Vinyl Preservation Act 2: The Flat Disc

In the fall of 2000, Vivendi, a French water company in search of copyrighted material for its Canal Plus holding, purchased struggling Universal PolyGram from Seagrams, a Montreal-based distillery that had a license to print money in its traditional business, which had gone badly astray with the acquisition of Universal, and then made things worse when it purchased PolyGram from Philips, which had bought out its partner Siemens, some years previously. Philips had lost money for years with PolyGram, but it could easily afford to do so. It was only the ego of then Seagrams favorite son that saw the purchase. For Philips it was a release from a burden that had begun in 1933, when that company began to manufacture gramophone records to sell with its mainstay business, the hardware, the gramophone itself, which Philips had started to manufacture, along with radio sets, in the 1920's.

The very first sound transcription device, invented by Thomas Edison in 1877 was the phonograph, a cylindrical wax-tin foil device that required that a wheel attached to the cylinder be turned at a precise rate, both during the recording, and during playback. Although capable of a modest fidelity, the cylinders were good for only a few plays, and often only one play before the grooves became unplayable. Also, since there was no way to duplicate a cylinder, each was a one-off proposition and the cylinders were not surprisingly, expensive to purchase.

MP3 to play: - Circus Melodie - 1906 78rpm acoustic recording

Within ten years, Emile Berliner, a Montreal resident, patented a recording system that is still very much in use today, based on a flat disc, the gram-o-phone. All of the geometry of the modern turntable could be found in Berliner's design, including the cantilevered tone arm that was balanced to trace the flat disc, or record, and the skating necessary to cause the grooves to be traced in a neutral manner was all part of the original concept. Other initial designs that resemble the phonograph were merely gramophones that had been designed to use the same mechanical drive system, gear actuated to spin the platter which was offset at an angle of about 20 degrees to permit gravity to control the motion of the tonearm. These designs were interim, and commercialized gramophones all had horizontally mounted platters and a counterweighted arm.

The first records were made out of a combination of bitumen and an early plasticizer (phenolic) that yielded a record that could be mass-reproduced inexpensively. The finished product, called bakelite, met the most important critera of duplication: The substrate could be heated and molded, or pressed into a shape that closely reproduced the master, and could be played many times. By the 1930's a move was under way toward superior thermosetting plastics, called thermoplastics. The best material of all, PVC, or vinyl, became the predominant substrate of choice for record manufacturing, as its grooves were softer, and vinyl had a 'memory' of its groove shape that allowed a record to provide better fidelity over many plays. Bakelite records, for all their longevity, would lose some fidelity with each play.

Because a flat disc could be pressed, it was possible to reproduce large numbers of records from a single recording, something that couldn't be done with the Edison system. One can only wonder what Edison thought about when he held a record in his hand. I suppose he knew that he was looking at the superior design.

These innovations were a key to the success of the sound carrier.

In Montreal, Berliner went about manufacturing records in a facility in Lachine Quebec, The Victor Talking Machine, or Gram-O-Phone Company, which would later become RCA's pressing plant. RCA was Berliner's first licensee and it would later buy out the Gram-O-Phone company. Having secured patent protection, Berliner set his two brothers up in the business. One went to England, where he started The Gramophone Company. The second brother went to Germany, where he established Deutsche Grammophon in 1898. The Gramophone Company, also established in 1898, became EMI when it combined with Columbia Gramophone in 1931. Deutsche Grammophon exists today as the premium classical label for Universal.

Over the course of years, the company that Berliner began grew to became the largest music company in the world, this reinforced when two giants, Philips and Siemens decided to consolidate their music businesses into one. The German Polydor and the Dutch Phonogram became PolyGram. The 1962 amalgamation took place at a time when there was a great incentive to combine operations. A separate business, Decca in England, was going bankrupt, of all things, due to its inability to keep up with its own successes using a manual accounting system. Philips began using computers in 1964 to track royalty payments (something that Decca had trouble with) but quickly decided that all of the functions of its business could be measured by the royalty tracking system, and soon every movement of a record was tracked from production requests (album cover art, etc.) to manufacturing, distribution, proof of delivery, and the number of returns from retailers, and the reason for a return. It was only natural for Phonogram to acquire Decca in 1967, as Philips had formed a strong co-operative relationship with that company when it purchased the struggling Dutch based Decca licensee in 1942.

Montreal continues to feed into the PolyGram story, for it was here that all of these computer systems were developed. The Montreal office had two distinct systems departments, one for its existing operating system, the other for the system that would supersede it. Worldwide companies would adopt the system that Montreal was using at about the same time that the next generation was being tested and implemented by PolyGram in Canada. When the author of this article worked for PolyGram, it was in the process of implementing the next system which had one feature that all who were engaged with the system found useful. This was 1984, and the system was called volley. It allowed a single terminal to multitask, so a next transaction could be vollied in before the previous transaction had been confirmed. This cut down on waiting time in what had previously been a single transaction at a time system.

 

Inheritor of the burden of PolyGram? .ed's former supervisor and partner in crime in 1983-84

The method that Berliner employed to reproduce records may have evolved over time as better materials became available, but aside from the number of stages involved, the process remained the same. Using a cutting lathe, an acetate disc would be cut by a stylus and could be played back once to assure that it was adequate as a pressing master. This 'grandmother' would then be used to press a 'father.' This disc is a negative of a playable disk, and it is used to produce many 'mothers.' The mother is nickel coated, and can be played many times. The mother is distributed to pressing plants, and from it the 'son' is produced. The son, like the father, is a pressing master. It is used to press daughters, which are the vinyl records that you play.

A somewhat simpler process is used today to press CD's. A blank CD, with its spiral groove predetermined in manufacture, has reflective and non-reflective surfaces that bounce back the laser beam depending on the reflectivity. Reflective and non-reflective portions are binary code, strings of ones and zeros that are accumulated and rectified into an audible soundwave, that varies depending on the composite frequency that has been assembled by the CD player out of 16 bits of information that it analyses, or as is common today, nonspecific portions are identified out of a bitstream that accumulates in the D/A converter.

Although this article is intended to give some sense of how flat disc technologies work, it is also worth noting that the story of the day (May 17, 2006) is that Vivendi is in financial trouble and needs some sort of bailout. When Vivendi courted Universal it was anticipated that it would be capable of supporting Universal in a way that the Bronfmans and Seagrams could not. It looks like PolyGram has a sting, and only the deepest of pockets should try to finance the largest recorded catalogue in history which will always be a money-loser.

.ed