Hi Fi Fo Fum!

[Panrock]

Lots more BBC Archive stuff: https://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/broadcasting/zjcdbdm

Thanks! I particularly enjoyed the film about the building of the Holme Moss station.  Wonderful music and superb narration. Great days!

Steve

[Hartley118]

Fascinating and a very nostalgic film.

At least back then in 1959, most of the sound quality improvements were actually real rather than imaginary - for example better tracking pickups, wider frequency range speakers and turntables with lower wow and rumble. Today, those real issues are pretty well sorted, so the press has had to move on to the imaginary issues.

Incidentally, I guess that the record store would have been HMV because I've never seen so many HMV 'Double C' pickups all working together at the same time.

Interesting too that the BBC turntables all appeared to be using the Cosmocord GP20/HGP39 crystal pickup, perhaps due to its clearly visible cantilever stylus facilitating track selection.

Martin

[Hartley118]

Hi.
I still enjoy 78s in the raw with the usual background noise. Even unplayed 78s have still some inherent noise but I find that the Decca ffrr 78s take a lot of beating. One thing I'd like to fit to my AT6 is a Shure M78 cartridge, the Sonotone 9TA that's in it now is pretty good but I believe the Shure is excellent.

I recall in the early days of LP (back in the era of Hi Fi Fo Fum), there were many 'LP versus 78' discussions. Fans of 78s would tell me to just become accustomed to the scratch and 'listen through it'. That indeed proved to be possible, and I remember the early days in the 1980s when we initiated what became 'Cedar' noise reduction in collaboration with Cambridge University Engineering Dept. We had a digital version of that process (running very much in non-real time on BBC Micros!), with matched filters 'becoming accustomed to the scratch' and reducing its prominence whilst transmitting the musical content, hence improving the signal/noise ratio.

Martin

[ppppenguin]

Martin, I didn't know about the origins of Cedar. Would be great to know more.

[Hartley118]

Cedar is quite a long story: the company is one of the great innovators and survivors of the audio industry.

It all began at the public launch of the Neve digital mixing desk back in 1982. In addition to comprehensive custom broadcast and recording desks, we were proposing simpler transfer desks to enable essentially lossless transfer of digital recordings with, in addition to level control and monitoring, EQ, compression and time delay, all in the digital domain.

At the buffet lunch after the launch, I found myself sitting next to a senior engineer from the National Sound Archive who expressed a great deal of interest in a digital transfer console. Technical spec meetings followed at Neve HQ in Cambridge (I was Neve Technical Director at the time). A key player was Dr Christopher Roads, head of the British Library National Sound Archive. Spec discussions were going swimmingly, and then Dr Roads tossed a rock into the calm waters: "In addition to EQ, compression etc., could you please incorporate a digital noise reduction facility to improve the signal to noise ratio of old recordings"

Not being born yesterday, I had to respond along the lines of "Well, we believe that may be possible, but we haven't developed it yet, so we can't actually quote for such a noise reduction facility. However, we'd be happy to facilitate a university research programme with the aim of developing such a capability". The Cambridge University website describes the association as follows:

'Through a connection at Neve Electronics, Roads was put in touch with Professor Peter Rayner, a signal processing engineer in the University’s Communications Laboratory, and it was he who first proposed a computer-based audio restoration system. The British Library then provided a grant that enabled the development of a ‘proof of concept’ prototype. Later shown on the BBC TV programme Tomorrow’s World, this demonstrated that computer-based audio restoration was viable. '

I guess that I was that connection!

The full account is here at https://www.enterprise.cam.ac.uk/news/ce...lds-audio/

There's further historical information on the Cedar website at https://www.cedar-audio.com/products/his...tory.shtml

Peter Rayner's group had been working on signal recovery in radar and sonar applications using matched filters . These essentially analyse the character of the noise and intelligently recognise the wanted signal. The bandwidth of the digital filter is then dynamically adjusted to suit the wanted signal and to reject the background noise. Like most digital filters, it all works in the time domain and it gets pretty close to the human approach to listening to 78 records, where the brain accommodates to the background scratch and just focuses on the music. Although Cambridge University possessed one of the world's most powerful computers , it's interesting that the initial trials used a BBC Micro Model B! The processing was originally done offline, but pretty soon moved into real time, which has for a long time been one of the competitive features of Cedar.

I hope that gives some interesting background on what is I guess a classic tale of innovative product development

Martin

[Kalee20]

Inspiring story Martin, thanks for the link!

[ppppenguin]

Thanks for telling the story. Cedar is very firmly rooted in high quality research. Neve were very much in the forefront of mixing desks - I don't think we knew that you were a director.

[ElectricIAN]

Great archive film.. I have turned into that person fiddling with hifi!