[Music] Hey, we're here at Endpoint Audio in Burbank, California. I'm with Nicholas Bergh, a restoration and preservation engineer. This place is like a museum. There's a lot of history here. We want to really focus in on these two devices right here, which actually were a part of a huge transition in the audio industry. Can you tell us what we're looking at here? Yeah, so for the first three decades almost of sound recording history, it was all acoustic recording, so completely mechanical. The
microphone, in a sense, was the horn. So you would sing and play into the horn. Just the energy of the sound itself is enough to move a small glass or micodiphrane and attach that would be a stylus to cut the groove. And what are we cutting a groove into? A wax. Wow, okay, so it's like a wax platter or disc. Exactly, yeah. So because it was used for so long, it started off very crude, you can imagine, but after the decades, it became very sophisticated. So they would change the thickness of the
glass. So instead of changing a microphone, they would change the size of the horn, change the thickness of the glass, change the size of the glass. They could add a couple horns together via just a little piece of plumbing. So you could have a vocal on one horn and a band on a bigger horn. So they really spent a lot of time perfecting this technology. Wow, and then we'll get back to more details about how this worked, but tell us what this is right here. All the early machines, the disc machine
s, are like this. They're weight-driven. So you can see on this one here, the weight is what powers it. So the transition between acoustic and electric didn't involve a change of the lathe itself. They used the exact same lathes, and all they did was change what was attached to the lathe. So instead of the acoustic head, they put this electric head instead. And this was a development by Bell Labs in Western Electric. And so when the studios updated between acoustic and electric, they got the new
cutting head that they attached to their old gear. They got this first condenser microphone, and then this rack here, which is the original recording rack. Wow, and when you're saying first, the original, these aren't models. No, no, this is the real thing. Yeah. There's often confusion about the first microphone because it was essentially just built in the hobby shop there. So they were just like taking things that they had. The easiest thing for them to take was the housing of the earlier car
bon microphone. And so this is actually the housing of a carbon microphone, but the element inside is the condenser element. And then similar to a modern condenser microphone, the electronics are inside just under the capsule. This still functions. In fact, we can't really show it right now because this is all kind of, you don't just flip on a switch like you would your interface or your preamp at home now, but American Epic is a documentary that featured Jack White and a number of other artists
where you actually set up this gear and you hear what's being recorded. So if you're interested in checking that out, I'll leave a link to where you can find that in the description below. In each case, it's just one track, so to speak. So we've got the sound that enters this acoustically, the sound that gets transduced acoustically into electric signal. So the idea of recording and mixing later was not a thing. You had to basically what set up people at different distances, pointing different
directions, listen to what it sounded like, and then say, "That's great. Stay exactly where you are and get a perfect take." Yeah, yeah. And it's actually a very tricky microphone because the closest microphone is to is probably like something like an M50, the Neumann. So it's an omni-directional microphone, but directional at higher frequencies. And so even moving between here and here, if you're close to the microphone, makes a dramatic impact on the sound, even though it's omni, because the h
igher frequencies are directional. What were the main differences then moving from here to here in the terms of flexibility and sound quality? Yeah, so the biggest issue with this approach is it just always has to be loud, essentially, because you're acoustically having to move the diaphragm. And so things like bands and opera singers, anything that can get loud is good. But it's really not an option to record like a subtle blues guitar or like a subtle voice is not really an option. So either t
hey would choose the music to fit that, or someone who played a certain way would have to change how they would play to get it on the wax okay. Next, the response is limited. So the high-frequency response is largely limited by how stiff that diaphragm is and how large the diaphragm is, and the low-frequency by how large the opening is on the horn. So you might use a horn like this for a vocal, and then for a band, you might use a bigger horn for better low-frequency response. But it's still not
hing to what you can do with a microphone electric recording. In Pro Tools now, or whatever DAW you're using, you record, play it, you press the spacebar back, and then press again to know if it sounded good or not. What did that process look like here, to record and listen to see if the mix is correct? So one of the reasons why recording was really the domain of big studios back then is because of this process, because they were recording on wax. So they had to cast the wax, shave it perfectly
flat, do the recording, and then as soon as you played that wax back, it would instantly destroy it. And so the only option would be to kind of like roughly test what was going on on a junk wax, and then hope that that's also going to happen the next take on your master wax. So you can't check your master any other way than just kind of inspecting the grooves and make sure there's no overcutting or problems like that. Play the big studios, I guess, they would get dailies in a sense. So they woul
d get the pressing the next day and then check it then. But at that point, the musicians are gone. Yeah, I mean, obviously, it wasn't exactly like this, but in today's terms, if you were used to doing it in Pro Tools, that'd be like letting it roll. It's just a magic take. And then you play it back and you're like, "All right, guys, the mix sounds great." Unfortunately, I just destroyed it by listening to it, so do a perfect take again. Exactly, yeah. And I mean, even though it sounds crude and
impossible, that sort of pressure and energy of the take often will pull out great performances from musicians as well in my experience, because they see that a mistake, they see me throwing away a disc, and so there's that kind of added anxiety and excitement about it. And so oftentimes, it can really make great performances because they're excited about it too. I want to get into the signal flow of this. So this is pretty basic. You're seeing the whole signal flow here. Acoustics enter this. T
hey're amplified, I guess, by the horn, and then they cause a physical movement of the, what do you call it, stylus or cutting? Yeah, the stylus, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So it goes into the cutting head, will hold the diaphragm, then attach the diaphragm as the stylus. And then, like you said, that required a lot of acoustic power on this end to yield any sort of usable signal on that end. This changed that, not only this, but all of this as well. Yeah, so they would get the microphone, the cutting he
ad, and then this rack. So this is kind of the beginning of our industry. This is the first-elect recording rack, so the first-ever microphone preamplifier, the first line amplifier, the first level meter, and the first monitor amplifier. And so it was so important and influential. A lot of things that we take for granted today come from this original rack from 1925. So rack spacing, the size of racks, patch bays, the whole idea of balanced cables, grounding schemes, it all comes from this origi
nal design. So it was Bell Labs, essentially, the phone company at the time, and they kind of repurposed. So these were originally racks for the phone company. And so a lot of these amplifiers were also used for boosting long-distance calls and for radio and things like that. The equipment was so expensive to make, it was only leased at the time. And so every record sold, they had to pay a small amount to AT&T and Western Electric. This is really cool stuff, but that's not why you have it. As we
were talking earlier, you don't just collect this to have it here in your studio. There's actually a really important reason that you've collected and assembled these things. And there's an important reason that they're all still functioning. Can you tell us about that? So I mostly involved doing sound preservation and restoration. You know, the way things were recorded back then, you know, was very poorly documented. And most of the equipment has been lost over time. And so the only way to rea
lly know how to properly extract that now is to understand exactly how it was recorded. So kind of the curves of the microphone, the recording curves of the equipment, and how to kind of reverse that properly to get the playback right. So the goal of the equipment here is usually to get it all working, and then to really put some test signals through as well as have musicians play to fully understand the impact of the equipment on what we hear on the records or the tapes. And you've been doing t
hat since you said mid-90s. Yeah, it's been a while. For me, it's so cool because what you're doing, this is awesome to geek out about, but in restoring some things, I mean, these are moments in our history. And that's the part that I find most moving to me is that I always thought that something that was recorded with this stuff just sounded terrible. But in reality, this stuff was really quite capable. And you can hear that when you watch American Epic. I was like, is this some sort of Pro Too
ls session on the side? I was confused. But then, yeah, I mean, the signal's there. You just have to understand the effect that the equipment, the recording medium, the aging of those things had on that signal and basically invert that and bring it back to life. The real sound quality hit is often the shellac, so the final pressing in the material. So there, you know, master metal parts and master wax, they can sound fantastic. And it's often the extra noise from the pressings that can make thin
gs really sound poor back then. But even in this section of equipment, it was often like little tweaks that changed over the years. So this is the same condenser microphone technology we use today. But they realize, you know, well, we need to move the diaphragm closer so there's no resonance in the cavity and these little small changes that really helped over the years. And then even in the rack, you know, I mean, there's pieces of this rack, like the line amplifier that are essentially contempo
rary. I mean, they have this. This amplifier has a response from 30 hertz to 30 kilohertz. There were other amplifiers like the the mic input amplifier where they were really trying to push the gain a bit too much. And so it does kind of roll a little bit on the sides. But a lot of what they were doing sounded great. I can't even myself fathom, but the part that I do fathom, I can't express it enough how important the transition from this to this actually was culturally. It defined music that we
listen to still today. Yeah, it's the beginning of like early blues recordings and pop recordings that kind of like the crooner voice, you know, close to the microphone, soft singing and like subtle guitar, acoustic guitar. I mean, all that's just just not really possible in the acoustic method. And so it existed back when this was the solution to record, but it just wasn't replayed. It wasn't played back. And yeah, you don't hear it live. Exactly. Yeah. And that was then a very regional genre.
Whereas once we got it on a recording that that genre and those sounds were distributed throughout. I'm getting chills talking about it. It's really, really cool. This is one of three pivotal moments that you describe in the next video that's on your screen now. We're going to talk about magnetic tape and how that even took it to the next level. So go ahead and click there and we'll see you there.
Comments