Pallophotophone<\/a>.<\/p>\nUnlike the Western Electric system, which used microphones and amplification to power the cutting head,\u00a0 Brunswick’s system utilized a recording horn that directed sound to a diaphragm, causing a tiny mirror – smaller than a pinhead – to vibrate. A constant beam of light was focused on the mirror.\u00a0 As the mirror vibrated, reflected flickers of light reached a photoelectric cell, which converted the fluctuations in light into an electrical signal that was then amplified to power the cutting head.<\/p>\n
Unfortunately, Brunswick was never able to get the system to work well.\u00a0 \u00a0Early recordings often had so much distortion that artists had to be called back to the recording studio to record new takes.\u00a0 \u00a0Brunswick’s engineers continually attempted to make tweaks.\u00a0 However, once a distortion issue in a particular frequency range was resolved, a new distortion would often emerge in another.<\/p>\n
Some recordings made by the process turned out better than others.\u00a0 I notice its shortcomings most on recordings such as these, where very loud passages of the entire band can come across as harsh or distorted.\u00a0 \u00a0I have several records with really excellent performances by the Abe Lyman and Ben Bernie bands that were unfortunately impacted by it.<\/p>\n
Despite heavy advertising promoting the alleged superiority of its “Light Ray” system, which it described as “Music By Photography,” Brunswick finally threw in the towel on it in 1927 and reached a confidential licensing agreement with Western Electric.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
“No One But You Knows How To Love” Bennie Krueger’s Orchestra (Vocal possibly by Walter Scanlan) September 11, 1926\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0(Brunswick 3323-B) \u201cGone Again Gal\u201d Bennie Krueger’s Orchestra (Vocal possibly by Walter Scanlan) September 11, 1926 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0(Brunswick 3323-A) … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"iawp_total_views":144,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[14,80],"class_list":["post-2217","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-1920s","tag-bennie-krueger"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.early1900s.org\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2217","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.early1900s.org\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.early1900s.org\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.early1900s.org\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.early1900s.org\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2217"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.early1900s.org\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2217\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2249,"href":"https:\/\/www.early1900s.org\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2217\/revisions\/2249"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.early1900s.org\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2217"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.early1900s.org\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2217"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.early1900s.org\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2217"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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