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Essentials in
History
Preserving The Sound: from wax to light in 100 years
Barbershop was part of the beginning of recorded sound.
Updated: 5/16/2003 3:12:00 PM
By Ruth Blazina-Joyce, Museum Curator/Archivist
Though male close harmony quartets were singing well before the birth of the recording industry, it’s interesting to reflect that the “golden age of barbershop harmony” coincided with the industry’s beginnings. The success of quartets as popular entertainment led to their early involvement in the new media. Close harmony has been recorded on every new development in the field, from the first wax cylinders to the latest compact discs.
Wax cylinders and shellac discs
In 1877, French scientist Charles Cros, as part of a larger experiment, invented a way to make a visual record of sound waves. In his device, the sound waves activated a diaphragm, causing a stylus to etch a rotating disc covered with lampblack. American inventor Thomas Edison knew of Cros’ work, and began his own series of experiments based on Cros’ “phonautograph.” Edison eventually decided that using a rotating cylinder, rather than a rotating disc, would give better results. He began work with a tin-foil cylinder, with the stylus moving in an up-and-down motion to make a vertical cut as the cylinder rotated below it. But the cylinders could only be played back a few times. This limited their commercial success as a dictating device for businessmen, and Edison shelved the idea.
C. A. Bell and Charles Tainter, two researchers for the Volta Laboratory in Washington, D. C., took up the idea and in 1885 developed a wax-coated cardboard cylinder, which featured improved sound quality and greater durability. Competition reawakened Edison’s interest. He went to work on a solid wax cylinder (actually wax mixed with filler, pigment, and stabilizers) which proved to be more stable than the cardboard version.
At first, Edison produced cylinders for business machines. His first musical cylinders went into talking dolls and amusement arcade coin-slot players. But Edison’s company was soon making musical cylinders for the home market. By 1890, three broad classes of music were available: Bands, Instrumental Solos, and Vocal Quartettes. Close harmony fans can note with pride that the Vocal Quartette cylinders commanded the highest prices, at $1.20 each.
Edison continued to improve the quality of his cylinders, spurred on by new developments in disc recording. Amberol cylinders appeared in 1908. These featured a smoother playing surface and doubled the playing time to four minutes. In 1912, Edison replaced these with Blue Amberols. The Blue Amberols were the crowning achievement of cylinder technology; they outperformed any other sound recording medium then in existence.
Much of this was due to the cylindrical shape itself. With a disc, sound became more and more distorted the longer the record played, because the groove velocity continually decreased the closer the stylus got to the center of the record. But with a cylinder, the velocity remained constant from beginning to end. This, coupled with the Blue Amberols’ smooth, hard, plastic-like surface and the use of a polished diamond stylus for playback, gave them a superior sound.
Meanwhile, Emile Berliner was continuing to work with discs. By 1897, he settled on using the stylus to make a side-to-side cut on a shellac disc (again, the shellac was actually a compound that also included fillers, pigments, lubricants, modifiers, and binders). The Columbia company brought out laminated discs in 1906. These consisted of a shellac coating over a kraft paper core. Edison also produced discs, and many of the Diamond Discs—a very high quality laminated disc—were re-releases of his cylinder catalog.
Competition between discs and cylinders raged throughout the early 1900s. Though the cylinders delivered better sound quality, discs often featured more popular artists with a higher level of artistic performance. With their greater convenience, and backed by shrewd marketing tactics, discs ultimately won the day.
Inside the studio
During these early years of the recording industry, artists worked freely for competing companies. Vocalists often sang in several quartets, using a different stage name for each “career.” The quartets themselves often released songs for Edison, Victor, and Columbia under assorted aliases. Turnover in membership was common as quartets formed and reformed, merged, split, spun off new combinations, and faded from the scene.
Up until 1925, all recordings, whether disc or cylinder, were produced acoustically. The physical force of the sound waves themselves, created by the quartet’s singing, was concentrated by a horn-like device and converted into a mechanical vibration by a diaphragm, which in turn drove a stylus that cut grooves into a master disc or cylinder.
To make one of these early recordings, a quartet was ushered into a bare room—the recording studio. A horn protruded through one wall, attached to the actual recording equipment which was set up on the other side of the wall in an adjacent room. Standing about 12 inches away from the horn, the quartet started singing. They stood as still as possible, because at that range the horn picked up every deep breath, cough, and shuffle. They leaned back on the very high or loud tones so that they wouldn’t blast the groove with the power of their sound, but ironically, the horn absorbed so much sound that they often had trouble hearing themselves sing. On songs with accompaniment (a common feature of the close harmony style of the time) they were often drowned out by the orchestra, playing in tiers behind them.
After several practice recordings, the quartet made three “perfect” masters. Each recording was examined under a microscope to check for broken or irregular grooves, which would render the recording worthless. But even the best masters were only good for a limited number of reproductions. It wasn’t uncommon for a quartet to spend an entire day in the studio singing a handful of popular songs over and over, making master after master.
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