This likely will need to move somewhere, but have you guys seen this ?

http://great78.archive.org/discovery/

There is some fine material here for the SS Tran.

Enjoy

Thanks for sharing!

They seem to have left off my favorite genre of 78 - Delta and Piedmont blues from the 1920s and 30s.

Wow, that's a lot of great music and a great resource.

The ones I clicked on were in stereo. I'm not sure why they did that, since it makes the surface noise so much more pronounced.

My guess on the "stereo" mono recordings is that by doing it that way the recording will appear in BOTH speakers or headphones of modern sets used for listening. Glad you guys like the resource.

The reason for doing a recording in stereo is so that the mono music is in the
center while the ticks and pops are mostly in one or the other speaker.

This means that you can de-tick the music without losing anything.
Doing it by hand and drawing in your guess at the waveform in the tick-y track,
then converting stereo to mono really works great.

I did this to all the old 33's I had that were not yet available in re-releases at Arkivmusik.com
Its excruciatingly tedious.

In my experience transferring or playing mono records in mono eliminates more than half the noise. This happens for two reasons: there is no vertical musical component in the groove, and many clicks and pops are cancelled through anti-noise.

Here's an example of a VG- shellac 78 I did. Very little de-clicking was done, and no reverb was added:

https://app.box.com/shared/eo8zg1r21g

Here's an acoustically recorded record from about 1925:

https://app.box.com/shared/o7yutb08pg

I think that one sounds pretty good considering it's seen quite a bit of play on my Victrola IX.

Clevis: Thanks for posting. This site will keep me entertained for a while.

Ken, I'd be interested in knowing more about your equipment setup, like what cartridge, magnetic/ceramic, mono or stereo wired in parallel, are you using a preamp with variable settings?

I've been playing shellacs using the Shure M78S with fair results but through an RIAA preamp with fair results. Eventually I'd like to either build or buy a preamp with various EQ settings and a button for switching between mono/stereo and phase reversal (Edison diamond disks?). Do you think strapping a stereo cartridge to mono achieves the same result as a mono cartridge?

Nothing too fancy here. A stanton 500 stereo magnetic cartridge (discontinued) with a Pickering 1527 stylus (discontinued), an old Pickering outboard preamp, and a 20 band outboard equalizer simply set by ear. Yes, I know the RIAA preamp is not correct, but I believe that I pretty much make up for that with the equalizer. When doing mono records, I simply use a "Y" patch cord. I did these transfers quite a while ago with a very old version of Sound Forge on my old Windows 98 machine. Any de-clicking was done by hand with the pencil tool. My turntable has a switch for Edison Diamond discs. I seem to get the best sound out of Diamond discs by using the LP stylus.

I believe that a stereo magnetic cartridge strapped for mono plays just the same as a mono magnetic cartridge would.

I'm kind of in the same boat as far as equipment goes - nothing too special. I use Audacity instead of Sound Forge and I'm all too familiar with "hand drawing" the waveform to reduce clicks and pops. Works well but is very tedious. I've only done this on 33RPM vinyl. I'll probably never get around to doing this on shellac and may not even get around to digitizing them. I do have a 10 band per channel graphic EQ on one system but I don't use that system much anymore. I find adjusting 20 sliders to be a pain. I mostly use a Kenwood receiver I rebuilt a couple of years ago. I also purchased an older 5 band EQ to use for the 78's and plan on recapping it and adding an internal RIAA preamp possibly with other switchable curves for 78's. That is one of my projects for this winter. We will see....

I'll try the patch cord and see what happens. Nothing to lose. By LP stylus, do you mean .7mil stylus for the Diamond Disks?

Yes, either 0.7 or 1.0. seemed to work the best for me on the few Diamond discs I did.

Yes, it's a lot of work. I'd never attempt to transfer my entire record collection, just those that I want to play often.

And maybe they could record Mr. Boogie too I dont know if they did this already? Was it a B side?