16 Rpm

[MonkeyBoy]

Do any of you have any 16 rpm records in your collection? I just noticed it on ebay. I notice the biggest selection is JimmySwaggart! There is even one Beatles (with Tony Sheridan) record listed!

[wintermute]

Do any of you have any 16 rpm records in your collection? I just noticed it on ebay. I notice the biggest selection is JimmySwaggart! There is even one Beatles (with Tony Sheridan) record listed!

I do... Also have a 8rpm (If I recall - Can't play to confirm!) one. Both are records for the blind- spoken word stuff. The 8rpm one is a flexidisk..

[Steerpike_jhb]

I have a few: all CBS music compilations, except for a Trini Lopez.
They are fun to have, but the audio quality is not great - no bass. But for all the players I've ever seen that can play 16rpm, that lack of quality wouldn't be an issue.
I use a modified Marantz DD to play them now.

[mysticfred]

I read somewhere that 16rpm records were really intended for speech only, as the sonic quality is so low that's all they could be used for, though never seen any.

[Damien Taylor]

I collect Seeburg background music records which were part of the Seeburg 1000 system, see here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeburg_1000

[Steerpike_jhb]

I read somewhere that 16rpm records were really intended for speech only, as the sonic quality is so low that's all they could be used for, though never seen any.

On a portable record player with ceramic cartridge, you really can't tell them apart from a 33 or 45. So they would have been totally OK for most of the record buying public I think. But how many artists would have needed 90 minutes of record time? And those were in the days of autochangers too; a double 33 set - when required - would have given the same 'continuous' playing time.

[Frisco-Classic-Stereo]

Hi gang, newbie here but not new in the vinyl world.

For the past 30+ years I have dedicated myself to restoring and transferring to digital all sorts of forgotten formats, 16 RPM being one. I was a young pup when 16 RPM first came out, and have been following their (slow demise) pretty much since then.

My own question about a 16 RPM I saw on eBay last year had a title something akin to The First 16 RPM High Fidelity Music Record
and had a brown cover with a great big colored X on the front.
Maybe somebody has the exact title and/or track list.

Do any of you have any 16 rpm records in your collection? I just noticed it on ebay. I notice the biggest selection is JimmySwaggart! There is even one Beatles (with Tony Sheridan) record listed!

I doubt VERY seriously that there was any Beatles 16 RPM's* no matter WHAT eBay says. 99% of the so-called 16-RPM discs listed in that category on eBay are standard LP's. Those of us with extensive knowledge of arcane formats tend to know better, but the average eBay seller would not.

* Half Speed Masters from Nautilus, Mobile Fidelity and Columbia etc. while technically mastered at 16-2/3 RPM normally do not get included in the 16 RPM category for collectors or archivists.

A group of us have been trying to get eBay to put a ``listing tree'' (similar to a customer service phone tree) in the 16 RPM category in order to avoid the 99% of erroneous listings in the category, however they have been uncooperative and the problem persists.

I do... Also have a 8rpm (If I recall - Can't play to confirm!) one. Both are records for the blind- spoken word stuff. The 8rpm one is a flexidisk..

There are also MILLIONS of titles on ten-inch RD's (Rigid Discs) of 8-1/3 RPM records for the blind as well as the nine-inch FD's (flexidiscs), all of which can be found ad infinitum at swapmeets and charity thrift shops.

I have a few: all CBS music compilations, except for a Trini Lopez.

Would be nice to have cover art and track list for them as I have never seen these or photos thereof in all my years of following the format. The most I've seen is the French Vogue series, and European monaural various-artists discs such as the Herb Alpert and the TJB disc or the Jim Reeves South African pressing, both of which you can find YouTube video.

They are fun to have, but the audio quality is not great - no bass. But for all the players I've ever seen that can play 16rpm, that lack of quality wouldn't be an issue.

Many such discs were cut full-fidelity and at real-time. The discs you mention by and large were cut double-time at 33-1/3 RPM with a tape playing at 30 IPS, also double its' recorded speed. This accounts for the lack of bass as cutterheads of the period only went down to 50 or 60 Hz, so doubling that would be 100-120Hz, eliminating the bass.

On a portable record player with ceramic cartridge, you really can't tell them apart from a 33 or 45. So they would have been totally OK for most of the record buying public I think. But how many artists would have needed 90 minutes of record time? And those were in the days of autochangers too; a double 33 set - when required - would have given the same 'continuous' playing time.

Yes, that was before the idea of the Box Set came about. Can you imagine what would have happened to 16 RPM if Time Life, Longines Symphonette and Reader's Digest would have pushed the format? That 19.99 box set of 12 LP's and a book you got through mail-order could have been had for 9.99 since it would have only contained six discs, a smaller box and a thinner booklet.

I read somewhere that 16rpm records were really intended for speech only, as the sonic quality is so low that's all they could be used for, though never seen any.

See above for the difference between ``real time mastered titles'' and ``double-time mastered titles''.

I collect Seeburg background music records which were part of the Seeburg 1000 system, see here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeburg_1000

And, we're trying to get a 100 percent complete library together to transfer to digital in High Resolution and restore, possibly cutting new sets onto DMM for Vintage Vinyl reproduction sets for modern collectors.

[fscl]

Hi gang, newbie here but not new in the vinyl world.

For the past 30+ years I have dedicated myself to restoring and transferring to digital all sorts of forgotten formats, 16 RPM being one. I was a young pup when 16 RPM first came out, and have been following their (slow demise) pretty much since then.

Snippage.....

And, we're trying to get a 100 percent complete library together to transfer to digital in High Resolution and restore, possibly cutting new sets onto DMM for Vintage Vinyl reproduction sets for modern collectors.

Welcome to VE.....

Great stuff, thanks for the insights.......

Just out of curiosity.....

On what equipment / how do you play the 16RPM records? And what is your experience with fidelity?

Fred and loves the woodwork of the internet

[Frisco-Classic-Stereo]

Welcome to VE..... Great stuff, thanks for the insights.......Just out of curiosity.....
How do you play the 16RPM records, i.e. on what equipment?

Years ago, before I got a brain in my head and realized I was ruining all these perfectly good records the same as trying to play an LP with a 78 stylus, my first player like many of yours was just your basic Garrard, BSR, Zenith, Magnavox or Rek-O-Kut gorilla-beast.

And, yes, I did the `play `em at 33, record `em at 7-1/2 on reel-to-reel and play them back at 3-3/4 around the house' type deal, or (later) it's Marantz cassette equivalent i.e 2-speed (Normal and High) chrome-and-Dolby cassette recorder so that the resulting tapes played back at normal speed with ``normal'' fidelity.

Yes the transfers were crappy, even on the chrome tape recorded with Dolby and played back without.

Fortunately, I only had raggedy, beat-up Highway Hi-Fi and Seeburg/Rowe-AMI discs at the time, which would have never played on their respective players anyway in their condition.

Later I re-tooled a standard Seeburg Select-O-Matic 78 jukebox left over from my granddad's restaurant in the late 50's since it could already play 10-inch discs and the original 3-mil 78 stylus included therewith could be re-fitted with the Seeburg half-mil background music stylus.

Then I copied the turntable design from a Seeburg 45-jukebox and had a 2-inch hole version custom-machined before installing it into the 78 jukebox (plays discs on edge from an internal rack) and re-setting the tone arm counter-weight, and moving the offset from 10 inch to 9 inch and replacing the 78 RPM motor with one for 16. Yes, all those racks of Seeburg BMS records looked REALLY strange in a 78 RPM jukebox.

But that got damaged in a storm when I was living back East, and all the records and jukebox got trashed. So, oh well.

Now I use a Technics SP-15 re-tooled for 16 RPM and a linear Denon tonearm with a Grado, Stanton or Ortofon CD-4 quadraphonic cartridge featuring a Shibata type stylus.

But I REALLY want the predecessor of the http://irene.lbl.gov/

Nprmal linear tracking tonearms ``follow'' the groove, and the act of forcing a conventional linear tracking tonearm out of alignment with the section of groove being played is what activates the drive thereon.

Unfortunately, this results in a constant game of `catch-up' so that the stylus is never perfectly square to the groove section, causing minute wandering of the stereo image and other discernible playback artifacts.

This Denon prototype of a linear tracking turntable from the 80's on the other hand features hundreds of ``eyes'' which look at the groove pack.

For variable-pitch recordings it will ``see'' where the groove pitch changes from narrow to wide and back again and send that information to the special Denon prototype linear tracking tonearm which will then be able to position itself at the exactly precise moment in order to play that particular section of groove 100% tangenitally just as it was recorded.

For fixed-pitch recordings, it will discern other anomalies in the groove pack and using the aforementioned disc mapping technology correct therefor by sending the inverse of these anomalies hundreds of times per second to the linear tonearm drive. This will therefore correct for eccentric and warped pressings up to over an inch across.

We had an error pressing featuring a 7-inch cut on a 10-inch disc of Twas the Night Before Christmas and Mixie-Pixie on a Cricket Records childrens' label 78 which had been pressed extremely eccentrically.

The disc was so eccentric, that an ordinary tone arm could not follow the wild undulations to the center and back to the edge of the recording without falling off at 78 RPM. The Denon prototype however with it's auto disc mapping had absolutely no problems with it at all, although it did look really crazy trying to play it.

And, of course, being so eccentric, the pitch and speed of the record ran wildly between too slow as it neared the edge and too fast as it neared the center, so it wasn't any good for listening anyway, just watching.

But back to 16 RPM discs and their players.

I also have an Elac that I use for spoken word and other standard-groove monaural recordings and sent away to Europe for the 1.0 mil Shibata type styli therefor, and then I have a Dual three-speed limited edition from the 70's which features 16-33 and 45 but no 78 that I use for the Prestige Jazz and other 12-inch mono and stereo music titles.

And what is your experience with fidelity?

As stated earlier, it depends on whether or not the disc was mastered real-time i.e cut at the actual 16 RPM speed, or as was more common, have the tape played at double speed and recorded at a standard 33 1/3 RPM as most of the talking books were of the period.

The real-time mastered series such as the Prestige Jazz titles and World-Pacific lounge titles (mono) or the Will Kennedy Orchestra titles on the Dancetime label (STEREO!!) sound A-M-A-Z-I-N-G for a normal 33 LP nevermind 16.

But that's not surprising, being those series' were DESIGNED to show off the high fidelity or stereo capabilities of the medium. Conversely, most of the background-music titles with just a disc number on them and no song titles were utilized to maximize the time on the disc, not the fidelity.

As such, these titles were recorded double-speed at 33, and hence have a sort of very clean AM-radio or SCA (FM-subcarrier channel) type sound to them.

But, as the 60's passed into the 70's and Nautilus, Mobile Fidelity and Columbia Half-Speed Mastered audiophile discs began to come on the music scene, mastering engineers cut many background music discs real-time at 16 RPM and tweaked the process so that it would improve the sound of a record normally mastered at 33, so a lot of the late 60's and early 70's BMS discs have GREAT fidelity.

After the late 70's, nobody cared anymore about Half-Speed-Mastering or CD-4 quadraphonic which was also mastered at 16 for playback at 33, so from there on out to the last production year in 1986, background music records were once again cut double-speed with the accompanying lack of fidelity.

Played with the proper size stylus (VERY IMPORTANT) and the recommended tracking weight can give the best reproduction.

Unfortunately, everybody on YouTube playing Seeburg records is destroying them, except for the guy playing a red-label 1975 disc on a big grey talking-book player as the stylus sizes are the same as for talking books.

Overloaded on information yet? I ain't even got started.

[Steerpike_jhb]

Many such discs were cut full-fidelity and at real-time. The discs you mention by and large were cut double-time at 33-1/3 RPM with a tape playing at 30 IPS, also double its' recorded speed. This accounts for the lack of bass as cutterheads of the period only went down to 50 or 60 Hz, so doubling that would be 100-120Hz, eliminating the bass.

But that process should IMPROVE the bass recording, rather than degrade it. If the cutter head is the limiting factor - and can't cut a groove below 50Hz, then runing the tape at double speed doubles all frequencies. On playback of the disc at 16rpm, the cutter''s frequency limit is halved down to 25Hz.

Conversely, cutting it at double speed will chop the top off the recorded freqency spectrum.

[Frisco-Classic-Stereo]

But that process should IMPROVE the bass recording, rather than degrade it. If the cutter head is the limiting factor - and can't cut a groove below 50Hz, then running the tape at double speed doubles all frequencies. On playback of the disc at 16rpm, the cutter''s frequency limit is halved down to 25Hz.

Except for bass-contour effect and other mastering-process artifacting.

If that were the case, then the 66 2/3 RPM lathe modifications they were using for the RCA Dynagroove titles for awhile in the 60's would have caught on. Since they were already cutting 8 1/3 RPM discs at 33 and playing a 7 1/2 IPS master at 30 to save expensive mastering engineer time, of course they would have wanted to do the same for commercial LP's if they could've gotten away with it.

Conversely, cutting it at double speed will chop the top off the recorded freqency spectrum.

Correct, and for speech and low-fidelity background music with a limited frequency range, nobody cares about bass or treble because the playback equipment of the period for the most part was not capable of retrieving the wide-range signals even if they had been present.

But back to the bass-contour effect. That's why the half-speed mastering came into being in the 70's, they needed better top end which they got, but they also needed to work on bass contour effect which is what happens when the recording medium goes too fast past the recording head and creates interference which is what happened with the Dynagroove besides having its' top-end cut off.

The inverse of that is muddy bass, which is what you get when you cut an LP at 66 2/3 RPM and play the master tape at 30 IPS. So, the Ortofon half-speed cutterheads were re-engineered from the ground up to give more solid bass response down to 10 or 12 Hz or so.

If you listen to the first few HSM demo sampler records from the early 70's you'll notice the muddy bass, even though you get a clear top end (some guys say bordering on brittle-sounding like what you get cutting on a DMM) at least the bass was nice and punchy.

Only later on did they start to get the treble so it wouldn't sound screechy and brittle without re-equalizing from the mixdown master. Artists wanted their mix to sound the same on LP 8-track or reel-to-reel, so of course when HSM came out, then the sonic balance was messed up at first and artists hated the sound.

The same would hold true ten years later with DMM. Even though by then they had the bass worked out and at least TRIED to have the treble not sound so screechy and brittle, it basically comes down to a case of cutting into a living organism (nitrocellulose) vs cutting into cold hard copper.

There are still people that say cutting into a lacquer with a DMM lathe gives the best qualities of both: the higher fidelity from the DMM head and the warmth from the lacquer.

To be able to tell for yourself whether or not that is true, you'd have to get a good turntable like a Linn or a Rega and a good linear tonearm
and then get a DMM and a lacquer-mastered copy of the same title, and then get an HSM-mastered version as well and then just play back and forth between the three.

If you can find a title in those three that was also produced on RCA Dynagroove and get an original black-label Dynagroove pressing, then you'll be able to see the difference there as well.

So, to recap, you'll have four copies of the title in question, the RCA Dynagroove original, the orange-label early 70's lacquer-mastered re-cut, the Half-Speed-Mastered (by either Nautilus or Mobile Fidelity)
and the Direct-to-Metal mastered version (usually German pressings).

Play them all side by side by side and see what you think.

[flavio81]

Just to add my comment: All the DMM records that i've listened sounded fantastic.

If they sound brittle, check out what was the tape recorder. Many DMM records were mastered from early 80s digital tapes. The ones made using the soundstream digital recording system sound good, but i'm afraid some others systems may have the worst artifacts of digital audio.

[Frisco-Classic-Stereo]

Just to add my comment:
All the DMM records that I've listened sounded fantastic.

If they sound brittle, check out what was the tape recorder.
Many DMM records were mastered from early 80s digital tapes.

My first DMM was a German Teldec-mastered CHESS concept album (in the black cover) from 1984 DD-DMM (vs a CD's DDD or AAD or ADD).
Of course I also had the Half-Speed Mastered version (lacquer-mastered) and a conventional real-time lacquer-mastered version and they all had their problems.

The DMM had great bass but was brittle on the top.
The HSM had great treble but the bass was muddy
The normal pressing was heavily midrangey.

And the CD, no matter if you took the RCA blue label original or the
Polydor reprint was worse, although the Polydor reprint did sound better.

The ones made using the soundstream digital recording system sound good, but i'm afraid some others systems may have the worst artifacts of digital audio.

Classical and jazz DMM's though, especially those cut from new digital transfers of the 3-track half-inch production stems for say RCA Shaded Dogs or Mercury Living Presence, those have a GREAT sound, but I have yet to find a pop or rock DMM that I don't have to ditz with the EQ and compression before I can listen to it.

I would dearly like to buy a 16rpm music record.

Anyone? Thanks

Just be advised that VERY FEW if ANY of the 16 RPM discs listed on eBay are actually 16 RPM. You can pretty much take it for granted that there's no 16 RPM Quad City DJ's or The Best of Blondie or any other commercial music title that was pressed in the millions.

See my posts here (under ``diamone'' (my name in the music world).

http://www.quadraphonicquad.com/forums/ ... for-16-rpm

and here:

http://bsnpubs.websitetoolbox.com/post? ... ight=16rpm

and here:

http://bsnpubs.websitetoolbox.com/post? ... ight=16rpm

and here:

http://bsnpubs.websitetoolbox.com/post? ... ht=seeburg

and here:

http://bsnpubs.websitetoolbox.com/post? ... ht=seeburg

[Whitneyville]

I have at least a dozen 16 2/3 RPM music discs. One enourmous issue is the RIAA equalization for 33 1/3 RPM LP's is NOT the EQ curve used on the 16 2/3 RPM ELP's (as some of them are labeled). I have an old Zenith record player which will play them and has a switch for the equaliazation although it's mono only(mixed stereo). I think the 8" speaker and the low-power tube amp is the limitation to the fidelity. I use the "LP" flip side of the stylus to play them. The discs I have are "elevator music" or "Muzak" type music, they were designed to be played at parties or dinners in the late 60's is my impression, of the music and general lack of dynamics in the music. The difficulty in pressing them well and the non-standard EQ kept them and the Hi-Way Hi-Fi (7"45's...I had one in my '58 Chrysler Imperial on the transmission "hump") from being viable formats, plus the fact that many old record players had 1 mil stylii which was NOT good for the 16 2/3 "ultra-groove"(Decca's designation) ELP's. The 16 2/3 speed was used after WWII for the "U-Record-It" brand recording booths at music stores but with a 1 mil stylus on 7" and 9 3/4" discs (I have a couple of each) which are on bright yellow vinyl acetate (rigid) discs. My late brother-in-law's jazz combo crowded into one of those booths to cut their "sides" in about '54. I think GI's in Korea sent back 16 RPM "audio letters" to home too.(Special Services Corps) The 16RPM records were the "books for the blind" format until the Compact Cassette came out and it's half-speed version which are STILL the preferred format for the blind. You can't put Braille impressions on the top of a CD, which will play only 80 minutes as opposed to 360 minutes for half speed cassettes (with intentional limited fidelity for clarity of spoken voice). I also have a two-foot high collection of the late Oral Robert's "Healing Waters" 16" 45 RPM "inside-out" radio transcriptions if anyone wants them...those 16" aluminum lacquers MUST be good for something! From estate/garage/yard sales, I think I have at least 2 or 3 of every disc recording format ever tried, including the "side loader" Kenner Kiddie Korps record player discs, that are about 5" in diameter with three holes in a "Y" shape playing at about 45 RPM from the early-mid 1950's. They were "scratch-proof" and you could carry the player around while playing as far as the electric cord would reach.