Vinyl Records: Black Magic at Work

Despite reading all about how vinyl records are recorded and made, it's still a bit like black magic to us. Dive in and learn all about the coolest music medium.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, everybody, big special announcement at long last, we are
going back on the road to do live shows. And
I could not be more excited. I too, am fairly excited.
I could tell it's gonna be great. Chuck. We're gonna
be back live on stage for the first time in
to three years. Uh. We were on stage in but

(00:26):
at the very beginning of and we're going to yeah three, Yeah,
three years since we've trod the boards and we're about
to trod them boards again, Chuck. On February first, second,
and third, we're going to Seattle in Portland, or Portland
and Seattle, and then for sure on February three, we're
going to wind the whole thing up in San Francisco. Right,

(00:47):
that's right, We're going back to sketch Fest are usually
January home, but early February home this year, for my money,
the best uh comedy festival in the world, and we're
gonna be going to sketch Us. And again, we're not
sure the order yet. We don't have ticket links yet,
but we do have a little bit more information. We
just couldn't wait to tell you guys. So tickets are

(01:08):
actually going to be on sale very soon. October six,
there's going to be a pre sale with a password
UH and we will probably put those out on our
social links. I'm not sure how you'll find out, but
you'll find out, and then on October seven there will
be general sale. We'll give you more information as we
get it. But again, we just couldn't wait to tell you, guys,
because we're too excited. That's right, and you know what

(01:29):
we're doing. We've got a great uh working with some
great new people with our social media stuff. So you
might have noticed that our Instagram and our Facebook have
some new and exciting things happening. So that's a great
place to find information about the tours. Very nice. So
we'll see you guys in the Northwest coast this February
and the rest of you, who knows, could be a

(01:50):
wild year. Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production
of I Heart Radio. Y hey, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Josh, There's Chuck, Jerry's here, and Jack Black's lurking around,
which makes this stuff you should know. We got the

(02:12):
facts on wax w s y s K. That's pretty great. Sorry,
pretty you should have been a radio personality. I used
to want to be I wanted to be a DJ.
You came awfully close. Man. I have to say that
was a pretty pretty close to a realized dream if
you ask me. Uh well, and what's funny is is

(02:35):
the saying wax and like are one of our local
record stores. Here's wax and facts and old DJ saying wax.
In this episode you will find out why they say wax. Yeah,
it's hopelessly outdated, but yeah, it's still still applies to
us the next time. Let's do this. This is pretty fun.

(02:57):
I'm excited. Do you collect final, Lenny? I think you
do a little bit right, Yeah, a little bit. Um.
I don't like collected. I just buy stuff that I want.
But you know, I'm vinyl, but I'm not just like, look, everybody,
check out my collection. I just have a selection of records.
How about that? Yeah? My deal is I have my records,

(03:18):
most of my records that I had growing up. Never
got rid of him, moved him every time like a dummy.
I got uh inherited while still alive my um stepfather's
record collection. He didn't pass away, but he just said here,
I'm done with these. I'm so sick of music. It's ridiculous.

(03:39):
But that's where I got all that good Like he
has all the all that prog rock from the seventies.
He was way into that stuff. Uh. And then I
started buying just sort of classic favorites of mine, basically
kind of filling out newer classic favorites from when I
stopped buying records up to this point. So I'm kind

(04:01):
of running out of room on my little three banger shelf,
so I'm slowing down the rate of purchase. But it's
it's good, and through the miracle of modern technology, I
can play a record through a Bluetooth set of Bluetooth speakers.
That is amazing, but it's also a tragedy. Well, yeah,
I wish I had a plugged in what hi fi

(04:22):
system I've got them. I've got some like just Rockford
or rock File or whatever shelf speakers that are plugged
into an UM I guess a post amp or preamp,
I don't know, one of the amps, but it's not
part of the record player and the record players plugged
into that. And it seems clugy enough that I'm like, Okay,
this seems pretty authentic. Yeah, I mean, you can tell

(04:43):
we're experts here with our use of Rockford Files and
pre post SAMP, right, so, I but I mean still,
you don't have to be a total expert to to
talk about vinyl, although there will certainly be um record
store guys, the music equivalent of com book guy, who
will right in and tell us how how much we

(05:03):
just totally suck forever and like just got every single
thing wrong. But this is not for those people. It's
for everybody else who just wants to know how vinyl
records work. How about that? I think that's great? Uh,
And I think a few of these stats before we
dive into the history or in order thanks to Dave
Rouse who pointed out that obviously in the uh fifties, sixties, seventies,

(05:26):
and into the eighties some um, certainly into the eighties,
vinyl records were sort of the thing, uh, and their
peak in the seventies there were more than fifth, sorry
and thirty million records bought each year each year, which
is about six with eight track making up for the rest.

(05:47):
Because of course you had to play something in your
conversion van, right, you couldn't really, most most cars weren't
outfitted with record players, that's right. But then the cassette
came along and the c D and all but killed Vinyl. Uh.
They accounted for point one percent of music sales at
some point in the nineties, which is a pretty big drop,

(06:10):
I would say, but then made a comeback in the
two thousand's because of nostalgia and because of hipsters and
audio files and certain movies and Record Store Day and
all other reasons. Yes, But I mean like if you
if you could rewind back to seven and you asked

(06:31):
somebody if if they would ever, you know, see Vinyl
albums again, they would just laugh in your face like
they were done. They were goners, right, And so the
idea that it came back is pretty it's pretty remarkable
as far as comebacks go. And then in twenty I
believe Vinyl Records outsold CDs for the first time since
Night six. That's a check of a comeback. And that's

(06:54):
not even to say that CDs were doing that poorly.
CDs actually had increased in sales over the past few
years as well, So it wasn't like CDs were just
tumbling downward while Vinyl was kind of slowly creeping upward.
They were both creeping up and Vinyl just overtook CDs.
I think in the year that vinyl overtook CDs UM,
twenty seven and a half million Vinyl records were sold

(07:18):
around the world. One it jumped up to forty one
point seven million. Yeah, baby, So yeah, Vinyl is definitely back,
and there's a lot of reasons why it's back, And um,
I say we start with the history of the whole
thing to maybe explain why people like vinyl. I think
that's where you kind of find the birth of the
whole thing. Uh, totally some other good news by the way,

(07:39):
just to drag that out a bit, is that cool
video I sent you from how It's made? Uh? They
went to that music record that record pressing plant in Nashville,
which is, as thinks, still one of the biggest ones,
and they had to re expand and they were like, hey, everybody,
remember when we shut down almost Well we're we have

(08:00):
open up a bigger place now, which is awesome and
it's a great comeback story. Yeah. And I would guess
the people who were buying the point one percent of
music sales as vinyl in the eighties and nineties, I
had to just be exclusively DJs, right, Oh No, I
mean there were always Vinyl collectors. Um, they were just

(08:20):
not nearly as many. For a while. It wasn't exclusively
DJs because did DJ and they didn't even use records anymore,
did they. I mean, that's a pretty recent phenomenon. They
were using vinyl like throughout the eighties and nineties for sure.
When I guess we should look into that, like when
they switched to the carts, Um, I would say in

(08:41):
the tens maybe, really, I'm just guessing. But if it
gets a response like that out if you all guess
every time, I don't think so. I think they've had
the carts for a while. So the two thousand odds,
I mean, I think before that someone will know and
tell us. Whatever I do work for a major radio company,

(09:03):
we should just ask somebody. We'll ask somebody, We'll get
him on the phone, we'll call in will be the caller.
I love it. So we're talking the history now, Chuck,
I'd say, um, and we're talking vinyl records. But you
can't really talk about vinyl records without like the beginning
of records a recorded sound in general. Um, And most

(09:23):
people say, who came up with recorded and played back sound?
Thomas Edison, Of course it was you know, the last
quarter of the nineteenth century, I think, And you're right, like, yes,
Thomas Edison definitely gave us what we kind of understand
is recorded and played back sound. But um, there was
a guy who came a good twenty years before him,

(09:46):
although apparently Edison wasn't aware of his work. But he
was a guy from France, Edward Leon Scott de martin Ville. Yes,
and um, I've seen him referred to as Scott apparently
that's his last name, and I guess he's from Martinville.
Frank Okay, oh, that would makes sense. So, um, Scott
was tinkering around with something called a phone autograph and

(10:08):
if you um look into it and we'll talk about
how how vinyl records are made later, but like he
basically said, here's how we're going to make records from
here on out. Here's the at least the rough contours
of the whole thing. Yeah, and it's it's very rudimentary.
But as you will see when we describe it compared
to what they did later on, it's sort of the

(10:30):
same idea, which is, and we'll get into how he
did it, but which is basically using a vibrating tool
to cut and it vibrates because of sound, and it
makes a vibrating representation of whatever sound you're making and
cuts that into something. Yeah, what's astounding. This is the
most astounding thing that I've learned in a really long time,

(10:54):
is what is captured on record is a natural language
of sound that humans stumbled upon. And one of the
first people, possibly the first person to stumble upon it
is is edwardley On Scott to Martinville and like, like,
this is this has always existed, we just never tried
to capture it. It It just didn't occur to us. But

(11:15):
when you look at a record, you are you are
holding in your hands a captured, encoded representation of a
sound that was made at some point in time. And
Scott was the first person to figure out how to
capture this. Yeah, And it's funny, even after having learned this,
watched all the videos, being able to regurgitate how it's done,

(11:37):
it's still a bit like black magic to me. How
you say something into a microphone and it ends up
being cut into a vinyl record and a needle can
bring that sound back out. It's it's still just sort
of mind blowing to me. Yeah, there is like definitely
a certain amount of black magic to it. And it's
pretty cool. Like it's the cool kind, you know what
I'm saying. It's not the kind where like somebody breaks

(11:59):
a leg because of it. All right, So should we
talk about the phone autograph? Yeah, So what Scott did
was he took a um and I'm not quite sure
what inspired him to do this, but he took an
acoustic trumpet, you know, like the old gramphone the crank
record players that had like the big horn coming out
of it. Why did you say, Sonny? Exactly, that's an

(12:19):
acoustic trumpet. And he put a little membrane over the
small and the narrow end of it, and he attached
a boar's hair, one single boar's hair to that membrane,
and then, uh, the boar's hair was touching a glass plate,
i think. And on the glass plate he had put
something called um lampblack, which is like soot basically, just

(12:41):
put a nice coating of it. And then he spoke
into the large end of that acoustic trumpet and that
black magic started, That's right. And so what happened is
that boar's hair bristle would uh wiggle and vibrate along,
you know, to match whatever sound he was making, and

(13:02):
it drew basically what Dave refers to I think astuteley
as a sonic fingerprint. Uh. Through that soot, it drew
sort of the visual representation of sound for the first time. Um.
At the time, I think he called it a natural stenography,
is what Scott called it. But at the time he

(13:23):
was like so great. Um, I promised that this thing
maybe one day we'll be able to make a sound,
but we don't know how to do that, and everyone went,
what are you even talking about, dude? Um. But through
the miracle of science, they actually got a computer to
uh virtually play virtually as in you know, not like

(13:45):
virtually like it actually did, but they use a virtual
digital stylists to actually be able to play these early
recordings of this dude like singing French songs and saying things,
oh yeah frera jacka and all that. It wasn't far
a jacka, it was well then who cares? Now I've

(14:05):
got the song in here somewhere. But uh, I mean,
you know, it's kind of creepy sounding, but it is.
And then some of it is just sort of hums
and noises, but it is a human being. Uh, it's
all Claire de la loun. Uh. It is a actual
human being speaking words and singing words. And long before

(14:26):
Edison did so. Yeah, it's a good twenty years before Edison.
And there was one other thing that Scott figured out,
UM that was really important, and he figured it out
right out of the gate. Is that when you um
are are etching on that um, that glass plate covered
in lamp black with the boar's hair, the boar's hair

(14:47):
is just kind of wiggling right. The sound vibrations are
making it wiggle, and that wiggle is transferring acoustic waves
into mechanical energy that's being captured in those etchings. But
since the boy as um the boar's hair is just
in one place, you have to move that glass plate
and you can't just move it at any rate. It

(15:09):
has to be a specified rate. And he figured out
how to move that glass plate and I think one
m a second, which is really fast, UM. And that
means that if you read, if you put that thing
the other direction, UM at one m a second, then
it would play. And what he figured out was that
RPMs rotations per minute what would come to to be

(15:32):
a huge part of record playing was essential because if
you do it too fast, you have the same amount
of information, it's just compressed time wise, because you're moving
that glass plate faster than one meter a second, so
it comes out sounding like Alvin and the Chipmunks. If
you move it too slow, less than one meter a second,
it's that same amount of information, but it takes up
a longer amount of time and you come out sounding

(15:55):
like us on you know, half speed or something like that,
which people like to do when they marijuana cigarettes. I here,
although to be clear, he was not using revolutions because
it wasn't spinning yet know what as RPMs, But it
has to do with adjusting like a set frequency. It's
extraordinarily important that the playback and the recording are done

(16:16):
at the same frequency. And Scott figured that out out
of the gate. That's right, so put a pin in that. Uh.
Edison comes along and um wasn't really working from Scott's work,
but was arrival of Alexander Graham Bell and was working
on telephone products and decided to try and record phone calls.

(16:39):
And he had a big breakthrough when he attached the
stylust to a diaphragm, a lot like Scott did. And
I keep wanting to call him Martinville. I know Scott
from Martinville. Sure, um, And then the you know, exactly
in the same way the vibrations of the diaphragm were
etched in this case onto a sheet of paraffin wax

(17:00):
with a needle. And he was basically like, wait a minute,
we can record. It doesn't just have to be phone calls.
We can record all kinds of things, like one day
there shall be rock and roll. And he figured that out.
He was like, yeah, no, forget the phone. I'm doing
something else with this. So he moved from that paraffin
wax sheet to metal cylinders wrapped in aluminum floor right. Yeah.

(17:22):
And it's it's almost like the I mean sort of
in a way, it's almost like the inverse of how
a music box works. Like it's a metal cylinder, but
with a music box they're little nubs that uh prick
metal combs of different pitches. In this case, you're you're
cutting a groove. Uh. And you know, if you had
a sheet of tinfoil at home and got a toothpick,

(17:44):
you know you can drag it along and make an impression.
That's essentially what he was doing, right, So the fact
that he moved over to cylinders was pretty progressive. That
actually was um, the way that music was captured and
played back for a while, UM was on these cylinders.
And Alexander Graham Bell was the one who took these

(18:06):
cylinders and changed them from aluminum foil into wax. Yeah,
so wax cylinders were really popular. That was how you
listen to music back then, how you recorded music and
listened to it. And UM, I have a little anecdote
from you me. Actually she found out that when she's
she I'm gonna tell it on her behalf, but I'll

(18:29):
put on a wig and try to tell him a
higher pitch before. So, Um, she found out that this
some guy who had like the best record collection in
the country, possibly the world, lived like thirty minutes away
from her. So she and some friends went and visited.
This guy's name is Joe Bussard, and he's still around
and he still has this fantastic record collection, um, and

(18:51):
most of it is pre nineteen fifties stuff, but he
has original whax cylinders, like from the nineteenth century that
he played for them, and she said they were like
African American spiritual. She's like, it was clearly people sitting
on a porch singing this stuff. And it was like,
did they these people had sung this in one take

(19:12):
on a porch in like the eighteen nineties or something
like that. And there she wasn't you know, two thousand
whatever listening to it played back, which is pretty sweet,
and she said, this is lame. I want to hear
some rock indoor rule. Uh, that's an awesome story we had.
It made me think, or remember rather that we had
a a hand crank phonograph growing up in my house.

(19:36):
My I guess my dad got it at some point
and it was cool. You know, we had old records
and we didn't sit around and listen to him, but
my brother and I would put on one of those
old records and crank it up every now and then,
and uh, you know, it's cool. It sounds kind of
like a horror movie, but it's like it's just it's
a neat experience to see sort of the early technology

(19:57):
at work. There is something really unsettling about a nineteen
twenties record being played. There's just something about it. It's like,
for some reason, it always seems like the singer wants
to harm you, but it's pretending they don't, I know,
even especially because they're they're always singing about times a
little like warble and you're like, no, no no, no, you

(20:18):
got a knife in your hand exactly, slick back hair
and some crazy huge smile. Um. Alright, so Edison uh
and Bell are both working on this stuff. Bell has
got his wax cylinder going. Um. He played it back
on something called a graphophone. This was an eight seven.

(20:39):
You crank that handle, it rotates that wax cylinder and
it plays it back through an acoustic trumpet um which
I think we had one on ours. That was just
for show, but there was an actual kind of rudimentary
speaker underneath, and that's what amplified the sound. And then
of course later on the hand crank was replaced with
a motor. And just to explain the hand crank too,

(21:01):
you don't have to keep cranking it. You would crank
it a bunch and then kind of hit go and
then it would store up that mechanical energy and rotate
the player. Right, But that was still cylinder, right, That
was still the wax cylinder. Not obviously at my house,
we didn't have those but yeah, but still we're working
not even necessarily just wax, but we're working with cylinder.

(21:22):
That was how you played back or recorded sound. And
it was like that until a guy came along, I
think in the eight nineties named Emil Berliner. He was
German American and he came up with the gramma phone,
which probably sounds familiar because Berlinard's invention, which was shellac records,
he was the first one to say, forget these cylinders,
let's put let's put the stuff on disks and come

(21:46):
up with rotations per minute and just he made all
these innovations. Um, his invention was the standard from the
nineties to nineteen fifty. That was how you listen to music.
Was this guy's invention, the gramaphone, Yeah, which you know.
The main reason why is because you could actually reproduce
these on mass You could create like thousands of copies

(22:07):
of disc records, which was not something you could really
do with the wax cylinders. It was very expensive, it
took a lot of time to reproduce them. Uh. He
figured out how to make these molds of a master
recording and press them into records. Which is it really
set the stage. I mean things have changed a little bit,
but it really set the stage for how we still
do it today. Yeah, I mean it's it's virtually the same.

(22:30):
It's just you know, a little more advanced today. But
the principles are were certainly the same. The big difference though,
is this was not vinyl that this guy was making.
Like I said, it's shelack, and shelac is a natural substance.
That was basically, uh, it's a natural polymer. It's like
natural plastic. Basically it comes out of the lack bug,
which I think is native to Southeast Asia, if I'm

(22:51):
not mistaken. So it was expensive to produce to shelack
enough shellack to make a record, because again, the stuff's
coming out of a bug, not gen on that it
was from the female lack. Is that why it's called
she lack? Maybe? I think it is. That's pretty great.
If it is, that's wonderful. That's a great old timey
play on words. Well I'm gonna say that's fact. Okay,

(23:15):
that's all you have to do these days, right, just
say something. Yeah. Anybody who could contradict that as long
dead anyway, So it's all good. Well, I think you know,
we put a pin in this whole revolutions per minute?
Should we go ahead and explain that, yes, because Scott
was the one who figured that out, and uh it
just became a it's it's essential to reproducing or recording sound,

(23:38):
right like you have to have it um recorded at
a set frequency because the frequency effects is that the
pitch where it goes really high or really low? Is
that pitch? Sure? Okay, all right, I forgot yourself taught. Yeah, okay,
So it affects somehow because again, the like a sound

(23:59):
wave makes a way, even if you compress it, it's
still the same amount of information, it's just over a
shorter amount of time, and that makes it again sound
like Alvin and the Chipmunks. That's right. Uh So what
the old records from kind of up into the nineteen
fifties I think, or maybe it was later than that.
When did they changed, you know, from seventy eight to

(24:20):
thirty three and the third uh well, the first one
came out in like nineteen so okay, I'm sure they
were still selling those shellac seventy eight into the fifties.
All right, So seventy eight RPMs was the standard for
a while, and if you're wondering how they came up
with this RPMs, It's very easy. It's because the motors
that they used at the time ran at thirty six

(24:43):
hundred revolutions per minute. If you tried to think about
either manufacturing a record or playing a record at thirty
six d revolutions per minute, that's pretty funny to think about.
It's impossible, basically. So that's where gears, your old and
gears come in because the purpose of a gear is
to step down the speed of a motor. Uh and

(25:06):
in this case, they had a gear with So when
you divide those revolutions, you step it down with a gear,
and you eventually get down to uh eight technically seventy
eight point to six rpm. S. Yeah, I still don't
understand all that, but I accepted as as real. Well,

(25:27):
I mean, yeah, it's it's what we should do something. No,
never mind, I don't want to do how gears work
because it's way more complicated than it seems on the surface. Okay,
well that sounds like right up our alley. We can
we can confuse everyone further with that one. But at
any rate, it steps down that motor via a gear,
and we just do simple division and that's how you

(25:49):
got the seventy eight. So seventy eight is pretty fast.
I mean it's more than twice as fast as a
normal like uh LP album today spins and it's shell
which is pretty hard and brittle. So you can imagine
if that thing flew off, it could take great Aunt
Edgar's head clean off in the in the conservatory. Sure

(26:11):
like the recording artist intended, right, that was an abandoned clue,
uh murder weapon. Yeah, he did it. He did it
with a record, right, So the RPM is really important,
Chuck um for a couple of reasons. One, Um, it
was really fast in it, so it was dangerous at
least in my opinion. But more importantly, because they were

(26:33):
spending so fast, you had less time to get the
information across. So that meant that you had you know,
maybe I think a twelve inch record could hold four
to five minutes of music or of sound on each side. Right,
it's only like nine songs back then, right, So, um,
there were a lot of problems with these shellack seventy

(26:55):
eight but um, they were a huge advance, hugely forward.
But when vinyl came along, it changed everything and Chuck
we are almost thirty minutes into this episode. I say,
we take our first commercial break. Wow wa wow, let's
do it, okays skul Alright, So we are moving into

(27:30):
the twentieth century and finally vinyl comes along. Um. It
is called polyvinyl chloride or PBC. So those white PBC
pipes you see in the big box, uh hardware store,
it's the same same thing. It's a type of plastic.
And in the nineteen thirties is when record companies started
to kind of experiment with this because I'll the aforementioned

(27:54):
problems with shellac being very breakable and being very brittle.
And I believe Victor, which was a division of our
c A, was the first producer of vinyl records in
nineteen thirty. But it did not go well because it
took a little while before they had they had all
the playback equipment sort of SYNCD up working well together.

(28:17):
So in this case, uh, the pickups used to amplify
to send the signal to the amplifier. It's sort of
like a guitar pickup. They were too heavy and it
cut through the vinyl because it was uh not shelack.
It was used as shelack, so they had to sort
of rejigger everything, and it wasn't until after World War
Two that they really put in like a kind of

(28:39):
all their efforts stored making vinyl work. Yeah, because there
was a shelak shortage during World War two, so everybody's like, Okay,
we need to figure out this vinyl stuff for a
bunch of different reasons. But one of those things that
came out of it was the vinyl record. And most
people credit a guy at CBS named Peter Goldmark for
inventing the vinyl record that we know and love today.

(29:01):
That's right. Uh, He basically said, he figured out how
to make it stronger. Uh, he figured out how to
etch the grooves smaller so you could fit more stuff.
So he got it down to point zero zero three inches.
I think she lax maxed out at point o one inches,
so a lot more music basically per record. Yeah, because

(29:23):
in addition to more grooves, which means more information, which
means more length of time of recorded sound on one side,
it also played at a slower RPM, so it had
more time to play all that information too, So you
could just pack I think twenty two and a half
minutes per side on a on a thirty three and
a third RPM UM LP, which is what they're called

(29:47):
long play albums, the basically the vinyl record that gold
Mark invented. That's right. And here's a fun little tidbit
that Day found. I never realized, but UM album actually
pre dates the invention of the vinyl LP because when
people only had the seventy eights, they stored them in

(30:07):
sleeves called albums, and I think when the LPs finally
came out, it held about the same amount as an
album worth of seventy eight, so they called them albums. Yeah,
like one record, one vinyl record could hold probably five
or six UM shellac records worth. Yeah, so that's kind
of a boast. I guess this this one records an album,

(30:29):
you sucker. But now we get to UM. You know,
basically what Dave called the War of speeds. Uh. You
mentioned the UM seventy eights finally came down to thirty
three and the third. Uh So Columbia Records reduces the
first LP and UM and our Cia is who released
the forty five, which you know people collect forty five two.

(30:52):
They're the smaller ones that only have a song on
each side. It's like thick a single. Yeah, that's just
exactly what it is. So our c a victor in Columbia,
had that that war of the speeds that you mentioned
to try to say, you know, the thirty three LP
is um our p MLP is better. No, the forty
five RPM single is better, and the public just said

(31:13):
peace everyone piece, Well, let's let's have them all. Yeah.
I mean all you needed to do was have a
machine that can vary its playback speed, and you can't
have both. There didn't need to be one of the other.
And they they did realize that there are some people
who who just want the single version. Like I guess
since there's been music, there have been people that like singles.

(31:36):
I remember my first forty five? Do you remember what
yours was? I didn't collect forty five, so I actually
got into forty five. I was never a big time
into them, but I got into him because I just
wanted one single song. Uh. It was Sweet Georgia Brown
because my family had gone to a Globetrotters game and

(31:57):
I was like, I really like that song. So my
parents took me to Peaches Records and I got Sweet
George Brown, and I must have driven my family crazy
without realizing it played Sweet Georgia Brown over and over.
That's adorable. And then do you remember what your first
LP was? Absolutely Billy Joel's Glasshouses. Oh that's a good one.

(32:17):
How old were you? Well, it was whenever that came out.
I feel like I was tennish, but I'd have to
look at the date. My brother and I adorably split
the cost, so it was like five bucks and each
threw into fifty and got glass houses. That's awesome. Um
My first LP was seven in The Ragged Tiger, the

(32:38):
Duran Duran right, good record. Um, I think I got
it around second grade. I was always I think I
mentioned this too. I was always a late adopter, so
I was buying records long into the cassette run. I
was always like no, I didn't want to believe it.
It was like taking over. And then I was buying
cassettes far into c d s, and I was buying CDs.

(33:00):
I mean I have CDs that are four or five
years old. Wow, from now, I didn't even know you
could get those anymore. Yeah. Well the problem was to
have a probably older than that, because my pickup truck
that I will never sell is now just sort of
our work in camping truck. It has a CD player
in it, So yeah, I was buying CDs for that. Yeah,

(33:22):
I can see like not giving up the ghost because
number one, you're very loyal person, so I could see
you being loyal to records. And then also at the time,
you didn't know you were ever going to have a
choice again, so you were fighting against the death of
the LP vinyl record because that's what it seemed like
when cassettes and then CDs came out. Yeah, I have
no cassettes and in fact made my switch to CD

(33:44):
s because someone stole my one cassette carrier out of
my friends trunk of my car and little five points
when I went to a show at the Variety Playhouse
where you and I performed, yeah and sold out. If
I'm not mistaken, that's right. So they stole that and
I was like, all right, I guess I gotta buy
CDs now. So yeah, that's it for me, everybody, I'm

(34:07):
done with his sense. So one other thing that kind
of came out of vinyl records too, is because you
could put more information into one, they figured out how
to actually create stereo records starting in ninety and I
can't imagine what this must have seemed like to the
people back in ninety eight, because up to that point

(34:28):
everything was mono. It was one channel, so all of
the sound came through one channel, and you could have
two speakers, five speakers, ten speakers, it wouldn't matter because
they were all playing the exact same information, and it
didn't it just what You could just sit in front
of one speaker and get the same experience. With stereo,
you have two different channels coming out, usually right and left,

(34:50):
and rights going to the right speaker, less going to
the left speaker, and when you sit between them, you
don't get the sensation that the sound is coming out
of either speaker. It seems to be coming out of
the space between the speaker in front of you and
gives you this much more immersive, rich experience. And they
figured out how to do that on a vinyl record, which,
if you're talking about black magic to begin with, just

(35:12):
just for creating a record, creating a stereo record is
even more impressive if you ask me, Yeah, they did it.
They figured out how to etch the walls of the groove.
One side of the wall, the outside wall was the
right channel, the inside wall was the left and when
you play it back, that needle reads both sides at once.
The Beatles were one of the first Uh well, yeah,

(35:36):
I could safely say one of the first bands to
really experiment with stereo recording. And all of a sudden
you had like Paul in one ear, John and the
other singing harmonies. Um, and you know when headphones became
more and more the norm. This is when this really
paid dividends. Yeah, like Mitch Kramer listening to music in

(35:56):
his room at the end of the night and dazed
and confused that guy Wiley Wiggins works in podcasts some
Oh yeah, hey, Wiley Wiggins, how are you doing? I know.
I was listening to the Great Great podcast you must
remember this from Karina Longworth the movie podcast and at
the end of one of the episodes, actually sat through
the credits and it said additional research and transcription by

(36:18):
Wiley Wiggins. That's awesome, man, that's super cool. I don't
know if he's still doing that, but hello to both
of you. It's so um. I watched yeah for real,
I watched. Um have you ever seen Waking Life? Yeah? Yeah,
he started now that was he did creating that, but
also just in Days and Confused, He's always going to
be much Cramer to me. But I watched Days and

(36:40):
Confused the other day I was like, this movie still
holds up. And then I was like, there was no
reason for Matthew McConaughey to do any other character ever,
because everything he does is Waterson. Is Waterson in space
for Interstellar, it's Waterson, like as a lawyer and the
Lincoln lawyer. Like it just Waterson all the time. And

(37:02):
like you, if you go back and watch Stays and Confused,
you're like, yeah, he and Waterson are one and the
same person. Basically, it's Waterson selling Cadillacs or whatever that is,
which one doesn't he Is it Cadillacs or is it
Lincoln that he does the commercials for. Oh yeah, yeah,
Lincoln where he just drives around and waxes philosophical exactly. Totally.

(37:23):
I forgot about the ag campaign. That was all right,
it was alright, alright, alright, alright, well let's take our
final break and we're gonna come back and no doubt
stumble through how records are actually made. Right after this

(37:46):
that's watched, sk should know. Okay, record store guys, this
is the point where you can just leave us and
we'll say thank you for listening up to this point. Yeah,
I mean this is gonna be a little clumsy because

(38:08):
it's a little black magic e and it's um. They're
also made different ways depending on who's producing the record.
It's generally the same process, but uh, you know every
cook has their own recipe. Yeah, so the essential process,
I guess is you you it's ridiculously similar to what

(38:29):
Scott and Edison and Alexander Graham Bell were doing, which
is you basically put sound or music into some sort
of amplifying device, no longer an acoustic trumpet instead some
again amplifier that that makes a little needle wiggle. And

(38:49):
as that needle wiggles, it's etching that transcription of that
sound wave into a mechanical record of it. That's why
records are called records. It's a record of that sound ound.
And they do this with basically a turntable called the
cutting lathe. And that now I understand why they call
it cutting a record. I had no idea until I

(39:10):
guess yesterday, Um, why they call it that. Yes, Impressing
makes sense too, and it will in a second. But
it's just like this turntable, but it looks like a
turntable and like an industrial, an industrial turntable, and that's
exactly what it is. Yeah, it's just a a large machine. Uh.
The one that the video I saw was the one

(39:31):
in Nashville. I don't know if they're different chisels, but
they use an actual ruby gemstone chisel at their factory. Uh,
and that vibrating ruby chisel cuts that groove and a uh.
They still use lacquer, at least at this place, and
use a lacquer disc and this is called the mother disc. Um.

(39:52):
It's kind of cool. In the end you end up
with or you can end up with as much as
feet of groove lines, which is seven football fields. I
don't know how many big max. But if you took
like the lines of an LP, uh and I don't
I don't know if that's both sides or one side,
is that just one side, that would be seven football

(40:14):
fields long, which is pretty amazing. Okay, So so no,
for some reason, on the Shellac record, the mother record,
they fit way more information. And from what I saw,
I saw that an LP, the average LP like twenty
two minutes is like um about one and a half
football fields long. Really, that's what I saw. But I
saw what you were talking about in that video, and

(40:35):
I'm like, where's the distinction here? And I couldn't figure
it out. So anywhere between one and a half to
seven football fields that one groove. And by the way,
if you look at a record those grooves, that's one long,
concentric groove that you could stretch out as a single line.
Had never occurred to me. Did you realize that before? Yeah? Sure,

(40:55):
because where would it end? It's a spiral. I don't know.
I hadn't really thought it through. But that's a great
trivia question. Then you could get a lot of people
on how many grooves are on the average LP record
and the answers to one for each side. Yeah, although
what about the little space? I didn't really look up
how they did that, the little space between the songs.

(41:15):
It's still yes, but it must have just a blank.
There must not be any etchings in that groove. It's
still tell all the musicians like, shut up, Yeah, what's
it called room tone? Yeah? Room tone? And by the way,
this is this is how records are mass produced. Like
if you go to Third Man Records in Nashville, and

(41:36):
sit in the little booth like it literally cuts the
sound you make directly onto a record that you take home.
Yeah yeah, I think that guy that you me visited
head is on like you could if you have dollars
to spend to mess around with, like you can get
yourself a cutting life. But so you've got that mother
record that's made from shellac, you said, right, right, And

(41:56):
then they take that and they coat it with some
sort of metal. I don't know if it's platinum. I
think they said Nickel was involved, but they use electrolysis
and they make a negative of that record, so they
get the metal in all of the grooves. And when
they pop the metal off of that mother shellac record
they have they have the mirror no, yeah, a mirror

(42:16):
opposite image of it. Rather than grooves and and etchings
and valleys, it's bumps and ridges and mountains. And that's
what they use to press records from. Right. Yeah, that's
called the master stamp. Uh. And that master stamp can
make about a hundred thousand records. I think it is
Nickel or at least what they use it. This one

(42:38):
company that I saw, the largest one, uh, and that
will harden up into silver, and you peel it away
and then you kind of cut it and trim it
up so it's actually round. And then when you go
to press the actual vinyl, they dump and we'll get
to why they're black in a second, because that's super interesting.
But you get these black polyvinyl pellets, you melt them down,
uh in a hopper basically, and what plops out is

(43:02):
a little puck shaped like a little biscuit basically of vinyl. Uh.
You put the label on it because that helps center
things apparently, and then you have, you know, the one
side of the record on top and the other side
on the bottom these silver stamps and you apply about
sixty tons of pressure and it just squishes it out

(43:22):
and presses it into thin vinyl. Uh. If you think
it might be a little messy around the edges, you
were absolutely right. Um. They trim that off with a
machine so it's perfectly round, and that excess stuff is
called flash, and they actually just throw that back to
use later on it's recentled They re melt it right,
which is awesome. Totally. There are I saw I saw

(43:44):
people online who say that records made from that reused
flashing do not sound as good as other records. I'm like, dude, really,
yes on man, you need another a second hobby. It
doesn't just w record collection. And they didn't use the
word actually at all, right, no, not at all. They

(44:06):
were just daring you to say something. So um, so
that's it, like that's what, that's how one record is made.
And you said you can use one of those um
uh master uh negatives for a hundred thousand records. So
I guess they make a few of those and they
have a run and that's that you have your your
whole run of records created. Um. And you mentioned something

(44:27):
about records being black, like they don't have to be black.
I think I have at least one or two that
are colored um like red. Yeah, yeah, it is cool.
It's definitely different. But um black is the color of
choice for a couple of reasons. One PVC uh is
some is like a natural insulator, so static electricity can

(44:50):
build up in it, which is nay good because static
electricity attracts dust, and dust messes up your records. It
can cause them to skip and do all sorts of
terrible stuff. It can clug up your needle. Um. And
then so they add this stuff called carbon black. I
think half of a percent of your records material is
carbon black, and that actually makes it a little better
of a conductor, so it repels dust a little better. Yeah,

(45:13):
so that'll that'll help him. And apparently and I never
thought of this either, but you just you see dust
better on a black record. Uh, so you're you know,
you're more apt to keep your records cleaner probably, uh
And I never really noticed that. But yeah, on my
clear records, I can't see any dust. I have to say. Um,
some of the records that I have, I I got
from our buddy. Van Nostrin has always been very in

(45:37):
sending records that most people would not want to hear. Um,
Engelbert Humperdink I have thanks to him. Um, I've got
a one about Jimmy Carter, a comedy record, Um the
disco duck. But get this, there's no disco duck anywhere,
and it's just like a kind of a jazzy upbeat

(46:00):
um covers of disco songs without the duck. I don't
know where Van Nostrom found this, but it's pretty astounding.
Where the records that he comes up with in sinse
So thanks. I used to listen to comedy records going
up to as a kid, I would get George Carlin's
class Clown or how I and I'm still not good
at impressions, but how I got interested was the rich

(46:22):
little records The First Family Rides again, and you know,
it was a big thing, like comedy albums, And some
comedians today are are getting vinyl pressed of their specials
and stuff, which is kind of cool. It is cool
because those comedians are flushed with Netflix money, so all
of them can afford a fifty dollar cuttingly. So we
kind of explained, I think, in our own way, how

(46:43):
they're made. But then there's the black magic of actually
hearing these things. Uh, you sit around and look at
those grooves all day, but you wanted what you want
to do, get up and dance right pretty much, and
that's that, and that's records, um chuck. If you could
also afford not to to cutting lathe but an electron microscope, um,

(47:03):
you could do worse than putting a record underneath it,
because you would see some freaky stuff going on in
those grooves. That groove itself holds a bunch of different
little etchings and each sound has its own etching. In
this groove. And again these grooves are sometimes like an
eighth of a millimeter UM thick, like they've gotten way

(47:24):
thinner than when Peter Goldmark first invented vinyl records, and
they hold so much information that you can actually physically
see just like Um Edward ley On Scott of Martinville
Um saw himself on that class plate. If you look
really really closely through an electron microscope, you can see
the same thing, and you are literally looking at a

(47:45):
physical encoding of sound. The sound wave has been transferred
mechanically through that that ruby, um what do you call it,
the carving thing chisel onto a record. And now if
you put your record on your turntable, play it back
at the appropriate rotations per minute, very important, and you

(48:06):
put the arm down. What you're doing is you're putting
down a needle or a stylus that is a very
sensitive usually industrial gemstone like sapphire maybe ruby I saw
a diamond most most frequently, and that that actually reads
every single one of those little tiny squiggles in that
in those grooves from start to finish, and it retranslates

(48:29):
that mechanical encoding through to the cartridge, which translates that
into electricity, which creates an audible sound that has to
be amplified and run through speakers. And when you do
all that, you're listening to a record. That's right, And
I kind of compared it to a guitar pick up
if uh, which one do we explain that? And was
that in the les Paul, Yeah, it had to be.

(48:51):
But it's just sort of the same idea as a
guitar pickup. It's it uses copper wire and magnets um
to create this, you know, electric current, and in this
case it's induced at the same frequency as that little
needle wiggling through the grooves. And then you have to
obviously that you still don't hear anything unless you feed

(49:12):
that through an amplifier and then eventually speakers. If you
listen really closely, you can hear the faintest bit of it,
but it's nothing to dance to your right, um. Dave,
Dave helped us with us, right, this was a Dave jam.
It was Dave. So Dave kind of drove something home
for me when he talked about how the middle c
on a piano is um vibrates at an amplitude of

(49:36):
two hundred and sixty one point six three hurts, which
means that that it vibrates to create that sound that
middle cyano piano. It vibrates a two hundred and sixty
one point six three vibrations per second. That's just one
note on a piano, and that is encoded in a record.
When you play a middle C on a piano and
you capture it on a record. Um, you, that's just

(49:58):
one thing. Now consider all of the different notes, all
the different sounds, all the different instruments that are are
encoded onto a record, and it's there. Each one is
physically encoded in the right proper time, the right spot
on that groove in that record, playback on that particular RPM.
And when you start to put all this together and

(50:19):
realize how complicated it is, it really gives you an
appreciation for what's going on with vinyl and why people
love it so much. Yeah, I mean, it's it's sort
of easy to wrap your head around someone plucking a
piano string or loot rather hammering a piano string that
would be a harpsichord if it was plucked in a

(50:40):
middle C like ding ding ding ding, and how that
might be translated. But when you think about a groove
being cut that represents like guitar feedback from Jimmy Hendrix,
which is a sound, but it's not like a U.
It's not like you think of a familiar note being
plucked or something, or the sound of distorted guitar. It's
just it's amazing. It is black magic. I'm with you. So.

(51:04):
Um A lot of people chuck say vinyl is the
only way to go, and other people say take your
vinyl and shove it because digital music is the only
way to go. And there's apparently a pretty big argument
about all this. Yeah, I mean, you know, your vinyl
enthusiasts will say it has a warmer sound. Uh, they'll
say that's as close to the original way form as

(51:26):
you can get because it's directly from a master recording
and it's not digitized and compressed. Um I and Day
points out, and I fully agree that part of this.
You know, I'm sure there are audio files who have
an ear that can really differentiate, differentiate um sounds on
a really minute level. I'm not one of them. Um

(51:49):
So for me, part of it is the the ritual
of the record album. Aren't liner notes? Holding an album
and looking at it while you're playing it, Like all
the stuff that was Law Austwin records shrunk to cassettes
and you could still sort of do it then, and
you can kind of do it with CD cases and
liner notes. But the record was really like it was.

(52:10):
It was a part of the whole experience large format art.
But there are people who say that, you know, like
you said that digital gets rid of those pops and
clicks that a lot of people like from records. Um
it has a wider frequency range than vinyl does, so
it can hit the highs and the lows more accurately.

(52:30):
UM I mean, I like it all. I don't think
you have to choose. I don't think you have to
choose either. But um I I saw a really good
description of the difference between digital recordings and analog recordings,
which is what is meant to be captured on a record.
There was a guy, a recording engineer named Michael Connolly
who um said, Let's say that you want to measure

(52:52):
your height, and you stand next to a door jam,
and you put a pencil along the top of your
head and you mark the door jam. What you've just
done is created an analog of your height that mark
stands in for your height. Right. Another way you could
do it is stand still and hold the measuring tape
and then see what your height actually is. And then

(53:13):
you take that measurement and you transcribe it to another medium,
like you write it down in a notebook. And the
thing is is your analog is truer, it's more faithful
because it's an actual representation of your actual height. But um,
the measurement can be reproduced much more easily. You can
go from notebook to notebook and just write down that

(53:34):
same measurement every time without any loss of information. And
that's not true from that door jam pencil mark, because
let's say you move, you want to take a door
jam with you to remember how tall you were, and
you install it at your next house, it might not
be quite the same, you know, height off the floor
as it was before. So those are those pops and
clicks that get added into it when you reproduce a sound,

(53:57):
an analog sound, whereas with digital, yes, it's not the
entire waveform of the whole thing, it's measurements of it.
But it's such a mind boggling number of measurements with
a mind boggling amount of information that most people say,
not only can you not tell what's lost in a
digital recording, some people say digital recordings are actually better, right,

(54:18):
But to be clear, we are talking about a digital
recording as in a c D, which has about for
a little more than four kill a bits per second
UH worth of information, which is super high. UM. If
you're talking, you know, streaming something from a streaming service,
there is a difference, and you don't have to be

(54:39):
an audio file to tell UH it is a thinner sound.
It's ten ear UH. It is compressed down from the
CD size, which is a little over fourteen hundred two
between ninety and a hundred and sixty uh kill a
bits per second. So that's a lot of compression going on.
And Dave points out that you um like you're probably

(55:00):
playing that through like in a bluetooth speaker maybe or earbuds,
not very good quality. If you if you do think
the records sound better, it's probably because you're at your
audio file friend's house who collects records and who also
places it through a really high quality amplifier instead of speakers.
So you know the sound between the difference between that

(55:22):
and UH streaming something through a bluetooth speaker earbuds is
just nine and day. Yeah, because so that the the stamp,
the bit rate is just the number of measurements taken, right,
and measurements are not exact. It's the kind of a
snapshot of the thing. It's not the whole thing, like
a record is the whole sound wave. But I ran
across something, Chuck that just kind of puts the whole
argument to bed. And I noticed it in that video

(55:44):
you said about how records are made at that record
Um manufacturer in Nashville. Did you notice that they started
out with a digital file. Well, yeah, I mean yeah,
it was a pro tools file. It was so they
transferred a digital file onto a record. So the whole
difference for anything that's ever been put to a record

(56:06):
from a digital file is out the window. Your arguments
just totally moot because you started out with a digital file. Yeah,
but it's a huge digital file, but it's still digital,
which means it's not in precise representation of the exact same,
same thing. But other people say, well a records not neither.
There's just too many, too much room for air, it
can't possibly be precise. But I think you said it

(56:28):
you don't have to choose. Yeah, I agreed you got
anything else about Vinyl records because I could keep going. Man,
this is fun. Uh A little fun tidbit about my mom.
When she was little living in Memphis, Tennessee. She my
granddad took her into I think it was called the
Memphis Recording Studio that's pretty on the nose and recorded

(56:48):
her playing um, the clarinet or something and left with
a record and that later became Sun Records. So technically
my mom recorded where a wasp pressly recorded. That is
pretty amazing, man, I think that's true. That's a story
I got. I'm sticking to it. I think there's a
very charming story to end on Charles. So let's go

(57:09):
instead to listener mail. How about that? Ah? Yeah, this
is a quickie about de farting a lot after colonoscopies,
which we talked about the vine. Hey, guys, I am
Chuck the gastro and grology technician, huge fan of the
show and I don't think I missed a single episode.

(57:30):
I was regarding your different experiences after colonoscopies because I
was super farty and you don't remember being super party, right,
I was super high. That's right. Uh. Air is injected
during the procedure to purposefully distend the colon for a
better view of all the walls and easier passages to
the holy land. And it makes your hands puff up

(57:51):
like a cabbage patch kid, which everybody likes to see.
Some facilities use air, which will result in the fart party.
Some facilities use the more expensive carbon dioxide, which is
absorbed by your colon breathe out your lungs and results
in a more comfortable experience. This is a possible cause
for the difference between your experiences. You may still get

(58:13):
a little gassy after CEO two, um, but I can
assure you that recovery rooms in the CEO two facility
are not full of farts and is a more pleasant
experience for the patient in general. Did you go to
Bargain Bargain Barn Hospital for yours when cold to colon ascopes?
Are us spatulous city or the colon Barn? I guess

(58:35):
so it was pretty fun. I enjoyed the fart barn Um.
And this is from Chuck and he says, ps g
I is the best department butts in guts for the wind.
Nice nice work. Chuck. Nice work you two, Chuck. Uh.
Thanks man. If you want to be like Chuck, either
one well, no really, the one that just wrote in.
You can write into us too and send us an

(58:57):
email to Stuff Podcasts and i art radio dot com.
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