5 replies to this topic

[wes williams]

I've been buying concertina 78rpms on ebay for the past year or so, but they are suddenly leaping in price. Yesterday a fairly common Alexander Prince "Belphegor March" went for £21 - I'd bought the same record four months ago for 99p. Have you all been asking your partners for concertina 78s for Xmas? Perhaps I'd better put my duplicate copies up for sale quickly.

I've almost finished a fairly comprehensive discography for Prince that will be going into PICA for publication at the end of 2012, and I hope to follow that with an "..and other players" discography at the end of 2013. And if anybody is after a particular Prince track, I have many remastered.

[Frank Edgley]

It's good to hear that you are doing this work. Will you be removing the characteristic scratchiness of the recordings typical of 78s? I hope so. In my opinion, they detract from the performance and do not give an accurate idea of how he/she sounded in real life.

[Mark Davies]

The Neovox Company of Birmingham UK produced in the 1970's at least two casettes of Alexander Prince 78's.I only have both cassette somewhere.I understood somebody in London was in the process of cleaning up and producing a CD of all known AP 78's.Does anybody know what stage has been reached in that project?

[wes williams]

It's good to hear that you are doing this work. Will you be removing the characteristic scratchiness of the recordings typical of 78s? I hope so. In my opinion, they detract from the performance and do not give an accurate idea of how he/she sounded in real life.

A little confusion here Frank - the discography is a list of Prince's recordings, not the 78s I have. But I've managed to establish that Prince did re-record some of his earlier pieces acoustically in 1924, and again in 1926 using electrical recording equipment, which were reissued under the same disc number. Although the new electrical recording equipment was very basic in 1926, the recordings have much better fidelity, so its possible to hear better representations of his performances. One of these electrical recordings will be available on the ICA Facebook page sometime in 2012.

Its possible to remove the scratchiness of 78s without affecting the recording, but removing the surface noise (hiss) is much more difficult.

A CD issue of all Prince's known releases would have to be a multiple CD set - he issued almost 70 discs on the Regal label alone, with quite a few being re-recorded later. So that would be about 7 CDs just for Regal (140+ sides at 3 minutes per side).

[Alan Day]

Jim Ward has most if not all of Alexander Prince recordings and Jim was employed by us for cleaning up old 78s.He intends to release these recordings in CD format and has a considerable number.I will see him shortly and I will ask how he is getting on with the project.
Briefly watching Jim at work ,he first thoroughly cleans the 78 to remove dirt.A lot of the noise when playing can come from the shape of the needle that has been used before, so that by using a needle that plays in a different part of the groove,
a better sound is created. There are computer programmes that can recognise a hiss and providing Jim has the noise at the front or rear of the recording he can remove this noise. Sadly this can sometimes alter the sound of the instrument. On the wave format Jim can see peaks and troughs and clicks that appear as almost straight lines.He rounds them off by hand thus eliminating them. So the finished product can sound almost new (as in Ashton under Lyne recording 1935 English International).
Sorry for the description in lay man's terms but you should get a rough idea of what is involved.
Al

[Geoff Wooff]

Oh what a pleasant thought ! That we might be able to hear lots of Prince's recordings in a handy to use format.

Good luck and speed the needle.
Geoff.