THE GRAMOPHONE STAGES A COMEBACK

New Zealand Listener, Volume 2, Issue 34, 16 February 1940, Page 15

THE GRAMOPHONE STAGES A COMEBACK

(BY

RONALD

McINTOSH

gramophone industry a blow that almost killed it. It was not human nature to continue getting out of a comfortable chair by a warm fire every four minutes to change the record when the radio announcer would do the same thing for you — and select the programme as well. The variety of records in the libraries of the broadcasting stations and the greater fidelity and range of the electrically-produced music made even the confirmed gramophone addict turn eventually from the harsher mechanical reproduction of his instrument. For a while it looked as if the gramophone was as dead as the crinoline and the bustle. But the age of miracles is not past. The crinoline and the bustle live again, and now the gramophone, stripped of its former disadvantages, is making a determined bid for its former place in the entertainment world. Fy 30 dealt the Pocket Operas The entire opera of Aida, for example, can be comfortably carried in a man’s pocket in the new style of recordings, and the instrument will play for an hour or longer, in tones as dulcet and faithful as the wide-range radio set, without any attention from the operator. There is no needle stratth in the new gramophone, for a beam of light is used in place of the needle. The name of the machine is the Cell-o-Phone, because it utilises the photo-electric cell, and its owes its invention to the principle employed in London’s famous talking clock.

The instrument works in very much the same way as the soundsystem of the talking film. When we speak or play music, waves or vibrations are set up in the atmosphere. These waves depend for the size and shape upon the nature of the original sounds, and radiate in all directions like egpanding soap bubbles. When picked up by a microphone, these waves are translated into similarly varied waves or electric impulses, which are made to oscillate mirrors throwing light upon a sensitive moving film. Consequently the image of the light on the film makes a zig-zag track similar te that visible alongside the pictures in the modern film. The ribbons, which are wound on reels, are only a fifth of an inch wide. Reverse Process The _ reproducing instrument simply reverses the process. The sound track film, with its varying black and white shapes, is unwound in front of a powerful lamp, so that the continually varying sound records pass through the track and play upon a sensitive photo-electric cell. The light is translated by this cell into its original electric impulses, which are then amplified exactly as in the radio set, and radiated as sound waves from a loud-speaker. The old gramophones will never be resurrected from the spare room by this invention, but if you dislike the trouble involved in playing the old gramophone, buy one of these new machines and play the records you want to hear.