FAMILIARITY OUTLOOK

NZ Truth, Issue 1301, 20 November 1930, Page 11

FAMILIARITY OUTLOOK

But There Are Real Thrills In ■ - i ','.''.': Making of Records

COLUMBIA FACTORY WONDERS

We are a blase people. We have so many wonders to extol that as a rule we accept everything that is offering and ask no questions. Our attitude to sensations and new scientific wonders has become passive through a succession of inventions and disr coveries. The gramophone record, for instance, one of the outstanding inventions of all time, is bought by the million and with hardly a thought for the amazing processes through which it passes before it reaches its final perfect and simple state. '

YET those manufacturing processes . would keep a layman thri-lled for days on end. The very contemplatidn of the fact that an abstract, elusive thing like sound can be caught, and through man's material' inventions produced millions and millions of times through successive years, stirs the imagination. "But■that"is Wie amazing thing that is done m the great Columbia factory m Sydney, where thousands upon thousands of records are made each month, and where exclusive" processes not only record sound, but eliminate extraneous sound such as surface scratch, and distortion, giving the record its final quality as an entirely faithful recording of the original music or speech. The process of making a record starts, of course, m the recording studio where the carefully ' selected artists do their numbers, and the spund is transmitted through a delicate

still wear twice as long as ordinary ones., In making-, a record for sale, the material is adeptly placed between the highly finished matrices and subjected to hydraulic pressure of 3000 lbs. per square inch. This pressure forces the material into thousands of minute undulations forming the sound wa^. es- / . /he first pressing of every selection m the Columbia factory is submitted to .exhaustive tests by Columbia musical experts, so that the slightest semblance of faulty recording involves the rejection of the master record and another performance is necessary, The accepted records are passed «n to skilled workmen called "edgers," who put a smooth, bright finish on the edge of the record, Special machines' impart the high polish to the surface and the finished records are placed m their bags without further handling.