Anyone want to discuss the transition from acoustic to ele..

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In another thread on a different subject, a discussion was started
concerning the recording industry's transition from the acoustic (or
mechanical) recording process to the electrical process in the 1920's.
I was wondering if anybody would be interested in devoting an entire
thread to the subject.
Here's my understanding of roughly how it occurred. In 1921 Western
Electric announced that it had invented the electrical recording
process, but did not make it commercially available to record companies
until 1924.
There was a serious economic recession in the recording industry in the
early '20's. I am not sure what caused it, but it may have been a
carryover from the general post-WWI recession of 1919. For example,
Columbia went into receivership at this time. The advent of the
electrical recording process is widely credited with rejuvenating
industry sales, but I suggest instead that it was the introduction of
the automatic changer that did so.
Western Electric charged a "per-copy" royalty for every record produced
by the electrical process. The recording companies were hurting
financially in the early '20's, and did not relish the idea of having
to both purchase the necessary new equipment and pay the increased
royalties.
As an example, Victor claims to have adopted the electrical process in
1925. However, if we take Paul Whiteman's "Valencia" (Victor 20007,
produced in 1926) as an example, I think we can see the situation is a
little more complicated than that. Although the record carries the
"VE" label and states that it is an "orthophonic recording" (indicating
it was made with the electrical process), it is similar to an older
acoustic recording in that it has neither a lead-in groove nor a 1"
oscillating exit groove (the "Valencia" exit groove oscillates only
about 1/4" ). To me, this is a dead giveaway that the record was cut
with the old acoustic lathes. I believe that records actually cut with
the later-type electric cutting lathe had an entrance groove and the 1"
oscillating exit groove. This was because the recording industry
discovered that one of the factors holding back growth of sales was the
need to operate the gramophone at 3-minute intervals. Record
purchasers did not like being required to quit spooning with their
honeys every 3 minutes to change the record. The automatic record
changer was introduced to solve this problem, and it increased sales.
The electrical cutting lathes were designed from the outset to be used
with the newly-introduced automatic record changer, which required a
lead-in groove and a larger exit oscillation to reliably cue the
changer to lift the tone arm.
Therefore, my theory is that the industry, or Victor at least, switched
over to the electrical recording process piecemeal. First they
electrified the recording process, and only a few years later did they
electrify the cutting process. They didn't switch over to the new WE
cutting lathes until the introduction of the automatic changer made it
necessary to do so. In the interim, they used a hybrid process wherein
an electrical signal was used to actuate the old mechanical cutting
lathes.
If anyone has any more information about this, I would like to hear it,
and I will appreciate any corrections if any of the foregoing is
incorrect.

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> Therefore, my theory is that the industry, or Victor at least,
> switched over to the electrical recording process piecemeal.
> First they electrified the recording process, and only a few
> years later did they electrify the cutting process.

Before the invention of magnetic tape, the cutting process _was_ electrical
recording. * How can you separate them, except with some other recording medium
(which didn't exist at that time) in-between?

* Ignoring the mic, of course.

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"How do you think this was done? Short of having a loudspeaker play
into a
recording horn, which would sound unspeakably bad, I can't think of a
way
for an electrical signal to actuate a mechanical cutting lathe that
isn't
really an electrical cutting lathe."

By mountng an electrically-operated servo on the acoustic cutting lathe
and actuating the servo with audio power output.

"One data point making this unlikely: electrical and acoustical
recordings
sound a lot different -- and the sonic signatures of electrical
recordings
appear on Victor and other records quite early."

This would be expected if the "front end" of the recording process used
microphones and amplifiers rather than an acoustic horn.

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I don't mind good-faith corrections, but the responses to this thread
have been nothing but an exercise in setting up straw men and knocking
them down. I give up.

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Several years ago I saw a guy at a steam engine fair that had a lathe-a
real lathe, I think a South Bend, that is-and a rig with a diaphragm
and a horn (that resembled a "Jill's John", for those who know what
that is) and he was demonstrating making acoustic recordings on a
cylinder of some hard material which he refused to describe. It went on
the cross-slide and playback was via a gramophone slider thingy. He'd
record a passerby loudly talking or "singing" (I use quotes because
they were uniformly reminiscent of the probably misnamed contestant on
one of the rube-talent shows recently) and play it back a few times.
He'd then take the chick-pee horn off and mount a conventional tool
holder, turn off .050 or so, and record another track. The residual
vibration on the lathe was so high as to make it much worse, I'm sure,
than a commercial cylinder dictaphone of yore, but it demo'd the
principle very well.