PUTTING IT DOWN ON RECORD

New Zealand Listener, Volume 3, Issue 78, 20 December 1940, Page 12

PUTTING IT DOWN ON RECORD

CBS Installs New Equipment

ITH the production depart- | ment of the Commercial | Broadcasting Service becoming busier every day, a correspondingly heavier strain is thrown on the equipment and on the technical staff which looks after the making of records. To cope with this demand for better quality in recording, the CBS has just installed new recording equipment and the results, it is claimed. are well up to the standard of overseas gramophone studios.

Making such equipment, one would imagine, would be about the most highly specialised job in radio, but New Zealand technicians are advanced in this work, and apart from one small item, the new equipment has all been made by the CBS itself. It was about six months ago, when the production department of the Commercial Service was started, that the first piece of equipment was installed at the head office studio in Wellington. This had been imported, and was more or less standard equipment for. broadcasting stations, the chief purpose to which it is usually put being the recording of "spot" news such as race results and overseas news. This original recording equipment was adapted to a purpose for which it had not been made, the recording of music. The results obtained were satisfactory, though a technician with a critical ear could detect its limited e. A Simple Principle "Range" in recording and general broadcasting is a subject which is obscured by such technicalities as "frequencies," "high fidelity" and so on. In principle, however, it is simple. In music, there are high and low notes which the human ear can easily detect

but which are lost in recording if the equipment used is not capable of registering them. A high fidelity radio, as any radio salesman will explain, is a set which is capable of reproducing the highest and lowest notes of broadcast music; similarly a high fidelity recording equipment is one capable of picking up and recording these highest and lowest notes. The equipment which is now in use at the CBS is high fidelity in the truest sense of the word, and already it is reproducing excellent fesults.. Its construction, the CBS chief engineer, Eric

Grainger, admits, is not as tremendously complicated as might be supposed. Making Copy Records In the near future a second recorder will be installed at head office. This will enable a programme to be recorded continuously, and will at the same time simplify the making of copy records. As is fairly generally known, the recordings miade at broadcasting studios differ from ordinary gramophone records in that they are cut on "acetates," which consist of a thin coating of cellulose acetate on a sheet of aluminium, whereas a gramophone record is pressed in large numbers from a single "master" record on wax. : The life of an "acetate" depends on the way it is handled, and the equipment (more particularly the weight of the pick-up) with which it is played. On an ordinary gramophone it would probably last no longer than two or three playings, Pick-up Equipment Pick-up equipment is another problem which is continually being studied by radio technicians, and here again the technical department of the CBS ig¢ keeping abreast of the latest develops ments. A good pick-up, as used in & (Continued on next page)

Putting It Down On Record (Continued from previous page) well constructed home radio gramophone, is usually of the crystal type. In broadcasting studios, however, the more expensive, more reliable, electromagnetic pick-up is used. Weight is the most important consideration. and it is this which conditions the life both of an ordinary gramophone record and of the more fragile acetate. The pick-up on an ordinary gramophone may weigh up to four and a-half ounces, as against the two ounces of ordinary studio equipment. CBS technicians are now developing a pickup which weighs only a few grammes. When duplicate recording equipment has been installed at the head office studios, a start will be made on equipment for all the ZB stations, and when that stage has been reached, the service will cut out the cost of transporting artists to Wellington.