What's a 78?

78s are old records. Let's have a little reverse history lesson. We now use CDs to store music. They store information as little pits in a silvery surface, and these are read by a laser beam. Before that, we used to store music on old vinyl records. The music was stored as wiggles in a very fine spiral groove which went in a big spiral right around the record's surface, and they were played with very fine diamond tipped needles, which waggled magnets inside wire coils and made an electrical music signal which could be amplified by an amplifier just like any modern one, but with a bit more gain. Before the vinyl records, there were even older records, which were made of shellac, and had a much more coarse groove in them, so that they could even be played with steel needles. They used to spin around much quicker than vinyl records. Vinyl LPs used to rotate at 33 (and a third!) revs per minute. Old records whiz around at 78 revs per minute. Hence their name: 78s.

78s are heavy, and a ten-inch diameter record struggled to hold three minutes of music on each side, so they were bulky to keep as well. Worse still, they are brittle and will break if they are badly handled. Their sound quality is very limited because they were recorded on very old equipment, and the records have "surface noise" which sounds like eggs frying (or worse) because the walls of the groove were not smooth. This was because they were designed to be played on machinery using steel needles. Steel is harder than shellac and would wear the records out really quickly, so fine carborundum granules were mixed with the shellac to literally sand down the steel needles and make sure that the wear was put mainly on the (disposable) steel needle and not on the valuable record. It is these granules which make the surface noise.

When we play a 78, we take the signal into our computer and use a powerful program to reduce the surface noise. It is possible to virtually eliminate the surface noise with a computer, but the result often sounds plastic and has far too much reverberation. We don't like this; we'd rather have a more original sound, which does mean that some of the surface noise escapes the filter. We use the computer to redress the balance between the music and the unwanted noises, but we don't overdo the process. Records which are in rough order or badly recorded will always show up as inferior. We always hunt around for the best-preserved records available, but there's only so much we can do...

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