Research Projects

Tuesday, January 10, 2012

Transcription Mystery Disc # 33

 This disc spins at an oddball 39 rpm with an outer edge start. How do I know it's 39 rpm?  Well for starters it's labeled that way and when I digitized it, the speed was clearly too slow at 33, and too fast at 45. So after some tweaking, my ear naturally found it about 10% faster than 33 rpm... so they were at least in the ballpark.
The Dixon Family


This Federal Perma Disk dates to October 14th 1945. Fred the engineer dutifully labeled both sides of the disc properly. He even left a note that the other side came out poorly so I knew not to bother with it. I the end I tried a few things with the audio and found a basic low pass filter to be the least offensive change. There was another minute of a small child named Marlene, warbling in the beginning that I tripped off, she was virtually inaudible with anything less than a harsh noise filter.  Still quite audible are Fred, Toots and Skipper. At the end "Daddy Dixon" thanks Fred for being the engineer. However, if Fred had recorded this at 45 rpm instead,  it would have sounded much better.

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