being on v-disk.

Listening to LP compilations of 78s really does lose a certain amount of the recordings' nuance. there is much more audible detail when the recording is heard at its intended 78 rotations per minute.

"The first grooves of the Jimmy Strange sides are missing due to a rimbite; no other copies are known to exist."

^^ love shit like this.

I bought a few things from the guy who runs the Old Homestead label. I bought up a bunch of their LP stock, and also found a few 78s in their catalog I wanted:

HARRELL, KELLY Victor 19596 New River Train/Rovin' Gambler
LEAKE COUNTY REVELERS Columbia15189 Wednesday Night Waltz/Good Night Waltz
GEORGIA YELLOW HAMMERS Victor 20943 My Carolina Girl/The Picture On The Wall

I didn't read this thread past the first 2 or 3 posts until now and I just knew that, like guys who talk about how such-and-so a girlie is "annoying" because they wanna make hump w/em, ian was going to turn into the 78 collector he was dissing.

Reassuring, it is.

haha, i'm never going to turn into one of THOSE guys.
i promise.

In coming weeks I'll be digitizing a (small) private collection of Arabic 78s (abt. 90 pieces). Watch this space for mp3 action. If anyone has any suggestions for cleaning up the sound of the wavs once ripped, i'd love to hear 'em.

Awesome!

yeah, i'm pretty psyched. i've never tried to do a decent restoration job on damaged source material before. so it'll be an experiment. but fun.

I'm pushing megatons of love your way, Ian.

Super-curios about Arabic musics! Godspeed, ian.

But those old 78 labels are just heartbreakingly beautiful, and prove that the world has since fallen to ruin.

Good luck, Ian. That's really cool.

Why are you so weird?

Just kidding -- Awesome! Keep us posted!

What they all said. :-)

I will probably miss these 1st time around, but I will bug you about them when I return to the US in mid-March. Many thanks.

Also, you probably know this, but go easy on the digital cleanup software. I'd rather hear crackle than weird digital waveform manipulation any day.

thread = bookmarked

good luck!

i know a dude who collects 78s. he also wears a wool full body bathing suit. he also has lives in bed-stuy, plays white blues with a slide, and even has a girlfriend. that being said, i'm looking forward to some sweet mp3 rips.

http://www.sendspace.com/file/56o2xf

First try.
The track is "I Love (Coffee Song) Part 1"
It is from an unknown label, as I don't read Arabic. Once I get in touch with the guy who commissioned this, I can have him translate the Arabic on the labels. The English tells me that it's sung by Asmahan, and is from the film Romance & Revenge. The next couple I upload will probably also be from the film.

I did not use any noise removal, except to fiddle with the tone knob on the turntable while ripping, to slightly cut the hiss. Audacity's noise removal routine seemed to make the file sound both muffled & digitally distorted.

Let me know, any thoughts etc.

Wow! Didn't know you'd be upping them this quickly! Thanx!

Looks like this one's from the 1944 film Gharam wa intiqam and the song is "Ana ahwa" or "Ahwa, Ahwa." Here's a clip form the movie (though it's not the song in question):

this is a really great tune ian

sounds good, ian.

she has a website with audio but th audio doesn't seem to work anymore:

http://www.asmahan.com/

last fm has a good asmahan station too.

Audacity's noise removal routine seemed to make the file sound both muffled & digitally distorted.

otm. I think you need somethin more like ProTools level software to remove hiss and even then it probably strips out too much stuff you want to keep. the only thing I do in Audacity is go in manually and take out the worst spikes and pops.

can't wait to check these songs out, thx for posting

http://www.sendspace.com/file/m8p95k

From the same film. "My Dreams" violin solo.
The English on the label doesn't tell me the instrumentalist's name. Eventually scans of the labels will be coming btw.

^ist that david schwimmer to the left?

thanks for sharing these, I really dig the instrumental one. I cosign not messing with the sound too much, if anyone is bothered by it they can do it themselves...

http://www.sendspace.com/file/wid1fv

Here is a third track from the same film. Also credited to Asmahan on the label, is there also an uncredited singer? It seems like there MIGHT be two voices here. It's called "Don't Blame Us." This one was a bit noisier than the flip side (the violin solo) and may be recorded a little quiet. When I tried to rip at a higher volume it began to slightly distort the vocal parts. There's an annoying bit of a buzz, so this one I might try to work with a little. We'll see.

Are these too quiet, in general?

keep in mind i'm listening to the files with crummy built-in macbook speakers. so maybe they sound better than i think, or maybe worse.

Thanks for these! They're decent enough for a quick listen on the laptop or whatever. And surely you don't want to remove the inch-coat of fluff that one associates with the sound of 78s? But then I'm not fussy, and know nothing about ripping 78s. Or even vinyl for that matter.

http://www.sendspace.com/file/zeyx80

This one is a vocal duet by Fareed & Sabah on Al-Chark Records. There is no English song title. The label is pretty nice, it's a blue background with silver lettering & a detail of three pyramids also in silver. Egyptian?

Again there is a buzz during some of the quiet bits, but i think this might be my favorite so far. Side 2 coming up later; next want to try one of the 12" 78s. There are a few nice clean ones, and they have a really nice label that looks a bit like this, but on red. http://www.tedstaunton.com/labels/1910-1919.pages/Amour.Gramophone.Record/image/amour.gif The cherub is the same, and the text is laid out similarly

^^^ that is for the label on the 12" 78, NOT the Fareed & Sabbah track. Let me see if I can find that label, it's nice.

I don't think I can hotlink to blogspot, so here:
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_eNQqGZfs3PI/SRiaMkJ7RRI/AAAAAAAAJa8/PIbLE0XXe2Q/s1600-h/tn-300_LABEL-AL-CHARKRECORDS_460B.jpg
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_eNQqGZfs3PI/SRiaMkJ7RRI/AAAAAAAAJa8/PIbLE0XXe2Q/s1600-h/tn-300_LABEL-AL-CHARKRECORDS_460B.jpg

That's a similar label, but a group of pyramids instead of the sun.

http://www.sendspace.com/file/jdnzbj

This is the first half of 12". The text above the angel says: Concert Record "Grammophon." And below: Arabian / male song / Bikoul marsoum amarnil hosn / Cheikh Yousself el Menialawi, Caire / Order number 60122

I'd guess this one is from the late teens or early twenties, but I'm no expert.

This is a nice gallery of Arabic 78 labels, but I wish there was more info.

http://78records.cdbpdx.com/Arabic/

http://www.sendspace.com/file/dvfb8q

Here is the second part of the Fareed & Sabah 78. The first time I ripped it, I was using the line-in but got that annoying electrical buzz (you know the kind i mean.) So I re-recorded it by mic'ing the speaker on the 78 player. Primitive, but it sounds okay. It's got some worn grooves, which you will hear.