Vinyl Records: Black Magic at Work

to trod them boards again, Chuck. On February first, second, and third, we're going to Seattle in Portland, or Portland and Seattle, and then for sure on February three, we're going to wind the whole thing up in San Francisco. Right, that's right, We're going back to sketch Fest are usually January home, but early February home this year, for my money, the best uh comedy festival in the world, and we're gonna be going to sketch Us. And again, we're not

sure the order yet. We don't have ticket links yet, but we do have a little bit more information. We just couldn't wait to tell you guys. So tickets are actually going to be on sale very soon. October six, there's going to be a pre sale with a password UH and we will probably put those out on our social links. I'm not sure how you'll find out, but you'll find out, and then on October seven there will be general sale. We'll give you more information as we

get it. But again, we just couldn't wait to tell you, guys, because we're too excited. That's right, and you know what we're doing. We've got a great uh working with some great new people with our social media stuff. So you might have noticed that our Instagram and our Facebook have some new and exciting things happening. So that's a great place to find information about the tours. Very nice. So we'll see you guys in the Northwest coast this February and the rest of you, who knows, could be a

wild year. Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of I Heart Radio. Y hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, There's Chuck, Jerry's here, and Jack Black's lurking around, which makes this stuff you should know. We got the facts on wax w s y s K. That's pretty great. Sorry, pretty you should have been a radio personality. I used to want to be I wanted to be a DJ. You came awfully close. Man. I have to say that was a pretty pretty close to a realized dream if

you ask me. Uh well, and what's funny is is the saying wax and like are one of our local record stores. Here's wax and facts and old DJ saying wax. In this episode you will find out why they say wax. Yeah, it's hopelessly outdated, but yeah, it's still still applies to us the next time. Let's do this. This is pretty fun. I'm excited. Do you collect final, Lenny? I think you do a little bit right, Yeah, a little bit. Um. I don't like collected. I just buy stuff that I want.

But you know, I'm vinyl, but I'm not just like, look, everybody, check out my collection. I just have a selection of records. How about that? Yeah? My deal is I have my records, most of my records that I had growing up. Never got rid of him, moved him every time like a dummy. I got uh inherited while still alive my um stepfather's record collection. He didn't pass away, but he just said here, I'm done with these. I'm so sick of music. It's ridiculous.

But that's where I got all that good Like he has all the all that prog rock from the seventies. He was way into that stuff. Uh. And then I started buying just sort of classic favorites of mine, basically kind of filling out newer classic favorites from when I stopped buying records up to this point. So I'm kind of running out of room on my little three banger shelf,

so I'm slowing down the rate of purchase. But it's it's good, and through the miracle of modern technology, I can play a record through a Bluetooth set of Bluetooth speakers. That is amazing, but it's also a tragedy. Well, yeah, I wish I had a plugged in what hi fi

system I've got them. I've got some like just Rockford or rock File or whatever shelf speakers that are plugged into an UM I guess a post amp or preamp, I don't know, one of the amps, but it's not part of the record player and the record players plugged into that. And it seems clugy enough that I'm like, Okay,

this seems pretty authentic. Yeah, I mean, you can tell we're experts here with our use of Rockford Files and pre post SAMP, right, so, I but I mean still, you don't have to be a total expert to to talk about vinyl, although there will certainly be um record store guys, the music equivalent of com book guy, who will right in and tell us how how much we just totally suck forever and like just got every single

thing wrong. But this is not for those people. It's for everybody else who just wants to know how vinyl

records work. How about that? I think that's great? Uh, And I think a few of these stats before we dive into the history or in order thanks to Dave Rouse who pointed out that obviously in the uh fifties, sixties, seventies, and into the eighties some um, certainly into the eighties, vinyl records were sort of the thing, uh, and their peak in the seventies there were more than fifth, sorry and thirty million records bought each year each year, which

is about six with eight track making up for the rest. Because of course you had to play something in your conversion van, right, you couldn't really, most most cars weren't outfitted with record players, that's right. But then the cassette

came along and the c D and all but killed Vinyl. Uh. They accounted for point one percent of music sales at some point in the nineties, which is a pretty big drop, I would say, but then made a comeback in the two thousand's because of nostalgia and because of hipsters and audio files and certain movies and Record Store Day and

all other reasons. Yes, But I mean like if you if you could rewind back to seven and you asked somebody if if they would ever, you know, see Vinyl albums again, they would just laugh in your face like they were done. They were goners, right, And so the idea that it came back is pretty it's pretty remarkable as far as comebacks go. And then in twenty I believe Vinyl Records outsold CDs for the first time since

Night six. That's a check of a comeback. And that's not even to say that CDs were doing that poorly. CDs actually had increased in sales over the past few years as well, So it wasn't like CDs were just tumbling downward while Vinyl was kind of slowly creeping upward. They were both creeping up and Vinyl just overtook CDs. I think in the year that vinyl overtook CDs UM, twenty seven and a half million Vinyl records were sold around the world. One it jumped up to forty one

point seven million. Yeah, baby, So yeah, Vinyl is definitely back, and there's a lot of reasons why it's back, And um, I say we start with the history of the whole thing to maybe explain why people like vinyl. I think that's where you kind of find the birth of the whole thing. Uh, totally some other good news by the way, just to drag that out a bit, is that cool

video I sent you from how It's made? Uh? They went to that music record that record pressing plant in Nashville, which is, as thinks, still one of the biggest ones, and they had to re expand and they were like, hey, everybody, remember when we shut down almost Well we're we have open up a bigger place now, which is awesome and

it's a great comeback story. Yeah. And I would guess the people who were buying the point one percent of music sales as vinyl in the eighties and nineties, I had to just be exclusively DJs, right, Oh No, I mean there were always Vinyl collectors. Um, they were just not nearly as many. For a while. It wasn't exclusively DJs because did DJ and they didn't even use records anymore,

did they. I mean, that's a pretty recent phenomenon. They were using vinyl like throughout the eighties and nineties for sure. When I guess we should look into that, like when they switched to the carts, Um, I would say in the tens maybe, really, I'm just guessing. But if it gets a response like that out if you all guess every time, I don't think so. I think they've had the carts for a while. So the two thousand odds, I mean, I think before that someone will know and

tell us. Whatever I do work for a major radio company, we should just ask somebody. We'll ask somebody, We'll get him on the phone, we'll call in will be the caller. I love it. So we're talking the history now, Chuck, I'd say, um, and we're talking vinyl records. But you can't really talk about vinyl records without like the beginning of records a recorded sound in general. Um, And most people say, who came up with recorded and played back sound?

Thomas Edison, Of course it was you know, the last quarter of the nineteenth century, I think, And you're right, like, yes, Thomas Edison definitely gave us what we kind of understand is recorded and played back sound. But um, there was a guy who came a good twenty years before him, although apparently Edison wasn't aware of his work. But he

was a guy from France, Edward Leon Scott de martin Ville. Yes, and um, I've seen him referred to as Scott apparently that's his last name, and I guess he's from Martinville. Frank Okay, oh, that would makes sense. So, um, Scott was tinkering around with something called a phone autograph and if you um look into it and we'll talk about how how vinyl records are made later, but like he basically said, here's how we're going to make records from here on out. Here's the at least the rough contours

of the whole thing. Yeah, and it's it's very rudimentary. But as you will see when we describe it compared to what they did later on, it's sort of the same idea, which is, and we'll get into how he did it, but which is basically using a vibrating tool to cut and it vibrates because of sound, and it makes a vibrating representation of whatever sound you're making and

cuts that into something. Yeah, what's astounding. This is the most astounding thing that I've learned in a really long time, is what is captured on record is a natural language of sound that humans stumbled upon. And one of the first people, possibly the first person to stumble upon it is is edwardley On Scott to Martinville and like, like, this is this has always existed, we just never tried

to capture it. It It just didn't occur to us. But when you look at a record, you are you are holding in your hands a captured, encoded representation of a sound that was made at some point in time. And Scott was the first person to figure out how to capture this. Yeah, And it's funny, even after having learned this, watched all the videos, being able to regurgitate how it's done,

it's still a bit like black magic to me. How you say something into a microphone and it ends up being cut into a vinyl record and a needle can bring that sound back out. It's it's still just sort of mind blowing to me. Yeah, there is like definitely a certain amount of black magic to it. And it's pretty cool. Like it's the cool kind, you know what I'm saying. It's not the kind where like somebody breaks a leg because of it. All right, So should we

talk about the phone autograph? Yeah, So what Scott did was he took a um and I'm not quite sure what inspired him to do this, but he took an acoustic trumpet, you know, like the old gramphone the crank record players that had like the big horn coming out of it. Why did you say, Sonny? Exactly, that's an

acoustic trumpet. And he put a little membrane over the small and the narrow end of it, and he attached a boar's hair, one single boar's hair to that membrane, and then, uh, the boar's hair was touching a glass plate, i think. And on the glass plate he had put something called um lampblack, which is like soot basically, just put a nice coating of it. And then he spoke into the large end of that acoustic trumpet and that

black magic started, That's right. And so what happened is that boar's hair bristle would uh wiggle and vibrate along, you know, to match whatever sound he was making, and it drew basically what Dave refers to I think astuteley as a sonic fingerprint. Uh. Through that soot, it drew sort of the visual representation of sound for the first time. Um. At the time, I think he called it a natural stenography, is what Scott called it. But at the time he

was like so great. Um, I promised that this thing maybe one day we'll be able to make a sound, but we don't know how to do that, and everyone went, what are you even talking about, dude? Um. But through the miracle of science, they actually got a computer to uh virtually play virtually as in you know, not like virtually like it actually did, but they use a virtual digital stylists to actually be able to play these early recordings of this dude like singing French songs and saying things,

oh yeah frera jacka and all that. It wasn't far a jacka, it was well then who cares? Now I've got the song in here somewhere. But uh, I mean, you know, it's kind of creepy sounding, but it is. And then some of it is just sort of hums and noises, but it is a human being. Uh, it's all Claire de la loun. Uh. It is a actual human being speaking words and singing words. And long before Edison did so. Yeah, it's a good twenty years before Edison.

And there was one other thing that Scott figured out, UM that was really important, and he figured it out right out of the gate. Is that when you um are are etching on that um, that glass plate covered in lamp black with the boar's hair, the boar's hair is just kind of wiggling right. The sound vibrations are making it wiggle, and that wiggle is transferring acoustic waves

into mechanical energy that's being captured in those etchings. But since the boy as um the boar's hair is just in one place, you have to move that glass plate and you can't just move it at any rate. It has to be a specified rate. And he figured out how to move that glass plate and I think one m a second, which is really fast, UM. And that means that if you read, if you put that thing the other direction, UM at one m a second, then

it would play. And what he figured out was that RPMs rotations per minute what would come to to be a huge part of record playing was essential because if you do it too fast, you have the same amount of information, it's just compressed time wise, because you're moving that glass plate faster than one meter a second, so

it comes out sounding like Alvin and the Chipmunks. If you move it too slow, less than one meter a second, it's that same amount of information, but it takes up a longer amount of time and you come out sounding like us on you know, half speed or something like that, which people like to do when they marijuana cigarettes. I here, although to be clear, he was not using revolutions because it wasn't spinning yet know what as RPMs, But it

has to do with adjusting like a set frequency. It's extraordinarily important that the playback and the recording are done at the same frequency. And Scott figured that out out of the gate. That's right, so put a pin in that. Uh. Edison comes along and um wasn't really working from Scott's work, but was arrival of Alexander Graham Bell and was working on telephone products and decided to try and record phone calls. And he had a big breakthrough when he attached the

stylust to a diaphragm, a lot like Scott did. And I keep wanting to call him Martinville. I know Scott from Martinville. Sure, um, And then the you know, exactly in the same way the vibrations of the diaphragm were etched in this case onto a sheet of paraffin wax with a needle. And he was basically like, wait a minute, we can record. It doesn't just have to be phone calls. We can record all kinds of things, like one day there shall be rock and roll. And he figured that out.

He was like, yeah, no, forget the phone. I'm doing something else with this. So he moved from that paraffin wax sheet to metal cylinders wrapped in aluminum floor right. Yeah. And it's it's almost like the I mean sort of in a way, it's almost like the inverse of how a music box works. Like it's a metal cylinder, but with a music box they're little nubs that uh prick metal combs of different pitches. In this case, you're you're

cutting a groove. Uh. And you know, if you had a sheet of tinfoil at home and got a toothpick, you know you can drag it along and make an impression. That's essentially what he was doing, right, So the fact that he moved over to cylinders was pretty progressive. That actually was um, the way that music was captured and played back for a while, UM was on these cylinders. And Alexander Graham Bell was the one who took these cylinders and changed them from aluminum foil into wax. Yeah,

so wax cylinders were really popular. That was how you listen to music back then, how you recorded music and listened to it. And UM, I have a little anecdote from you me. Actually she found out that when she's she I'm gonna tell it on her behalf, but I'll put on a wig and try to tell him a higher pitch before. So, Um, she found out that this some guy who had like the best record collection in the country, possibly the world, lived like thirty minutes away

from her. So she and some friends went and visited. This guy's name is Joe Bussard, and he's still around and he still has this fantastic record collection, um, and most of it is pre nineteen fifties stuff, but he has original whax cylinders, like from the nineteenth century that he played for them, and she said they were like African American spiritual. She's like, it was clearly people sitting

on a porch singing this stuff. And it was like, did they these people had sung this in one take on a porch in like the eighteen nineties or something like that. And there she wasn't you know, two thousand whatever listening to it played back, which is pretty sweet, and she said, this is lame. I want to hear some rock indoor rule. Uh, that's an awesome story we had. It made me think, or remember rather that we had a a hand crank phonograph growing up in my house.

My I guess my dad got it at some point and it was cool. You know, we had old records and we didn't sit around and listen to him, but my brother and I would put on one of those old records and crank it up every now and then, and uh, you know, it's cool. It sounds kind of like a horror movie, but it's like it's just it's a neat experience to see sort of the early technology at work. There is something really unsettling about a nineteen

twenties record being played. There's just something about it. It's like, for some reason, it always seems like the singer wants to harm you, but it's pretending they don't, I know, even especially because they're they're always singing about times a little like warble and you're like, no, no no, no, you got a knife in your hand exactly, slick back hair and some crazy huge smile. Um. Alright, so Edison uh and Bell are both working on this stuff. Bell has

got his wax cylinder going. Um. He played it back on something called a graphophone. This was an eight seven. You crank that handle, it rotates that wax cylinder and it plays it back through an acoustic trumpet um which I think we had one on ours. That was just for show, but there was an actual kind of rudimentary speaker underneath, and that's what amplified the sound. And then of course later on the hand crank was replaced with a motor. And just to explain the hand crank too,

you don't have to keep cranking it. You would crank it a bunch and then kind of hit go and then it would store up that mechanical energy and rotate the player. Right, But that was still cylinder, right, That was still the wax cylinder. Not obviously at my house, we didn't have those but yeah, but still we're working not even necessarily just wax, but we're working with cylinder. That was how you played back or recorded sound. And it was like that until a guy came along, I

think in the eight nineties named Emil Berliner. He was German American and he came up with the gramma phone, which probably sounds familiar because Berlinard's invention, which was shellac records, he was the first one to say, forget these cylinders, let's put let's put the stuff on disks and come up with rotations per minute and just he made all these innovations. Um, his invention was the standard from the nineties to nineteen fifty. That was how you listen to music.

Was this guy's invention, the gramaphone, Yeah, which you know. The main reason why is because you could actually reproduce these on mass You could create like thousands of copies of disc records, which was not something you could really do with the wax cylinders. It was very expensive, it took a lot of time to reproduce them. Uh. He figured out how to make these molds of a master recording and press them into records. Which is it really

set the stage. I mean things have changed a little bit, but it really set the stage for how we still do it today. Yeah, I mean it's it's virtually the same. It's just you know, a little more advanced today. But the principles are were certainly the same. The big difference though, is this was not vinyl that this guy was making. Like I said, it's shelack, and shelac is a natural substance. That was basically, uh, it's a natural polymer. It's like

natural plastic. Basically it comes out of the lack bug, which I think is native to Southeast Asia, if I'm not mistaken. So it was expensive to produce to shelack enough shellack to make a record, because again, the stuff's coming out of a bug, not gen on that it was from the female lack. Is that why it's called she lack? Maybe? I think it is. That's pretty great. If it is, that's wonderful. That's a great old timey

play on words. Well I'm gonna say that's fact. Okay, that's all you have to do these days, right, just say something. Yeah. Anybody who could contradict that as long dead anyway, So it's all good. Well, I think you know, we put a pin in this whole revolutions per minute?

Should we go ahead and explain that, yes, because Scott was the one who figured that out, and uh it just became a it's it's essential to reproducing or recording sound, right like you have to have it um recorded at a set frequency because the frequency effects is that the pitch where it goes really high or really low? Is

that pitch? Sure? Okay, all right, I forgot yourself taught. Yeah, okay, So it affects somehow because again, the like a sound wave makes a way, even if you compress it, it's still the same amount of information, it's just over a shorter amount of time, and that makes it again sound like Alvin and the Chipmunks. That's right. Uh So what the old records from kind of up into the nineteen fifties I think, or maybe it was later than that.

When did they changed, you know, from seventy eight to thirty three and the third uh well, the first one came out in like nineteen so okay, I'm sure they were still selling those shellac seventy eight into the fifties. All right, So seventy eight RPMs was the standard for a while, and if you're wondering how they came up with this RPMs, It's very easy. It's because the motors that they used at the time ran at thirty six

hundred revolutions per minute. If you tried to think about either manufacturing a record or playing a record at thirty six d revolutions per minute, that's pretty funny to think about. It's impossible, basically. So that's where gears, your old and gears come in because the purpose of a gear is

to step down the speed of a motor. Uh and in this case, they had a gear with So when you divide those revolutions, you step it down with a gear, and you eventually get down to uh eight technically seventy eight point to six rpm. S. Yeah, I still don't understand all that, but I accepted as as real. Well, I mean, yeah, it's it's what we should do something. No, never mind, I don't want to do how gears work because it's way more complicated than it seems on the surface. Okay,

well that sounds like right up our alley. We can we can confuse everyone further with that one. But at any rate, it steps down that motor via a gear, and we just do simple division and that's how you got the seventy eight. So seventy eight is pretty fast. I mean it's more than twice as fast as a normal like uh LP album today spins and it's shell which is pretty hard and brittle. So you can imagine if that thing flew off, it could take great Aunt

Edgar's head clean off in the in the conservatory. Sure like the recording artist intended, right, that was an abandoned clue, uh murder weapon. Yeah, he did it. He did it with a record, right, So the RPM is really important, Chuck um for a couple of reasons. One, Um, it was really fast in it, so it was dangerous at least in my opinion. But more importantly, because they were spending so fast, you had less time to get the

information across. So that meant that you had you know, maybe I think a twelve inch record could hold four to five minutes of music or of sound on each side. Right, it's only like nine songs back then, right, So, um, there were a lot of problems with these shellack seventy eight but um, they were a huge advance, hugely forward. But when vinyl came along, it changed everything and Chuck we are almost thirty minutes into this episode. I say,

we take our first commercial break. Wow wa wow, let's do it, okays skul Alright, So we are moving into the twentieth century and finally vinyl comes along. Um. It is called polyvinyl chloride or PBC. So those white PBC pipes you see in the big box, uh hardware store, it's the same same thing. It's a type of plastic.

And in the nineteen thirties is when record companies started to kind of experiment with this because I'll the aforementioned problems with shellac being very breakable and being very brittle. And I believe Victor, which was a division of our c A, was the first producer of vinyl records in nineteen thirty. But it did not go well because it took a little while before they had they had all the playback equipment sort of SYNCD up working well together.

So in this case, uh, the pickups used to amplify to send the signal to the amplifier. It's sort of like a guitar pickup. They were too heavy and it cut through the vinyl because it was uh not shelack. It was used as shelack, so they had to sort of rejigger everything, and it wasn't until after World War Two that they really put in like a kind of

all their efforts stored making vinyl work. Yeah, because there was a shelak shortage during World War two, so everybody's like, Okay, we need to figure out this vinyl stuff for a bunch of different reasons. But one of those things that came out of it was the vinyl record. And most people credit a guy at CBS named Peter Goldmark for inventing the vinyl record that we know and love today. That's right. Uh, He basically said, he figured out how

to make it stronger. Uh, he figured out how to etch the grooves smaller so you could fit more stuff. So he got it down to point zero zero three inches. I think she lax maxed out at point o one inches,

so a lot more music basically per record. Yeah, because in addition to more grooves, which means more information, which means more length of time of recorded sound on one side, it also played at a slower RPM, so it had more time to play all that information too, So you could just pack I think twenty two and a half minutes per side on a on a thirty three and a third RPM UM LP, which is what they're called long play albums, the basically the vinyl record that gold

Mark invented. That's right. And here's a fun little tidbit that Day found. I never realized, but UM album actually pre dates the invention of the vinyl LP because when people only had the seventy eights, they stored them in sleeves called albums, and I think when the LPs finally came out, it held about the same amount as an album worth of seventy eight, so they called them albums. Yeah, like one record, one vinyl record could hold probably five

or six UM shellac records worth. Yeah, so that's kind of a boast. I guess this this one records an album, you sucker. But now we get to UM. You know, basically what Dave called the War of speeds. Uh. You mentioned the UM seventy eights finally came down to thirty three and the third. Uh So Columbia Records reduces the first LP and UM and our Cia is who released the forty five, which you know people collect forty five two. They're the smaller ones that only have a song on

each side. It's like thick a single. Yeah, that's just exactly what it is. So our c a victor in Columbia, had that that war of the speeds that you mentioned to try to say, you know, the thirty three LP is um our p MLP is better. No, the forty five RPM single is better, and the public just said peace everyone piece, Well, let's let's have them all. Yeah. I mean all you needed to do was have a machine that can vary its playback speed, and you can't

have both. There didn't need to be one of the other. And they they did realize that there are some people who who just want the single version. Like I guess since there's been music, there have been people that like singles. I remember my first forty five? Do you remember what yours was? I didn't collect forty five, so I actually got into forty five. I was never a big time into them, but I got into him because I just

wanted one single song. Uh. It was Sweet Georgia Brown because my family had gone to a Globetrotters game and I was like, I really like that song. So my parents took me to Peaches Records and I got Sweet George Brown, and I must have driven my family crazy without realizing it played Sweet Georgia Brown over and over. That's adorable. And then do you remember what your first LP was? Absolutely Billy Joel's Glasshouses. Oh that's a good one. How old were you? Well, it was whenever that came out.

I feel like I was tennish, but I'd have to look at the date. My brother and I adorably split the cost, so it was like five bucks and each threw into fifty and got glass houses. That's awesome. Um My first LP was seven in The Ragged Tiger, the Duran Duran right, good record. Um, I think I got it around second grade. I was always I think I mentioned this too. I was always a late adopter, so I was buying records long into the cassette run. I was always like no, I didn't want to believe it.

It was like taking over. And then I was buying cassettes far into c d s, and I was buying CDs. I mean I have CDs that are four or five years old. Wow, from now, I didn't even know you could get those anymore. Yeah. Well the problem was to have a probably older than that, because my pickup truck that I will never sell is now just sort of our work in camping truck. It has a CD player

in it, So yeah, I was buying CDs for that. Yeah, I can see like not giving up the ghost because number one, you're very loyal person, so I could see you being loyal to records. And then also at the time, you didn't know you were ever going to have a choice again, so you were fighting against the death of the LP vinyl record because that's what it seemed like

when cassettes and then CDs came out. Yeah, I have no cassettes and in fact made my switch to CD s because someone stole my one cassette carrier out of my friends trunk of my car and little five points when I went to a show at the Variety Playhouse where you and I performed, yeah and sold out. If I'm not mistaken, that's right. So they stole that and I was like, all right, I guess I gotta buy CDs now. So yeah, that's it for me, everybody, I'm

done with his sense. So one other thing that kind of came out of vinyl records too, is because you could put more information into one, they figured out how to actually create stereo records starting in ninety and I can't imagine what this must have seemed like to the people back in ninety eight, because up to that point

everything was mono. It was one channel, so all of the sound came through one channel, and you could have two speakers, five speakers, ten speakers, it wouldn't matter because they were all playing the exact same information, and it didn't it just what You could just sit in front

of one speaker and get the same experience. With stereo, you have two different channels coming out, usually right and left, and rights going to the right speaker, less going to the left speaker, and when you sit between them, you don't get the sensation that the sound is coming out of either speaker. It seems to be coming out of the space between the speaker in front of you and

gives you this much more immersive, rich experience. And they figured out how to do that on a vinyl record, which, if you're talking about black magic to begin with, just just for creating a record, creating a stereo record is even more impressive if you ask me, Yeah, they did it. They figured out how to etch the walls of the groove. One side of the wall, the outside wall was the right channel, the inside wall was the left and when you play it back, that needle reads both sides at once.

The Beatles were one of the first Uh well, yeah, I could safely say one of the first bands to really experiment with stereo recording. And all of a sudden you had like Paul in one ear, John and the other singing harmonies. Um, and you know when headphones became more and more the norm. This is when this really paid dividends. Yeah, like Mitch Kramer listening to music in his room at the end of the night and dazed and confused that guy Wiley Wiggins works in podcasts some

Oh yeah, hey, Wiley Wiggins, how are you doing? I know. I was listening to the Great Great podcast you must remember this from Karina Longworth the movie podcast and at the end of one of the episodes, actually sat through the credits and it said additional research and transcription by Wiley Wiggins. That's awesome, man, that's super cool. I don't know if he's still doing that, but hello to both of you. It's so um. I watched yeah for real,

I watched. Um have you ever seen Waking Life? Yeah? Yeah, he started now that was he did creating that, but also just in Days and Confused, He's always going to be much Cramer to me. But I watched Days and Confused the other day I was like, this movie still holds up. And then I was like, there was no reason for Matthew McConaughey to do any other character ever, because everything he does is Waterson. Is Waterson in space for Interstellar, it's Waterson, like as a lawyer and the

Lincoln lawyer. Like it just Waterson all the time. And like you, if you go back and watch Stays and Confused, you're like, yeah, he and Waterson are one and the same person. Basically, it's Waterson selling Cadillacs or whatever that is, which one doesn't he Is it Cadillacs or is it Lincoln that he does the commercials for. Oh yeah, yeah, Lincoln where he just drives around and waxes philosophical exactly. Totally.

I forgot about the ag campaign. That was all right, it was alright, alright, alright, alright, well let's take our final break and we're gonna come back and no doubt stumble through how records are actually made. Right after this that's watched, sk should know. Okay, record store guys, this is the point where you can just leave us and we'll say thank you for listening up to this point. Yeah, I mean this is gonna be a little clumsy because

it's a little black magic e and it's um. They're also made different ways depending on who's producing the record. It's generally the same process, but uh, you know every cook has their own recipe. Yeah, so the essential process, I guess is you you it's ridiculously similar to what Scott and Edison and Alexander Graham Bell were doing, which is you basically put sound or music into some sort of amplifying device, no longer an acoustic trumpet instead some

again amplifier that that makes a little needle wiggle. And as that needle wiggles, it's etching that transcription of that sound wave into a mechanical record of it. That's why records are called records. It's a record of that sound ound. And they do this with basically a turntable called the cutting lathe. And that now I understand why they call it cutting a record. I had no idea until I guess yesterday, Um, why they call it that. Yes, Impressing

makes sense too, and it will in a second. But it's just like this turntable, but it looks like a turntable and like an industrial, an industrial turntable, and that's exactly what it is. Yeah, it's just a a large machine. Uh. The one that the video I saw was the one in Nashville. I don't know if they're different chisels, but they use an actual ruby gemstone chisel at their factory. Uh, and that vibrating ruby chisel cuts that groove and a uh. They still use lacquer, at least at this place, and

use a lacquer disc and this is called the mother disc. Um. It's kind of cool. In the end you end up with or you can end up with as much as feet of groove lines, which is seven football fields. I don't know how many big max. But if you took like the lines of an LP, uh and I don't I don't know if that's both sides or one side, is that just one side, that would be seven football fields long, which is pretty amazing. Okay, So so no, for some reason, on the Shellac record, the mother record,

they fit way more information. And from what I saw, I saw that an LP, the average LP like twenty two minutes is like um about one and a half football fields long. Really, that's what I saw. But I saw what you were talking about in that video, and I'm like, where's the distinction here? And I couldn't figure it out. So anywhere between one and a half to

seven football fields that one groove. And by the way, if you look at a record those grooves, that's one long, concentric groove that you could stretch out as a single line. Had never occurred to me. Did you realize that before? Yeah? Sure, because where would it end? It's a spiral. I don't know. I hadn't really thought it through. But that's a great trivia question. Then you could get a lot of people on how many grooves are on the average LP record

and the answers to one for each side. Yeah, although what about the little space? I didn't really look up how they did that, the little space between the songs. It's still yes, but it must have just a blank. There must not be any etchings in that groove. It's still tell all the musicians like, shut up, Yeah, what's it called room tone? Yeah? Room tone? And by the way,

this is this is how records are mass produced. Like if you go to Third Man Records in Nashville, and sit in the little booth like it literally cuts the sound you make directly onto a record that you take home. Yeah yeah, I think that guy that you me visited head is on like you could if you have dollars to spend to mess around with, like you can get

yourself a cutting life. But so you've got that mother record that's made from shellac, you said, right, right, And then they take that and they coat it with some sort of metal. I don't know if it's platinum. I think they said Nickel was involved, but they use electrolysis and they make a negative of that record, so they get the metal in all of the grooves. And when they pop the metal off of that mother shellac record they have they have the mirror no, yeah, a mirror

opposite image of it. Rather than grooves and and etchings and valleys, it's bumps and ridges and mountains. And that's what they use to press records from. Right. Yeah, that's called the master stamp. Uh. And that master stamp can make about a hundred thousand records. I think it is Nickel or at least what they use it. This one company that I saw, the largest one, uh, and that will harden up into silver, and you peel it away and then you kind of cut it and trim it

up so it's actually round. And then when you go to press the actual vinyl, they dump and we'll get to why they're black in a second, because that's super interesting. But you get these black polyvinyl pellets, you melt them down, uh in a hopper basically, and what plops out is

a little puck shaped like a little biscuit basically of vinyl. Uh. You put the label on it because that helps center things apparently, and then you have, you know, the one side of the record on top and the other side on the bottom these silver stamps and you apply about sixty tons of pressure and it just squishes it out and presses it into thin vinyl. Uh. If you think it might be a little messy around the edges, you

were absolutely right. Um. They trim that off with a machine so it's perfectly round, and that excess stuff is called flash, and they actually just throw that back to use later on it's recentled They re melt it right, which is awesome. Totally. There are I saw I saw people online who say that records made from that reused flashing do not sound as good as other records. I'm like, dude, really, yes on man, you need another a second hobby. It

doesn't just w record collection. And they didn't use the word actually at all, right, no, not at all. They were just daring you to say something. So um, so that's it, like that's what, that's how one record is made. And you said you can use one of those um uh master uh negatives for a hundred thousand records. So I guess they make a few of those and they have a run and that's that you have your your

whole run of records created. Um. And you mentioned something about records being black, like they don't have to be black. I think I have at least one or two that are colored um like red. Yeah, yeah, it is cool. It's definitely different. But um black is the color of choice for a couple of reasons. One PVC uh is some is like a natural insulator, so static electricity can build up in it, which is nay good because static

electricity attracts dust, and dust messes up your records. It can cause them to skip and do all sorts of terrible stuff. It can clug up your needle. Um. And then so they add this stuff called carbon black. I think half of a percent of your records material is carbon black, and that actually makes it a little better of a conductor, so it repels dust a little better. Yeah, so that'll that'll help him. And apparently and I never thought of this either, but you just you see dust

better on a black record. Uh, so you're you know, you're more apt to keep your records cleaner probably, uh And I never really noticed that. But yeah, on my clear records, I can't see any dust. I have to say. Um, some of the records that I have, I I got from our buddy. Van Nostrin has always been very in sending records that most people would not want to hear. Um, Engelbert Humperdink I have thanks to him. Um, I've got a one about Jimmy Carter, a comedy record, Um the

disco duck. But get this, there's no disco duck anywhere, and it's just like a kind of a jazzy upbeat um covers of disco songs without the duck. I don't know where Van Nostrom found this, but it's pretty astounding. Where the records that he comes up with in sinse

So thanks. I used to listen to comedy records going up to as a kid, I would get George Carlin's class Clown or how I and I'm still not good at impressions, but how I got interested was the rich little records The First Family Rides again, and you know, it was a big thing, like comedy albums, And some comedians today are are getting vinyl pressed of their specials and stuff, which is kind of cool. It is cool because those comedians are flushed with Netflix money, so all

of them can afford a fifty dollar cuttingly. So we kind of explained, I think, in our own way, how they're made. But then there's the black magic of actually hearing these things. Uh, you sit around and look at those grooves all day, but you wanted what you want to do, get up and dance right pretty much, and

that's that, and that's records, um chuck. If you could also afford not to to cutting lathe but an electron microscope, um, you could do worse than putting a record underneath it, because you would see some freaky stuff going on in those grooves. That groove itself holds a bunch of different little etchings and each sound has its own etching. In

this groove. And again these grooves are sometimes like an eighth of a millimeter UM thick, like they've gotten way thinner than when Peter Goldmark first invented vinyl records, and they hold so much information that you can actually physically see just like Um Edward ley On Scott of Martinville Um saw himself on that class plate. If you look really really closely through an electron microscope, you can see the same thing, and you are literally looking at a

physical encoding of sound. The sound wave has been transferred mechanically through that that ruby, um what do you call it, the carving thing chisel onto a record. And now if you put your record on your turntable, play it back at the appropriate rotations per minute, very important, and you

put the arm down. What you're doing is you're putting down a needle or a stylus that is a very sensitive usually industrial gemstone like sapphire maybe ruby I saw a diamond most most frequently, and that that actually reads every single one of those little tiny squiggles in that in those grooves from start to finish, and it retranslates that mechanical encoding through to the cartridge, which translates that into electricity, which creates an audible sound that has to

be amplified and run through speakers. And when you do all that, you're listening to a record. That's right, And I kind of compared it to a guitar pick up if uh, which one do we explain that? And was that in the les Paul, Yeah, it had to be. But it's just sort of the same idea as a guitar pickup. It's it uses copper wire and magnets um to create this, you know, electric current, and in this case it's induced at the same frequency as that little

needle wiggling through the grooves. And then you have to obviously that you still don't hear anything unless you feed that through an amplifier and then eventually speakers. If you listen really closely, you can hear the faintest bit of it, but it's nothing to dance to your right, um. Dave, Dave helped us with us, right, this was a Dave jam.

It was Dave. So Dave kind of drove something home for me when he talked about how the middle c on a piano is um vibrates at an amplitude of two hundred and sixty one point six three hurts, which means that that it vibrates to create that sound that middle cyano piano. It vibrates a two hundred and sixty one point six three vibrations per second. That's just one note on a piano, and that is encoded in a record. When you play a middle C on a piano and

you capture it on a record. Um, you, that's just one thing. Now consider all of the different notes, all the different sounds, all the different instruments that are are encoded onto a record, and it's there. Each one is physically encoded in the right proper time, the right spot on that groove in that record, playback on that particular RPM.

And when you start to put all this together and realize how complicated it is, it really gives you an appreciation for what's going on with vinyl and why people love it so much. Yeah, I mean, it's it's sort of easy to wrap your head around someone plucking a piano string or loot rather hammering a piano string that would be a harpsichord if it was plucked in a middle C like ding ding ding ding, and how that

might be translated. But when you think about a groove being cut that represents like guitar feedback from Jimmy Hendrix, which is a sound, but it's not like a U. It's not like you think of a familiar note being plucked or something, or the sound of distorted guitar. It's just it's amazing. It is black magic. I'm with you. So. Um A lot of people chuck say vinyl is the only way to go, and other people say take your vinyl and shove it because digital music is the only

way to go. And there's apparently a pretty big argument about all this. Yeah, I mean, you know, your vinyl enthusiasts will say it has a warmer sound. Uh, they'll say that's as close to the original way form as you can get because it's directly from a master recording and it's not digitized and compressed. Um I and Day points out, and I fully agree that part of this. You know, I'm sure there are audio files who have an ear that can really differentiate, differentiate um sounds on

a really minute level. I'm not one of them. Um So for me, part of it is the the ritual of the record album. Aren't liner notes? Holding an album and looking at it while you're playing it, Like all the stuff that was Law Austwin records shrunk to cassettes and you could still sort of do it then, and you can kind of do it with CD cases and liner notes. But the record was really like it was. It was a part of the whole experience large format art.

But there are people who say that, you know, like you said that digital gets rid of those pops and clicks that a lot of people like from records. Um it has a wider frequency range than vinyl does, so it can hit the highs and the lows more accurately. UM I mean, I like it all. I don't think you have to choose. I don't think you have to

choose either. But um I I saw a really good description of the difference between digital recordings and analog recordings, which is what is meant to be captured on a record. There was a guy, a recording engineer named Michael Connolly who um said, Let's say that you want to measure your height, and you stand next to a door jam, and you put a pencil along the top of your head and you mark the door jam. What you've just done is created an analog of your height that mark

stands in for your height. Right. Another way you could do it is stand still and hold the measuring tape and then see what your height actually is. And then you take that measurement and you transcribe it to another medium, like you write it down in a notebook. And the thing is is your analog is truer, it's more faithful because it's an actual representation of your actual height. But um,

the measurement can be reproduced much more easily. You can go from notebook to notebook and just write down that same measurement every time without any loss of information. And that's not true from that door jam pencil mark, because let's say you move, you want to take a door jam with you to remember how tall you were, and you install it at your next house, it might not be quite the same, you know, height off the floor

as it was before. So those are those pops and clicks that get added into it when you reproduce a sound, an analog sound, whereas with digital, yes, it's not the entire waveform of the whole thing, it's measurements of it.

But it's such a mind boggling number of measurements with a mind boggling amount of information that most people say, not only can you not tell what's lost in a digital recording, some people say digital recordings are actually better, right, But to be clear, we are talking about a digital recording as in a c D, which has about for a little more than four kill a bits per second

UH worth of information, which is super high. UM. If you're talking, you know, streaming something from a streaming service, there is a difference, and you don't have to be an audio file to tell UH it is a thinner sound. It's ten ear UH. It is compressed down from the CD size, which is a little over fourteen hundred two between ninety and a hundred and sixty uh kill a bits per second. So that's a lot of compression going on.

And Dave points out that you um like you're probably playing that through like in a bluetooth speaker maybe or earbuds, not very good quality. If you if you do think the records sound better, it's probably because you're at your audio file friend's house who collects records and who also places it through a really high quality amplifier instead of speakers. So you know the sound between the difference between that and UH streaming something through a bluetooth speaker earbuds is

just nine and day. Yeah, because so that the the stamp, the bit rate is just the number of measurements taken, right, and measurements are not exact. It's the kind of a snapshot of the thing. It's not the whole thing, like a record is the whole sound wave. But I ran across something, Chuck that just kind of puts the whole argument to bed. And I noticed it in that video you said about how records are made at that record Um manufacturer in Nashville. Did you notice that they started

out with a digital file. Well, yeah, I mean yeah, it was a pro tools file. It was so they transferred a digital file onto a record. So the whole difference for anything that's ever been put to a record from a digital file is out the window. Your arguments just totally moot because you started out with a digital file. Yeah, but it's a huge digital file, but it's still digital, which means it's not in precise representation of the exact same,

same thing. But other people say, well a records not neither. There's just too many, too much room for air, it can't possibly be precise. But I think you said it you don't have to choose. Yeah, I agreed you got anything else about Vinyl records because I could keep going. Man, this is fun. Uh A little fun tidbit about my mom.

When she was little living in Memphis, Tennessee. She my granddad took her into I think it was called the Memphis Recording Studio that's pretty on the nose and recorded her playing um, the clarinet or something and left with a record and that later became Sun Records. So technically my mom recorded where a wasp pressly recorded. That is pretty amazing, man, I think that's true. That's a story I got. I'm sticking to it. I think there's a very charming story to end on Charles. So let's go

instead to listener mail. How about that? Ah? Yeah, this is a quickie about de farting a lot after colonoscopies, which we talked about the vine. Hey, guys, I am Chuck the gastro and grology technician, huge fan of the show and I don't think I missed a single episode. I was regarding your different experiences after colonoscopies because I was super farty and you don't remember being super party, right,

I was super high. That's right. Uh. Air is injected during the procedure to purposefully distend the colon for a better view of all the walls and easier passages to the holy land. And it makes your hands puff up like a cabbage patch kid, which everybody likes to see. Some facilities use air, which will result in the fart party. Some facilities use the more expensive carbon dioxide, which is absorbed by your colon breathe out your lungs and results

in a more comfortable experience. This is a possible cause for the difference between your experiences. You may still get a little gassy after CEO two, um, but I can assure you that recovery rooms in the CEO two facility are not full of farts and is a more pleasant experience for the patient in general. Did you go to Bargain Bargain Barn Hospital for yours when cold to colon ascopes? Are us spatulous city or the colon Barn? I guess so it was pretty fun. I enjoyed the fart barn Um.

And this is from Chuck and he says, ps g I is the best department butts in guts for the wind. Nice nice work. Chuck. Nice work you two, Chuck. Uh. Thanks man. If you want to be like Chuck, either one well, no really, the one that just wrote in. You can write into us too and send us an email to Stuff Podcasts and i art radio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts My heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your

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