In this video I'm going to be taking a look at two short lived techniques
that we use to squeeze more music onto a single disc
so what I've got here
is a 2 hour 33 1/3 rpm vinyl record
and a 2 hour 24 minute 24 second compact disc
and both of these could be played on normal equipment
so lets see how they did it
Right, now let's start with this compact disc
this came out in 1987
at which point the maximum playtime of your average compact disc would have been 74 minutes
yet this particular disc contains 2 hour 24 minute and 24 seconds
approximately double that
so if i was to say to you, you have to come up with a way
of getting double the amount of audio on a compact disc
that could be played back in a standard compact disc player
how would you go about doing that?
It does sound a little bit tricky doesn't it?
But what if I was to say, the audio you are putting on here is a recording from 1953
That makes it a lot easier
I'll put the CD in and let it try and explain itself
[Talking in French]
[incomprehensible]
okay now not the greatest of help to everyone watching this video
but after a couple of minutes of that
an English language version comes in on the left hand channel
and it sounds like this:
"You are about to hear a new generation of compact disc...
which makes it possible to double the listening time"
Right lets isolate that and have a listen to what he is talking about
"You are about to hear a new generation of compact disc...
which makes it possible to double the listening time of mono recordings."
"At the present time CD players have no automatic switch...
and therefore you should proceed manually as follows."
"If your amplifier is equipped with a mono switch
push the CD into the CD player..
switch off the right channel and press the mono switch."
"In this way you can listen to the first part of the CD."
"when you have finished listening to the first part...
take the CD out of the player...
switch off the left channel without forgetting to switch on the right channel again...
and push the CD back into the player."
"The mono switch remains pressed down."
"You can then listen to the second part of the CD."
"If your amplifier has no mono switch...
neither the right nor the left channel have to be switched off."
"After pushing in the CD...
... all you need to do is alter the balance on your amplifier."
"First to the left and then to the right side."
"In this case you will only be able to hear out of the left...
or right speaker at any one time."
"With this new generation of CDs...
you can listen to one CD for more than 2 hours."
Okay so in summary it's a normal CD
it's a stereo CD, it plays in any normal compact disc player
accept the left hand channel plays the
first half of the recording in mono
and then the right hand channel plays the second half of the recording in mono
and you have to switch between them
to hear the whole recording. I'd say
calling that a new generation of CD
is really over egging it a bit, and I've just got to go back and play
a little bit of that recording just once more
It's that whole without forgetting part I'm assuming this
has been translated from another language, it doesn't quite scan right
it sounds like a double negative, perhaps I am supposed to forget?
or am I not supposed to forget? Of course I know what he is talking about
let me give you a quick demonstration
This two mono recordings on one compact disc
system was used for another set
Wagner's Ring Cycle that came out at the same time
that reduced that down to 7 compact discs
it was reviewed in the New York Times
They mention that came with a shrink wrapped switch box on the front
that you attached up to your compact disc player
and you'd select
the left channel for the start of it, the right channel for the end of it
and there was a further third position for your normal standard compact discs
Now believe it or not
someone had tried this idea a couple of years before
but Philips had blocked its release as they were planning on using the Philips pressing plant
to make the CD, so they refused to make them
because they were annoyed that this was messing around with their Redbook CD standard
talking about the fact previous
technologies like Quadrophonic
had got very confused by all the different systems that were out there
so they wanted compact disc just to be compact discs
but with this one they couldn't stop them from releasing it
because they used their own pressing plants.
It won't surprise anyone to hear that this wasn't around for very long
and I think this is perhaps one of only two titles that came out on this format
and it's easy to see why
I mean it is a pretty flawed idea
either requiring someone to mess around with the settings on their amplifier
everytime they want to listen to this CD
or perhaps use the switch box that was shrink wrapped to the front of some of these
attach that up to your CD player, reach round the back of your CD player
switching between the three different positions depending on what kind of CD you wanted to play
sounds like the sort of thing someone would come up with on Kickstarter
and of course reliant on the fact that
the recordings on here have to be longer than 75 minutes
and have to be in mono
Yeah, it's just not something that was really going to last very long
on its own but I think the thing that really killed it off
was the fact CDs came down in price. The whole idea of this thing
is that it's supposed to be cheaper to sell this set
with perhaps even a switch box on the front
than it would of been to sell 2 separate compact discs in a little set.
Well that changed pretty quickly CDs came down in price
so a 2 CD set
made a lot more sense than this
so the next one
Trimicron, so this is a 33 1/3rpm
stereo record, 12 inch that contains two hours worth of audio
and the idea behind this one
well in this one, it has got a lot more merit. Lets have a look at it
Right well first off I've got to say
this is a particularly attractive logo in my opinion
but it is very much a thing of its' time
This is the early to mid 1970s
when this came out, you can see here triple duration
1 disc 2 hours
it wasn't on the market for very long but
it was relatively successful for a short period of time
you can see here there were some other titles available using this technology
if you go on the Discogs website
you'll see some of those listed
and of course they're all classical music titles which is what the format was designed for
your average pop record would of fitted
on a normal length LP. This is just for your longer length pieces of music
Now if you go on Wikipedia
under the unusual types f gramophone records
you won't see it mentioned
but thats on the English Language Version.
If you got the French Language version of the same page
then Trimicron does get a mention on there.
The gatefold sleeve on my copy is falling apart a little bit
but you can see in here
on the left hand side the music that is on the disc, and on the right hand side
it goes into the details on how they went about creating it.
First off it is the brain-child of this guy, I like this guy
it looks like he has seen some stuff in his time, and he's saying here
he got sick of listening to classical music and having to
flip it over when it got half way through and
having his music cut up into little segments, so he came up wit this system
using this massive machine, which looks like something Ming the Merciless
would of used in a Buster Crabbe, Flash Gordon series
and that makes the Trimicron system possible
and the idea is according to his techonolgy
that he was able to put
triple duration, as he said on it, as you can see here
55 minutes on side A of this record
and to achieve that 55mins
He's removed the section between the tracks
now you can look at the pictures here and you can see you've got the track
which is the white sections and the black section is the bit between them
he said he has just removed the section between the tracks
and therefore that being twice the width of the track the stylus goes down
he is able to triple the amount of audio
that you can put down on a standard 12 Inch record
Now I'm no record mastering expert but
to me something does not seem right with those diagrams
I have reproduced them a little bit here to explain what the problem is
imagine this is the stylus of the record
now a stylus travels in a groove
and as it goes up and down each side that
is what creates the stereo audio
so in this case this is the stylus hear, it's going down
the groove hear and it's traveling down this bit here
now the crossed out sections are where it doesn't travel
thats the section between the track
as it goes round, it comes back round again and the stylus carries on down here like this
okay that's fine, that's a normal record, now what hey reckon they have down with this
Trimicron idea, they have done away with these crossed out sections
so now the stylus travels down here like that
and once it's gone round it travels down there like that
well that doesn't make any sense because if that
wall is the right hand channel and say that wall is the left
well when it does down the next one
the right hand channel then becomes the left hand channel on that one andt
that wouldn't work because you would be hearing some of the audio
from the previous revolution on one side
when you're hearing the next door, something is not quite right here.
I tell you want i need to do, i need to break out the macro lens
and lets have a look at one of those records close up
To have something to compare the Trimicron record against
I've got a couple of other discs out here
SuperFunk 3 is a relatively modern record
modern by the standard that it does not pack the tracks on each side
so we've got 4 tracks on side A
and5 on side B. Whereas
this 1980s compilation, this is when they really did pack them in
so here we have 8 tracks per side
now lets start off with the modern record
and we'll just have a bit of a close up on that
and you can see that it is a little bit dusty on here
and I've got to say I've just got this out of the shrink wrap
to take this picture, I hadn't
used this one yet, so it just shows you how dirty these things are
when they come out of the paper cases
that they are stored in, but anyway, lets zoom in on it and have a good look.
So you can see here, it is quite clear
we've got the tracks, we got the space between the tracks
and you can see that looks very similar to the diagram that was on the Trimicron sleeve
you've got the space between the traks
being quite a wider
that the actual track where the audio is recorded
Okay now lets move over to that 1980s compilation where
everything should be packed a lot closer together.It should be intersting
to see how big the gaps are
between the tracks on this one, so
You'll see as we zoom in it looks a little bit messy here
in fact you can make out the ridges
and the tracks but the almost seem
the same widths as one another. Now if you happen to have an
electron microscope to hand, you can get quite a bit closer
in on a record, you can see here the stylus going down the groove
of this particular disc, this is from
the Applied Science channel, Ben and I
know each other and I am sure he is quite happy with me showing
this clip on here, I'm just going to show
you a still out of it though, go to his site to see the full video
One thing to note here
is how the walls, or the width of the gap between
the stylus track
changes depending on the audio that is being played
so you can see on the right, that is quite a big area
whereas on the left that is quite a lot thinner
another thing to note from this is
it is a little bit more complicated than my simplistic
drawing on that whiteboard earlier on, it's not really
the tops of the trench that are creating the sound
it is the walls that are at approximately 45 degree angle
to one another, and it is the movement of the stylus
within that valley that creates
the audio. I'm quite sure the very top
of that ridge, doesn't really have much of a bearing on it at all
Right, so lets have a look at the Trimicron record now
now that 1980s compilation held 30 minutes a side
this holds approximately 60, so somehow they've managed to pack
twice the amount of audio onto here and
it looked like there wasn't any room left on that 1980s one so let's
see how they've gone about doing it.
Well, as we zoom in here, you'll notice something straight away
it is a very uniform line going
down there, not like the electron microscope version
or the other records that i showed you that moved around all over the place
these are very straight, it seems like
that's the system, it hasn't removed the central barrier between
the tracks it has just somehow made it very
straight and uniform and therefore must be compressing
down the amount of space that each track has
for the audio, lets have a listen
I didn't notice anything particularly compromised
about the audio while listening to it other than the fact
of course it is very much plagued by crackles and pops
so it just needs a good clean this disc
so I'll give it a clean and I'll play you a little snippet
of this with a direct feed
Yeah whatever I did I just couldn't get rid of those crackles
although I've reduced them down a little bit, the only I've
noticed about this disc is when you play it you do have to
turn the volume up just a little
bit more than you wouldwith a normal record, I would
probably listen to a normal record at about 60 on my amp on this
I have to listen at about 70 but there is still plenty of room beyond
so it is not like i have to max it out or anything
and it does seem like the audio has
quite a bit of dynamic range as well
You can see this represented in this capture
of the audio here, we've got the waveform and
those vertical lines that go straight up and down, those are the crackles and pops
but you can see also there is quite a bit
of dynamic range there, it goes reasonably loud, it goes very quiet
at one point towards the end there.
Although apparently according to the French Wiipedia
these discs do suffer from reduced dynamic range
and perhaps most importantly
they've got a reduced signal on them
meaning the volume of them is reduced by
40% over a norma record, which
meant people had to have record players
that was a very quiet one
that also had a good new diamond stylus
on there to trace the
track around
and it was perhaps a bit of a compromise too far for many people
As far as ideas go I don't think this was a bad one
and you've got to consider it came out in the early 1970s
and it actually was quite successful in the market as well
i think there were over 30 titles came out
that use this Trimicron system. You can understand why
the vast majority of people playing music
back at that point were doing it off a record player
so if you wanted to play for example
the first track on side A here
of 50 minutes and 54 seconds all in one
long stretch, unbroken, then this would of been the only
way must people would of had to go about doing that
in fact the next chance the vast majority
of people got to a 51 minute piece of music in one go
would of been when the compact disc came out
I suppose the reason that this would of died off though was
because it proprietary technology, no doubt the chap behind this one
wanted to license it out to peopel
even if he didn't ask for money on that i imagine
that you would have to change all the
equipment that you used for making records to enable them to produce these
so you can understand why it didn't take off beyond
the initial company that were producing these
but still it doesn't mean it wasn't a good idea, but yes okay
the sound quality is a little bit compromised, you have to turn
it up a little bit more
but i think my mum, for example, listening to her
radiogram in the mid 1970s
wouldn't of minded that at all, turn it up a couple of notches
it probably wouldn't of sounded any different to any other record she put on there
it's only recently that people are getting really obsessive about these
high end 180gram audiophile records
back then you just chucked a record on a record player
and thats what it was, it was
just the way that you listened to music
But anyway, hope you've enjoyed having a look at these two
extended length formats here today, but that's it for the moment
as always, thanks for watching.