[HN Gopher] How the Internet Archive digitizes 78rpm records
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How the Internet Archive digitizes 78rpm records
Author : quercusa
Score : 128 points
Date : 2021-04-26 13:55 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| marcodiego wrote:
| 4 styluses... Why not a laser reader[0]?
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_turntable
| whanamura wrote:
| Ok, I turned to the expert himself, George Blood, who
| responded: "laser turntables are designed to play 33rpm discs.
| Most will not spin at 78rpm. There is broad agreement they do
| not sound as good as stylus playback. I.R.E.N.E.
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRENE_(technology)) captures the
| disc as an image, then transforms that into sound. It is not
| way slower than real time, and while it is arguable that the
| resolution of the image is superior to stylus playback, the
| software is not yet able to produce results as good as stylus
| playback. And it introduces it's own, idiomatic noise spectrum.
| On the other hand it is far and away the best system for
| 'playing' damaged or compromised discs, such as lacquers that
| are beginning to delaminate."
| whanamura wrote:
| I work with the Internet Archive, and asked George Blood about
| the wear and tear using a stylus. Here's what he had to say:
| "LPs are soft and played with a very small diamond. 78s are
| made from shellac which is hard and abrasive. Originally they
| were played with steel needles at 10x the tracking weight used
| by our modern equipment. They also use a much larger diamond
| with 5-10x the surface area. The tracking force is spread over
| a larger area than vinyl playback. The contact pressure is less
| than 10% of vinyl playback. "
| meatsock wrote:
| laser readers are worse than using a needle because you can't
| rely on the laser to push dust & detritus out of the way nor to
| ignore smaller faults that would not even register using a
| stylus, so the recording ends up requiring more noise reduction
| and attention than using bog standard low price styli.
|
| previous discussion:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14964384
| mixologic wrote:
| Fascinating that we have so much history recorded on what started
| as insect secretions (shellac).
| kingsuper20 wrote:
| Very cool. It's the kind of volunteer gig I could see being
| involved in.
|
| Thinking back on the records I remember looking at in record
| stores back in the day, and how few of them made it to CD or
| streaming services, hopefully the 33 1/3 world has a big back-up
| effort. One huge problem I can see is the collision between
| archiving/access and copyright.
| BugsJustFindMe wrote:
| I'm a little surprised to learn that they use normal styluses
| instead of reading the grooves optically.
| jandrese wrote:
| More than that, they use 4 different styluses and let you
| choose which one you think sounds best for a particular record.
|
| I think it's kind of sad that this is a purely volunteer effort
| and not an official effort of the Library of Congress.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| I'm on the opposite side; I think it's an amazing example of
| private actin for a public service.
| jandrese wrote:
| I'm annoyed that it is necessary though, as the official
| institution who is tasked with preserving recorded works is
| failing to do their job.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| I'm not. I think the LoC is a single point of failure for
| curation. No single institution is going to preserve
| everything, so having multiple institutions, public and
| private, is far better than relying on a single public
| institution to get things right.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| I would encourage you to contact the LoC to express your
| dismay and your desire to see them improve:
|
| https://www.loc.gov/contact/
|
| You will want to address your correspondence to Carla
| Hayden, the current Librarian of the LoC.
| Denvercoder9 wrote:
| I expect it's better to contact your member of Congress
| to request a budget increase for the LoC. According to
| Wikipedia, the LoC has only a $6-$8 million/year budget
| for digitization.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| That is also a necessary effort, and I appreciate you
| pointing it out. My apologies for not enumerating in my
| above comment.
| whanamura wrote:
| Here's what George Blood, the digitizer, reports: "laser
| turntables are designed to play 33rpm discs. Most will not spin
| at 78rpm. There is broad agreement they do not sound as good as
| stylus playback. I.R.E.N.E.
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRENE_(technology)) captures the
| disc as an image, then transforms that into sound. It is not
| way slower than real time, and while it is arguable that the
| resolution of the image is superior to stylus playback, the
| software is not yet able to produce results as good as stylus
| playback. And it introduces it's own, idiomatic noise spectrum.
| On the other hand it is far and away the best system for
| 'playing' damaged or compromised discs, such as lacquers that
| are beginning to delaminate."
| whanamura wrote:
| Here's what George Blood, the IA digitization expert, said:
| "LPs are soft and played with a very small diamond. 78s are
| made from shellac which is hard and abrasive. Originally they
| were played with steel needles at 10x the tracking weight used
| by our modern equipment. They also use a much larger diamond
| with 5-10x the surface area. The tracking force is spread over
| a larger area than vinyl playback. The contact pressure is less
| than 10% of vinyl playback. "
| MarkusWandel wrote:
| These are not "normal styli" at least not for the old shellac
| records. It was very educational to watch this Techmoan video -
| https://youtu.be/AYn7aZZBMRA - and learn that the original
| shellac records were harder than the steel styli; these wore
| down in one or two playings and so were bought in bulk, and the
| tracking force was on the order of 100 grams.
|
| Why does this matter? Because it probably keeps down the fine
| high-frequency crackle from very minor dust and surface
| imperfections. But I can see that you wouldn't subject a
| precious antique 78 to that kind of playback these days.
| myrandomcomment wrote:
| Any dirt in the grooves screwed up the playback in the case of
| using a laser. Remember the pits that are read on CD/DVD are
| under a clear coating and cannot get dirt in them.
| jandrese wrote:
| They do thoroughly clean each record before it is played.
| johnklos wrote:
| It's amazing to see how much care and work is put in to efforts
| like these by people who clearly care about what they're doing.
|
| If corporate America had their way, those records would have had
| DRM, there'd have been half a dozen different formats, and they'd
| have stopped working after twenty years.
|
| A silly example, but looking at how records are preserved today,
| then imagining how media of today might be preserved for a
| century from now, should be something we think about when we're
| choosing what to buy, yet most people keep buying from companies
| that just disable our media whenever it benefits them.
| syoc wrote:
| This made me remember what happened with what.cd. Never had an
| account myself, but I feel like we truly have failed to a
| common, lasting, platform for storing arbitrary data.
|
| bittorrent was ahead of it's time, the tech is IMO really cool.
| It is just too bad that it does not really make anyone rich and
| thus cannot be accepted.
| MrDOS wrote:
| https://archive.org/details/whatcdcrawl
|
| Although I doubt there's anything in there that isn't also in
| the Goodbye Release:
|
| https://twitter.com/whatcd/status/923941782253121539
|
| > I feel like we truly have failed to a common, lasting,
| platform for storing arbitrary data.
|
| As wonderful as What.CD was, and as much of a void as it
| left, it wasn't that. I'm increasingly convinced that any
| general purpose metadata store is going to be insufficiently
| granular for true specialists, while conversely, most
| specialist metadata stores are going to be overwhelming for a
| casual user. For example, What.CD's most successful successor
| has not one, not two, not seven, but _forty-two_ different
| releases of Wish You Were Here. And even that is a small
| portion of the 768 versions listed on Discogs[0].
|
| But does a casual user even care? Hell no. They'll keep
| listening to the CD they got at Wal-Mart some time in the
| mid-'90s, happily, and none the wiser. This only becomes a
| problem when, eventually, there _is_ something that casual
| user _does_ care deeply about - model trains, or Funko Pop!
| figures - but they 're turned off (or banned) from
| contributing the site because they got in a flame war with a
| moderator over the omission of one particular re-release of
| Star Wars: Episode V. Uber-metadata sites are either
| insufficiently granular (see: Wikipedia), insufficiently
| well-curated (see: Internet Archive), or inaccessible (in
| both meanings of the word; see: the hypothetical combination
| of all specialist, private filesharing sites).
|
| [0]: https://www.discogs.com/Pink-Floyd-Wish-You-Were-
| Here/master...
| mikece wrote:
| I thought there was something in the early 2000s that used a
| laser (an array of them, actually) to map the grooves on a vinyl
| (or wax) record with perfect precision that allowed for the
| virtual audio processing of the record in higher quality than any
| physical stylus or pre-amp system could deliver. (There was also
| the side-benefit that the reading process didn't involve physical
| wear on the record or cylinder to optically record the grooves.)
|
| Also, not being a vinyl expert, I would like to learn more about
| the different types of stylus and how that affects playback...
| does anyone have any links?
| hausen wrote:
| There is such a laser record player, which costs $15k [1] and
| can only play black vinyl records [2].
|
| [1] https://diffuser.fm/laser-turntable/ [2]
| https://www.theabsolutesound.com/articles/elp-lt-1lrc-laser-...
| whanamura wrote:
| Here's what our digitization expert, George Blood, has to say:
| LPs are soft and played with a very small diamond. 78s are made
| from shellac which is hard and abrasive. Originally they were
| played with steel needles at 10x the tracking weight used by
| our modern equipment. They also use a much larger diamond with
| 5-10x the surface area. The tracking force is spread over a
| larger area than vinyl playback. The contact pressure is less
| than 10% of vinyl playback.
| betamaxthetape wrote:
| Optical turntables have major issues with dust and dirt. The
| records need to be extensively cleaned prior to being played
| [1], even for unplayed "virgin" vinyl. 78rpm (shellac) records
| are older than vinyl records, and tend to have more dust /
| dirt, so would require a lot of cleaning prior to archiving.
|
| Although the more expensive of the optical turntables (the LT-
| master) has 78rpm capabilities, such capabilities are optional
| even on this high-end version.
|
| I think it's basically down to costs - the costs of cleaning
| each record (I know they're cleaned already, but the process
| may need to be more involved to remove all dust), along with
| the tens-of-thousands for the player, probably don't make this
| economical on the scale the Internet Archive are looking for.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_turntable#Performance
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I suspect you really in fact do want to record the audio as it
| was intended to be played back. With the mass of the tone arm,
| the tracking and such as the tone arm swings closer to the
| inner radius of the disc, the RIAA equalization....
|
| Seems if you strictly are extracting the topography of the
| record ... good for printing a new one, but would require all
| kinds of simulation to playback accurately?
| nosmokewhereiam wrote:
| Someone here have some stellar techno LP's to upload? Might be
| the first.
| betamaxthetape wrote:
| It's worth noting that the Internet Archive are always on the
| lookout for more records to digitize, so if you (or someone you
| know) has a collection and wants to see them go to a good home
| where they'll be preserved, you can donate them [1] to the
| Internet Archive (they also take 33/45rpm records, books, CDs,
| etc...).
|
| (I'm not affiliated with the Internet Archive)
|
| [1] https://help.archive.org/hc/en-
| us/articles/360017876312-How-...
| prometheus76 wrote:
| I don't know why I didn't think to check into this sooner, but
| I inherited my grandfather's record collection that is >5,000
| records, and I just couldn't bear donating it to some random
| thrift store, and I knew that selling them would just mean
| someone picking through the collection and leaving the dregs.
| This is a solution that I've been looking for. I do listen to
| some of the records, and I enjoy it, but I don't have time to
| digitize the whole collection, but this is actually a better
| solution, because now other people will be able to enjoy my
| grandfather's collection besides my family.
| whanamura wrote:
| We'd love to work with you on a donation! Here's how to get
| the process started. https://help.archive.org/hc/en-
| us/articles/360017876312-How-...
| textfiles wrote:
| Hi, Jason Scott at Internet Archive. Let's talk.
| Jason@textfiles.com
| textfiles wrote:
| Update: We're talkiing
| phoe-krk wrote:
| This is the kind of updates that I really enjoy seeing.
| :D Thank you for your work, and thanks to prometheus76
| for offering his collection!
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Truly, this was the internet I was promised -- or at least
| hoped for -- decades ago when it began.
|
| Somehow I imagined the internet as a giant library -- the
| Library of Alexandria for the modern age. The Encyclopedia
| Galatica.
|
| Others thought it might better be the world's largest catalog.
| The Sky Mall.
|
| I've personally scanned and cleaned up many old children's
| science-related documents and uploaded them to the Internet
| Archive.
| Forge36 wrote:
| Are they digitizing cylinders?
| betamaxthetape wrote:
| I believe so. At least, they accept donations of wax cylinders.
|
| https://help.archive.org/hc/en-us/articles/360017876312-How-...
| mchanson wrote:
| I just donated to the internet archive. I had not before and they
| keep doing such great work.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| Records from this era (1898-1950s) had at least 2 different
| groove widths. If the playback stylus is thicker than the groove,
| the record is damaged. This is what has prevented me from
| listening to my great-grandparents' collection. Every time I go
| to purchase 78 RPM styli, I'm dumbfounded at the options and
| don't know which stylus to use for each record.
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