early electric pick up 1928
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- čas přidán 10. 09. 2024
- A very early - 1928 - electric gramophone (phonograph) pick-up, made by the Acuston company, Berlin, Germany. Electric pickups for playing the new electrically recorded 78 discs (essentially, 1925 onwards) only started to become widespread in 1927. So this one is early in the field. The design is directly based upon the traditional mechanical (acoustic) gramophone sound box. Unfortunately the magnets are totally inactive, and the coils are open--circuit - it would be too big a job to conserve. Instead, we had the idea of temporarily adapting it by using a cheap ceramic piezo-electric transducer. It worked surprisingly well! A U.S. Oriole 78 of 'Slu Foot Lou' by Frank Marvin is used to demonstrate the pickup.
FANTASTIC! this gives Me a idea for a EDISON Diamond Disc pick up! Your videos are indeed very informative! Thank You Norman!
sorry I haven't been very communcative lately! But yes, try it on a Diamond disc - very interesting experiment!
What a fantastic concept. A brilliant use of a piezoelectric disc too! :)
Thank you so much for this video. You've inspired me. Over lockdown I've been building a hybrid electric amplified gramophone using a piezoelectric disk. Excitingly it's reversible, very odd hearing Red Hot Chillie Peppers coming from a gramophone .
Before this, some radio technicians turned microphones into pickups to improve broadcast of records.
I Have done this to Record a Record! It Works! Beautiful Idea! I got mine out of a Fire Alarm! A Car Alarm Piezoelectric Disc in My EDISON Diamond Disc works for Electrically Recording EDISON Record`s! I LOVE THIS!
Norman your a brilliant man, always enjoy your videos, thanks!
Ohh i really love the last song!!!
the tone from a piezo works with pressure, the magnetic coil works with vibrations from the needle bar, these tones are very different, I would have re-wound the coils for an authentic tone. good idea though !
Me: "Shot? You can totally rebuild those coils and it will work agai... OK, a piezo pickup is a better choice."
Those two broken coils look really similar to the ones you find in many prewar headphones, and in some telephones as well. Wouldn't a swap be possible to hear it work as it should ?
I've done some research on Frankie Wallace and "Slu Foot Sue." It's interesting, but ordinary people (of which you are not) would find it useless. Oriole Records (U.S.) was founded in 1921 and went out business in 1937. They were sold in McCrory's stores (a "five and dime" store). The fidelity was not very good. That's what it says on the internet. What is on the flip side of your record? I couldn't find anything on our old friend Frankie on this label.
There was a U.K. company also called Oriole. Founded in 1925 and went out of business in 1935. (There is a complicated history of Oriole. In your spare time you could look it up).
There is another label called Banner Records (U.S.) 1922 to 1938. The store that sold Banner was S.S. Kresge, another five and dime store. Frankie Wallace and "Slu Foot Sue" is on one side and the other has "Dustpan Blues," which is why I wanted to know what is on the flip side. I could not tell whether your recording was acoustic or electronic. It sounds acoustic. The lesser labels produced acoustic records throughout the 1920's. Just a side note, Banner and Oriole records were produced by the same pressing plant called Plaza Music.
Vacuum tubes were around then. It could have been electromagnetic pickup with the coil bias from the amplifiers.
Always a pleasure Norman!
As always, great video! Thank you so much for posting this!
You _could_ re-magnitize the dead permanent magnets.
PS a nice little tune - would be not at all expendable in my universe.
Good solution that works very well!
Norman. I was wondering if the distortion only is a matter of the piezo getting stretched too much and not being able to handle the vibrations freely ? It sounds like saturation more than a worn groove.
How about experimenting with soft tone needles ? Could that be a useful solution ?
The frequency range from the piezo is much wider than one would expect. It should cover the whole audible range and the funny thing with at least the original Rochelle Salt crystal pickups were, that the sensitivity falls with rising frequencies. It has more or less an inbuild equalizer mimicking the variety of 78's pre-EQ's reasonably well.
And judging from the sound of this piezo, it has the same capability. The bass is fine and the treble well dampened.
Cheers and Godspeed.
Hail Norman! Your videos are always too few and far between, but always worth waiting for. This one is no exception either and had me wondering just why this particular 9' 12" was so much briefer than usual. Your You Tube contributions are always informative without becoming too technical to understand... any chance of some more, please? Thank you for this one, at least!
I forget what is was, but I had a tiny, cheap floor-model electrical phono with a dead amp and a live crystal.... when I connected the pickup directly to a good-sized dynamic speaker, it produced plenty of volume for a big room ! Wish I had treated all those $1 yard-sale phonos better, but they're all gone now.
Hi Max. I must try that! A self-powered electric record player - h'mm... Thanks for writing.
I would assume Max that the loudspeaker that you attached the crystal pick up to had a fairly high to low impedance transformer attached.
Feeding such a high impedance device directly into a conventional 16-ohm speaker would hardly yield any audible sound whatsoever.
I am rather surprised that it worked so well even via a 5,000-ohm transformer. I would think that the bass end would be extremely low.
If you replace the needle with a bamboo skewer, it would probably make the signal a lot less hot.
Norman. Looking at your video I thought that the vibration could also be electrically captured using a conventional diaphragm, but being part of a carbon microphone. What do you think ?
An early ceramic cartridge...
Good Lord - yes it is! 8^) I have one or two 1930s arms with actual crystal pickups but I think none of them work - I will test them again. Many thanks, cheers, Norman,
Fantastic idea !!
Great stuff as ever, Norman
Wow! Needs a little damping by the sound of it, hence the buzz. Good though
I have a columbia music note reproducer, it rattles. You can hear that in my videos (the gasket is not dried out) I'm not really sure what to do with it. Any suggestions?
Not the best video to ask fot that but if the gaskets are new it might be that the diaphragm is bent/torn/etc, or that the bearings holding the needlebar are loose. You can open the soundbox and tune the needlebar alone (best without the diaphragm as they may bend very easily), and the close it back so that there is no sideways pressure on the diapgrahm. It that doesn't solve the rattling, well you might just be playing too worn a record.
Hi how can you buy the stereo head to record vinile thanks
Hi Norman, The sound is surprisingly well extended. Are you using any equalisation?
Hi Simon. No EQ - I don't know what the frequency response of a piezo-electric transducer is, but it gave plenty of output to feed into a line input (i.e.flat) on the amplifier. Cheers, Norman.
Sounds like it may be Tom Stacks, a popular vocalist of the 1920's.
Hi Monique. It does indeed sound rather like Tom Stacks - but am pretty sure it's acually Frank Marvin using the pseudonym Frankie Wallace. Don't ask me how I know! I used to play in a band, and the leader's favourite 1920s vocalist was Tom Stacks. He said, every time he heard Stacks, he had a vivid mental picture of a smiling guy, singing in a striped blazer, bow-tie askew, straw hat rather battered; he had a crooked, broken cigarette in one hand, and a glass of bourbon in the other. I though it was a great idea, but never tried it! 8^) Cheers, Norman.
@@bixanorak Thank you so much for responding and informing me about Frank Marvin. The history of recorded sound is fascinating, I tell you. I love gathering vintage discs myself, a hobby of which I will never tire. Keep up the good work!
@@bixanorak Many thanks for answering, Norman. And- keep collecting!
You and your demon! What a fun experiment, Mr Field :-)
Great job my friend!
Hola soy colombiano me guata esto de gravar mis discos pero estoy gaciendo un oroyecto de gravar pero me grava con bastante ruido yo quisiera saber de que material es la aguja para gravar un profecional como tu quisiera que me dieras tu opinion la necesito gracias
Silly idea? Not at all Norman. I’ll wager that your conversation from magnetic to crystal resulted in a pickup that was much better sounding than the original when it was new. Perhaps more important, your experiment gave me a brainwave.
How would one of these piezo discs perform as a replacement for the usual mica or copper diaphragm used in the reproducer of a cylinder record machine? They appear not too far removed in diameter from the diaphragm used in Edison model B, C, E and K reproducers.
Could this one not be a relatively cheap and easy method of creating an electrical pickup for cylinder records? It could conceivably provide better results than sticking a microphone in front of a Phonograph horn.
What do you reckon?
Great!
Very nice.....can we take the risc of playing a 33 rpm LP on it or meant for only 78?
That is a very interesting question, Sourav. In theory, it should be perfectly possible to play microgroove 33/45 discs, provided that the stylus was the correct small size, and the playing weight was only 3 or 4 grams. But is would be very risky, and should only be tried on expendable discs. Actually, in the 1950s/60s, crystal (piezo-electric) pick-up cartridges were in normal use! The BSR TC8, the Garrard GC- series, the Sonotone 9TA series... you may still find these in old junk equipment - but new ones are rare & expensive on ebay. Best regards, Norman.
Very good sound! But i think that the original design non used magnets. Fixed magnetic field may be created by direct current, added to coils by resistor or inductor.
love this .... wonder how a cactus or soft tone needle would work ?
Ahh.. well, in this case it would work pretty much as a steel needle, but of softer tone. Needles(s) to say, a thorn (cactus) needle wouldn't work at all in an early electromagnetic pickup. There's an anecdote from the 1930s about a keen young Gramophone Society member who set up the electtrical equipment for a record recital, and at the last minute decided to use thorn needles for a sweeter tone. But he did not have a chance to try it out before the presenter arrived. Naturally, no sound emerged and consternation reigned until some expert present solved the mystery! All the best to you& yours! Cheers, Norman.
thanks 4 the very imformative info, best @@bixanorak
this pickup could simply be re-wound using formvar 42 swg. Wax potting will protect t from future microphonics.
excellent
Many thanks, Greg. There's more in the pipeline - for instance, playing back radio through 1920s/early 30s loudspeakers. Are they any good? Are they still in working order &c. Cheers, Norman.
You could also reverse the idea using the piezo disc and make yourself some high impedance headphones suitable for crystal sets.
Reminds me of electric guitar pickups. With a string instead of a cantilever, resonating in front of the element to alter the magnetic field.
Btw, piezoelectric elements aren't new at all.
Hi, & thanks for writing. Yes - of course, early electric guitar pickups were electromagnetic. As you say, the Piezo-electric effect was first recorded by the Curie brothers around 1880-2. Another breakthrough was the use of quartz crystals for radio frequency oscillators - usually credited to the U.S. around 1923/24. Cheers, Norman.
@@bixanorak From my collection, also piezoelectric cartridges for music playback where invented long ago.
But probably not by making it the way you did. Very nice implementation you did there!
I have a Ford Model T Pickup from 1925 that I converted to electric.
Where did you get your T-shirt? I've got to have one.
Hi there. Thanks for writing, & glad you liked the video. As for the T-shirt, it came from www.bixfest.com/ when I went there in 2005, IIRC. The BIXFEST, an annual event to commemorate the life of jazz cornetist Bix Beiderbecke (died 1931), has been running for over 30 years & is organized by Phil Pospychala. It's usually in Racine, Wisconsin, in early March, which was Bix's Birthdate. There probably aren't any more of this T-shirt available; but if you go to www.bixfest.com/ , you might ask Phil if he has the odd one left over. He'd be delighted to hear from you, I'm sure. And, as you'll see from the website, if you actually go to a Bix Bash in Wisconsin, you'll never be the same again. I went two or three times, and look what's happened to me! Fare Well, dear chap - but don't forget, I did warn you! Cheers, Norman.
@@bixanorak Thanks. I'll check it out.
Thank you so much for this, I had a plan to do something similar with a broken sound box I wanted to convert to an electric pick up. I'm so glad to see it's possible. I'm assuming you had to connect the piezoelectric disc to a microphone amplifier module before plugging it into the amplifier?
Hi there & thanks for writing. These transducers have a suprisingly large output - in fact, it should easily drive a line input on an amplifier! Good luck - cheers, Norman.