It's simple when goven a bit of thought. Sure, you can gear down a spring motor, but the governor has to run at high speed to remain reasonably smooth. This means that you use up all of your spring, keeping the governor going, while the turntable runs at slow speed. Under those conditions, a long playing record will play less than half the playing time on the phonograph before you run out of spring. The listener would be cranking the motor several times before a 33 1/3 RPM disc could finish playing. That wouldn't go over well with customers at all! It would explain the reason that Edison used 80 RPM for his long play records. We might say that he had half of the puzzle solved, but he didn't go to slow playing speed because it wasn't practical with a spring motor.
Sort of ironic, or perhaps tragic, but Victor used the slow speed, and the electric motor, but nearly standard groove pitch, so they had the other half. You have to wonder why RCA didn't investigate the microgroove. It was demonstrated by Edison, so RCA had to be aware of it. RCA had good research capability. Why didn't they put the two ingredients together in 1932, as Goldmark did, in essence, in 1948? My own comment here, and someone might bash me for it, but the RCA LP discs of 1932-34 sounded crumby. I have about 6 of them. I also have a Vitaphone disc from the "Jazz Singer" film, and it sounds reasonably good. The Vitaphone discs wre pressed by Victor; it says so on the label. I wonder what happened at RCA between 1927 and 1932? ----- Original Message ----- From: "Steven Medved" <[email protected]> To: <[email protected]> Sent: Tuesday, May 02, 2006 12:54 PM Subject: Re: [Phono-L] Victor long playing records > Hi Doug, > > This is interesting, Edison had the Alva but I have never seen an electric > motor in a DD phono, I never thought of this until your post. > > Steve > > But Edison had an aversion to electric motors >>in phonographs, though he could have had them; others did. > > > _______________________________________________ > Phono-L mailing list > [email protected] > > Phono-L Archive > http://phono-l.oldcrank.org/archive/ > > Support Phono-L > http://www.cafepress.com/oldcrank >
