[Dixielandjazz] acetate or Cardboard

[tcashwigg at aol.com]

Hi Bill & All

  Yes those flimsy tear out recordings were called acetates,   they used 
to be manufactured by a company called "EvaTone" who called them 
"Soundsheets" used mostly for promotion and advertising purposes, but 
those are not what Bob is seeking the answer about.

  I have some old 50s era recordings such as he described, that are 
actual phonograph records, made by coating I assume vinyl or acetate 
over a cardboard inner. I found out the hard way once when I at on one 
and broke it, it did not shatter as one would expect, but just broke 
the coated surface like cracks in a mirror which made it un playable.

  We also used to joke about major labels selling records pressed on old 
pizza boxes, which was referring to this process even in the 70s they 
were issuing stuff like that.

  I did direct to disc records in which we cut the music into a master 
disc, then electroplated it to make Mothers from which we pressed the 
final product for ultimate quality. IN the normal manufacturing process 
they went from the Master to the Mother to Stampers which gave them 
unlimited production capability but at far less audio quality the more 
they manufactured from each stamper. with the high end audiophile 
records we made, we were limited to about 50,000 high quality pressings 
form each Master. This was not however the case with each Master, some 
we only got 30,000 or so out of before a noticeable depreciation in 
sound quality was noticeable. 50,000 pressing was a great 
accomplishment when it turned out that way. Many industry folks were 
skeptical about our claims of having sold 150,000 units of our records, 
because the industry standard at the time was about 50,000 copies if 
everything was perfect. Some actually called us liars for a year until 
they discovered the fact that we had made three identical masters of 
the our original recordings by hooking up three Neuman cutting systems 
on the same recording thus tripling our output capacity on all records 
that we recorded.

 Cheers,

  Tom Wiggins who has forgotten much of the technical jargon now that we 
all use Digital in spite of our aloof efforts to make a better record 
for the consumer. :)) Well we got to do it for a few years anyway.

 -----Original Message-----
 From: Bill Gunter <jazzboard at hotmail.com>
 To: dixielandjazz at ml.islandnet.com
 Sent: Sun, 04 Dec 2005 21:34:21 +0000
 Subject: RE: [Dixielandjazz] acetate or Cardboard

 Ringwald writes: 
  
  >I have an argument going, well not exactly an argument, a friendly 
 >discussion, with Mad Dawg. He claims the material that the Bing Crosby 
out >take would have been pressed on is cardboard with some sort of 
plastic >coating like what home made records were made of back in the 
50s. 
  
  I remember those recordings. Some of them were distributed in 
magazines - you'd just tear out the page a stick it on your turntable 
and play it. It was good only for a limited number of playings. 
  
  I don't recall, however, if they were 78s or 45s or LPs or what. But 
they were certainly flimsier than standard recordings. As I recall, 
they were like cardboard with a plastic coating of some sort. It'll be 
interesting to find out just what they were made of. 
  
 Cheers, 
  
 Bill Gunter 
 jazzboard at hotmail.com 
  
  
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