Of late my work has mandated that I become reasonably adept at transcribing 78 RPM records into digital format. That’s just peachy; I relish acquiring a new skill set, no matter how arcane.
But 78s aren’t arcane. They are what everybody thought of as “records” for half a century. I’m just old enough to remember when some folks still had massive console record players that played 78s, even though most had retired those in favor of hi-fi outfits designed for LPs. 78s weren’t absolutely beyond the pale for me, although I come very close to the age cutoff for which 78 rpm shellac discs represent ancient technology on the order of Babylonian cuneiform.
As I have delved into the enticing and occasionally musty world of 78 RPM records, I have acquired a newfound respect for their robustness and persistence. 5-1/4 inch floppy discs, VisiCalc files, punched cards, Univac tapes—indecipherable without intensive expertise and/or expense. But you can play a 1926 record without haunting every antique shop and flea market in town. Our digital infrastructure could turn inaccessible but those moldering 78s in granny’s attic will still play just fine.
And without electricty. A wind-up Victrola can do it, maybe not all that well by modern standards, but that’s the way most people used to play their records. Hand-spin a 78 RPM disc on a rounded pencil and rest the corner of a thin playing card in the groove; it will make (faint) music. Don’t forget that a significant percentage of United States citizens were still non-electric as late as the 1930s. But they could play records. Electric jobbers with vacuum-tube amplifiers and speakers and all that were luxury items until after the second World War. 78s are a finalized technology; like brooms, candles, and buttons, they can fulfill their purpose in almost any circumstances. In their own scratchy clicky way, they’re perfect.
What was once brain-dead simple has become complicated. Back in the day you put the record on the platter, cranked the handle, pressed the “spin” lever, then rotated the needle onto the record. No volume control, no balance, no tone controls, no speaker placement, no $5000 interconnect cables made out of plutonium derivatives and sheathed in skins from extinct Egyptian salamanders. Nowadays most people don’t even have record players, much less units that can handle 78s, much less wind-up Victrolas. To be sure, you can go trawling around Antique Alley, but your best bet is to go modern. And you can go modern, full-tilt über-high-tech modern that extracts a hitherto-unsuspected wealth of detail out of those dusty old platters. Our forbears had the simplicity, but we can crank up the sonic effulgence.
Playing and preserving a 78 RPM disc isn’t just a matter of plopping the thing onto your trusty 1972 Magnavox record player. Gotchas and provisos abound. For your edification I present the most urgent considerations.
Turntable speed. It almost goes without saying that you need a turntable that can rotate its platter 78 times per minute. In a pinch you can play the record at 45 RPM (which most tables can do) and make the necessary adjustments with editing software, but that’s quite a substantial change in speed and pitch, so audio quality will suffer. The classy English company Rega produces a turntable specifically designed for 78s—the Planar 78, essentially a repurposed Rega P2, elegant reliability in Euro-cool minimalist styling. It’s worth having for its techno-chic alone, much less its virtuosity with 78s. I dig my Planar 78.
Stylus. A 78 RPM disc requires a conical stylus wide enough to fondle both walls of those canyon-wide grooves, rather than the elliptical stylus designed for LPs and their itty-bitty microgrooves. Play a 78 with an LP stylus and that exquiste diamond will drop right down to the bottom of the groove where there’s mostly schmutz. The audio’s up on the sides of the groove. One economy measure is to use a cartridge that lets you swap out a conical stylus for an elliptical. Ortofon makes several models along those lines, a modern-day version of the old cartridges with a flip lever—one side marked “LP” and the other “78.” That wasn’t a perfect solution by any means, and a lot of 78 RPM records got the shit kicked out of them by those flip-lever record players. Their high-tech modern descendants are a lot kinder to the records, but still they fall short.
Cartridge. It’s best to use a cartridge with concomitant stylus designed specifically for 78s. Such cartridges are monophonic (i.e., they don’t go searching hopelessly for a stereo image that isn’t there) and are built around magnetic coils tuned to the wiggling of 78 RPM grooves. Believe it or not, you can buy bright shiny new ones from peerless manufacturers. Solid-gold marque Grado puts out two models—the 78C and 78E. I have the latter cartridge installed in my Rega Planar 78, and the two together dance a merry quadrille.
Tracking force. 78s require more tracking force (i.e., weight) than LPs. Most LP cartridges prefer a tracking force of about 1.5 grams. But 78s were designed for heavier tone arms. Those wind-up Victrolas manhandled the hell out of the records, but the discs were armored against anything a record player might dish out. One might think that a lighter touch from the stylus would yield better results in addition to less disc wear, but actually the converse is true: too light of tracking force and the stylus starts bouncing around in the groove, acting like a razor blade wreaking havoc along the groove walls. The tone arm needs to keep the needle nestled nice and secure in the grooves. That’s a good reason for a separate turntable; you can set the tracking force as needed and not worry about constant readjustments between LPs and 78s on a single turntable. My Rega Planar 78 is set for 4.5 grams of tracking pressure applied to the Grado 78E cartridge; I play my LPs on a spiffy new VPI Scout II turntable with a Grado Sonata cartridge that floats along at a mere 1.5 grams. Each to its own; each is gloriously adept at its appointed task.
Just to avoid any misconceptions here, the bulk of my music library—and my listening—is digital from soup to nuts. I’m no Luddite. But I love recorded sound, all kinds of recorded sound, and I’m deeply appreciative of the beauties of analog audio—from 78s, vinyl LPs, open-reel tapes, maybe even cassettes on festive occasions. As I write this I’m listening to a near-mint Capitol LP from 1952. Yes, it’s mono—but the sound is deep and rich and clear and utterly delectable. I’m in hog heaven. I could listen to audio like this forever.
Automatic tone arm pickup. This one can leave you sputtering with frustration, if your turntable is one of those “automatic” types that picks up the tonearm at the end of the record. Even if it has a 78-rpm setting, the piggish thing just might yank up the tonearm while the side is still playing. The grooves on a 78 tend to crowd close to the label in the interest of eeking out just a few more seconds of playing time. Outside of surgery with pliers or metal cutters or soldering irons, there’s damn little you can do about it. A turntable designed for 78s will be manual; you operate the turntable; it doesn’t operate itself. That’s true of any audiophile-grade turntable, and may heaven smile upon each and every fancy-schmanzy one of them.
Equalization. You may need to apply a specialized equalization curve to 78s. Modern phono stages are built around the equalization curves for long-playing records, but sometimes 78s sound wacky with those curves, all boomy or hissy or shrill or muffled. Fortunately, adjustments are simple with software. The shareware Macintosh program Amadeus Pro even comes with a bunch of presets designed for records from various labels and eras. But use a light hand. That’s true of every aspect of audio restoration, by the way. Don’t try to make a shellac 78 disc from 1940 sound like tomorrow’s hit CD. Encourage; don’t correct.
Joins. The standard length for a 78 RPM side is 4 minutes, although clever engineering could stretch it out a bit. Nevertheless, it isn’t usually long enough for a symphony or concerto movement. Breaks are the norm, and part of reconstituting a 78 RPM album is to re-join those breaks. I find Adobe Audition particularly well suited to the task. I record each side of the 78 RPM set onto a separate track, and then slide the clips on the tracks around (using the razor-blade editing tool as necessary) to achieve a smooth join, sometimes by overlapping the end of one side with the beginning of another. It’s a bit of a black art, but with careful listening you can create a convincing join without too much trouble. And if everything goes to hell in a handbasket, Adobe Audition’s edits are non-destructive, so you can step right back to the beginning and start over with no lasting harm done. Thank God.
It’s a lot of fuss to turn a 78 RPM album into high-def computer files. And you don’t have to convert anything — you can just play the records for themselves without dubbing. (Sometimes I do just that—why not just enjoy them for themselves, dammit?) But the process has a certain joy about it, as an ancient morceau of our heritage is brought back to life for a moment, tickled into singing again, its voice captured in a new medium and thus propelled along to the future. Certainly I wind up appreciating the recording all the more, given the time and bother I’ve invested in its resurrection. I avoid any invasive digital manipulation save click removal, which takes care of the most distracting artifacts but doesn’t affect the overall sound. That’s important, because there’s a sweet warmth to a 78 RPM record; it isn’t high fidelity by any stretch of the imagination, but what’s there on the disc tends to be there with vibrant presence. 78s operate within a much narrower frequency and dynamic window than either LPs or digital audio, but there’s some real musical magic in that narrow aperture, if you can stop fixating on what isn’t there and come to value what is.