July 2018
In This Issue...
We're Featuring Bad Sound Quality
Article By Noel Keywood

  We're running a feature this month on bad sound quality. No, as editor I haven't gone mad! It's all the rage these days – and the subject basically revolves around 78s – those shellac ‘LPs' that shatter if you drop them. Which is part of the problem: you could possibly shatter a disc that holds an historic performance – then it will be gone forever.

An historic performance is often something you and I may think is worth losing ‘cos there are no electric guitars in there and no dance beat either – so what use does it have? I've been shaken out of such musings by listening to Timestep's Dave Cawley describe the U.S. conferences he attends on archiving, which include vast music collections that occupy whole buildings, left by wealthy individuals in an estate bequeathed to the nation, to be funded by their estate. So think big here; we're talking U.S. multi-millionaires from the entertainment business – films and music – pre-WWII.

But archiving isn't just about the surprising sums of money that lie behind it. It is about preserving a nation's musical heritage and here the 78rpm shellac disc, as the first way of preserving music (ignoring cylinder recorders) takes on a value that transcends LP. Our fascinating feature – see p87 – on George Blood's archiving facility I think you'll find quite extraordinary in explaining all this. There's a lot more to spinning a turntable at the right speed than just trying to get Adele into correct pitch.

History can explain a lot and people in touch with it come up with interesting interpretations of modern situations, even technologies. Mike Creek of Creek Audio observed "auto-transformers were used in early transistor amplifier output stages" when I mentioned that McIntosh use this seemingly bizarre circuit topology. Our review on p12 reveals just how well it works in modern form.

The past is brought up to date in this issue. I hope you enjoy reading about it all in our latest great issue.

--- Noel Keywood, editor.

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