In the early, low- or no-fi, days, the simple fact that sound was coming out of a machine was sufficient for most people, and the reality that the sound was what we would now consider awful was, for lack of comparison, of little consequence.
For discs, the easiest (read “cheapest”) way to hold the cartridge for playback was to use a radial arm (think about the RCA dog picture, with Nipper sitting next to a radial armed gramophone with the horn directly attached to the arm, listening to His Master’s Voice) and that was how most disc players were presented to the consumer market. It compensated for them, though, with very high tracking force (sometimes in the ounces) that simply overwhelmed them. All of the early recordings – in fact, until “ DynaGroove” or its equivalents came along in the 1960s- used constant groove spacing, most easily provided by a leadscrew turning at constant speed.Īs to playback, for cylinders, the playback tonearm also had, simply because of the shape of the record it was playing, to be transverse and had all of the problems of the transverse tonearm that I will be writing about in later installments. In the cutting mode, the record cutting machine acted as, and was actually called a “lathe”, and the function of the “arm” portion of it was to set the cutting stylus to a desired mean depth of groove (the earliest recordings were vertically – up-and-down or in-and-out - instead of side-to-side modulated, as later became the norm) to hold it there and, with the cylinder or the disc turning, use a leadscrew to move the cartridge (called the “cutting head”) across the medium to make the groove. If you remember that the term “cutting a record” actually meant cutting a record, it’s easy to understand why those first “tonearms” were transverse: Whether for a cylinder or a disc, they were the easiest way to do what was necessary – first, to actually cut a track in the medium, and then to play it back. Starting in the late 1880s disc records – the format we are now more familiar with, became available and, after 1912, dominant, and with them came the possibility of the “radial” tonearm which, instead of moving the cartridge across the record in a line, maintaining a constant angle to the groove, tracked it in an arc, from a single pivot point. The first, that came-in with the very first cylindrical recordings – whether on foil or, later, wax or other materials – was “transverse”, meaning, in this case, “across the record, at a constant angle”.
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Historically, two approaches have been taken to the problem of how to hold the cartridge so that the “needle” (Nowadays, we call it the “stylus”) will be properly positioned to either cut or play back a record.
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I ended Part 11 of this series of articles about phonograph records and the equipment for playing them by bringing up the tonearm and how it affects not only the playing, but also the actual cutting of records… Twitter Facebook Email Print LinkedIn Pinterest SMS WhatsApp
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