| Founded | 1919 |
|---|---|
| Founder | John G. Scully, Lawrence Scully |
| Defunct | 1985 |
| Headquarters | , United States |
Scully Recording Instruments was an American designer and manufacturer of professional audio equipment for recording studios and broadcasters.
| Founded | 1919 |
|---|---|
| Founder | John G. Scully, Lawrence Scully |
| Defunct | 1985 |
| Headquarters | , United States |
Scully Recording Instruments was an American designer and manufacturer of professional audio equipment for recording studios and broadcasters.
John J. Scully was a machinist who worked for sewing machine manufacturer Wheeler & Wilson before going to work for the Columbia Phonograph Company in 1904. During his employment at Columbia, Scully was put in charge of the company's experimental laboratories and improved the design of the Dictaphone. Independently of his work at Columbia, Scully designed and perfected his first disc recording apparatus in 1909. Scully left Columbia Phonograph Company in 1918 and became a technical engineer for General Phonograph Corp. for a year.
In 1919, John J. Scully founded Scully Recording Instruments in Bridgeport, Connecticut as a manufacturer of disc cutting lathes. The original Scully lathe was a mechanical, weight-driven device that utilized three weights (the largest being 100 pounds) attached to pulleys connected to a turntable which revolves under a stationary cutting head. The lathe was positioned on a 5–6 foot tall pedestal to provide adequate distance for the weights to descend, their descent governed by a 7-gear transmission, driving the lathe a sufficient amount of time to cut a complete disc. [1]
From 1919 through 1923, the company produced 1 disc cutting lathe per year. In 1921, the company sold its first Scully Recorder to Cameo Recording Corp. in New York City, [2] and in 1924, Western Electric purchased a Scully weight-driven lathe to demonstrate their "Westrex" cutter head and electronics for both the Columbia Phonograph Company and Victor Talking Machine Company. Both companies began using the Westrex system for recording sessions in 1925 after agreeing to license the system from Western Electric. [3]
From 1925 to 1929, Scully Recording Instruments experienced booming demand from the motion picture industry as it adopted new electronic sound recording technologies to transition from silent films to "talkies," but orders for new disc cutting lathes halted following the stock market crash. [4] In 1933, John J. Scully's son, Lawrence J. Scully, joined the company, and the following year, RCA Victor placed the first of what would become orders for 20 disc cutting lathes purchased from Scully over the next four years. [4]
During the remainder of the 1930s and into the 1940s, Scully disc cutting lathes were widely adopted by major American recording studios and broadcasting companies, including NBC Radio Network, who bought 36 lathes between 1938 and 1947. The company ceased recording lathe production during World War II to work on aircraft subcontracts, with the only exception being a recording lathe built in 1943 for the United States Navy's Underwater Sound Laboratory in nearby New London. [4] After the war, orders for Scully recording lathes rolled in from Westinghouse Broadcasting, the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, General Motors, Columbia, Decca, and Capitol Records. [4] In 1945, Mary Howard founded her own recording studio, Mary Howard Recordings, and became the first private person to own a Scully lathe, which she purchased for her own record label, MHR. The company exported recording lathes to England, France, Germany, Japan, Italy, Mexico Chile, Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines, and even Russia. [4]
By 1950, the year that company founder John J. Scully died, his company had 10 employees. The same year, the company introduced the model 601, a disc cutting lathe with variable pitch, which made it possible to vary the width of the grooves (i.e. the pitch) of a master disc to preserve the fidelity of the recorded material while conserving the available recording space of the disc. Addition of the variable pitch feature raised the price of Scully's recording lathe from $2,500 to $7,300. In 1955, the Scully company introduced automation for this variable pitch feature, which could be included for a total price of $8,500. [4] Scully Recording Instruments continued to dominate the U.S. marketplace for disc cutting lathes until the 1960s, and almost all American lacquer masters were cut using a Scully lathe, often fitted with the Westrex cutter head and electronics. [5]
In 1961, recognizing the limited market for professional disc cutting lathes and facing increased competition from Neumann, whose disc cutting lathes were no longer restricted from being imported to the United States, [5] Scully Recording Instruments entered the tape recorder market. Under the direction of former Presto Recording designer Arthur Gruber, who was Scully's chief engineer and vice president from 1961 through 1968, Scully introduced the model 270, a playback-only device intended to address the needs of automated radio stations. [6] When sales of the model 270 didn't meet the company's expectations, Scully contracted Bell Sound Studios co-founder and chief engineer Dan Cronin to design a tape recorder that would utilize the parts that the company had purchased to build the model 270. The Scully model 280 was introduced in 1965, [7] and adopted by recording studios such as Decca in London. [8] Scully later introduced a 1/4-inch 2-track recorder, then a 1/4-inch 3-track recorder, and eventually a 1/2-inch 4-track recorder, which became a mainstay for several years. [6]
In 1966, as many recording studios were seeking to upgrade to 8-track capabilies, the company introduced a 1-inch 8-track recorder, the 284-8, [6] which offered more features than the similar model from competitor Ampex, while taking up less rack space. Advision Studios installed a 284-8 in 1967, making it one of the first 8-track studios in London. [9] By 1972, Decca was using two 284-8s, and added a third later. [8]
In 1967 Scully introduced an innovative and unique 1-inch 12-track model, the 284-12, which was briefly popular. The first of these machines was custom built for Apostolic Studios in Manhattan and was used by Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention for the album Uncle Meat. The same model was quickly installed at the Record Plant in New York City and used by Jimi Hendrix, and also at Pacific High Recording in San Francisco. With more tracks, artists enjoyed increased recording flexibility. The 12-track system used a narrower track width than 8-track, which may have influenced the recording quality. Despite the narrower track width, Tom Scholz of Boston, later bought one of these machines and was thrilled with its sound quality. [10] However, the 12-track format was overtaken by 2-inch 16-track technology, which was introduced soon after by Ampex. The 12-track Scully system also pre-dated the introduction of 2-inch 24-track recorders, which would become an industry standard for recording studios during the mid-1970s.
In 1971, the company introduced the Scully 100, a 2-inch 16-track model priced below $11,000, significantly lower than the industry-leading 3M M56's $15,000 price, but the Scully 100 wasn't commercially successful. Scully shifted its efforts to the broadcast market but found it to be crowded, and the company went out of business by mid-1980s. [11] Scully's 16-track models were used by studios such as Sigma Sound in Philadelphia. [12]
A total of approximately 600 Scully recording lathes were built, and it is estimated that less than 40 still exist, with only twenty-one of those still functional, making them extremely rare. [13]
Prolific jazz recording engineer Rudy Van Gelder purchased a Scully model 601 recording lathe for his recording studio in 1954, and acquired a second model 601 in 1962. [14]
In 1975, Tom Scholz purchased a used Scully 12-track machine for home demos and the initial recordings that would become the debut album by Boston. [10]
Third Man Records acquired a Scully recording lathe previously used at King Records in Cincinnati, which is now used by Vance Powell for direct-to-acetate recording of live performances at the label's Blue Room venue in Nashville. Live at Third Man releases cut direct-to-acetate with the Scully lathe have been released by artists including The Shins, The Kills, Seasick Steve, Blitzen Trapper, and Billie Eilish. [15] [16]
Engineer Nicholas Bergh spent over 10 years assembling and restoring a vintage 1925 Scully lathe with a Western Electric amplification system used to demonstrate the first electrical sound recording system in the 2017 documentary film The American Epic Sessions . [17]
A phonograph, later called a gramophone, and since the 1940s a record player, or more recently a turntable, is a device for the mechanical and analogue reproduction of recorded sound. The sound vibration waveforms are recorded as corresponding physical deviations of a spiral groove engraved, etched, incised, or impressed into the surface of a rotating cylinder or disc, called a "record". To recreate the sound, the surface is similarly rotated while a playback stylus traces the groove and is therefore vibrated by it, very faintly reproducing the recorded sound. In early acoustic phonographs, the stylus vibrated a diaphragm which produced sound waves which were coupled to the open air through a flaring horn, or directly to the listener's ears through stethoscope-type earphones.
An audio tape recorder, also known as a tape deck, tape player or tape machine or simply a tape recorder, is a sound recording and reproduction device that records and plays back sounds usually using magnetic tape for storage. In its present-day form, it records a fluctuating signal by moving the tape across a tape head that polarizes the magnetic domains in the tape in proportion to the audio signal. Tape-recording devices include the reel-to-reel tape deck and the cassette deck, which uses a cassette for storage.
A phonograph record, a vinyl record, or simply a record or vinyl is an analog sound storage medium in the form of a flat disc with an inscribed, modulated spiral groove. The groove usually starts near the outside edge and ends near the center of the disc. The stored sound information is made audible by playing the record on a phonograph.
A recording studio is a specialized facility for recording and mixing of instrumental or vocal musical performances, spoken words, and other sounds. They range in size from a small in-home project studio large enough to record a single singer-guitarist, to a large building with space for a full orchestra of 100 or more musicians. Ideally, both the recording and monitoring spaces are specially designed by an acoustician or audio engineer to achieve optimum acoustic properties.
The Gramophone Company Limited , based in the United Kingdom and founded by Emil Berliner, was one of the early recording companies, the parent organisation for the His Master's Voice (HMV) label, and the European affiliate of the American Victor Talking Machine Company. Although the company merged with the Columbia Graphophone Company in 1931 to form Electric and Musical Industries Limited (EMI), its name "The Gramophone Company Limited" continued in the UK into the 1970s.
Ampex Data Systems Corporation is an American electronics company founded in 1944 by Alexander M. Poniatoff as a spin-off of Dalmo-Victor. The name AMPEX is a portmanteau, created by its founder, which stands for Alexander M. Poniatoff Excellence. Ampex operates as Ampex Data Systems Corporation, a subsidiary of Delta Information Systems, and consists of two business units. The Silicon Valley unit, known internally as Ampex Data Systems (ADS), manufactures digital data storage systems capable of functioning in harsh environments. The Colorado Springs, Colorado, unit, referred to as Ampex Intelligent Systems (AIS), serves as a laboratory and hub for the company's line of industrial control systems, cyber security products and services and its artificial intelligence/machine learning technology.
Mastering, a form of audio post production, is the process of preparing and transferring recorded audio from a source containing the final mix to a data storage device, the source from which all copies will be produced. In recent years, digital masters have become usual, although analog masters—such as audio tapes—are still being used by the manufacturing industry, particularly by a few engineers who specialize in analog mastering.
Reel-to-reel audio tape recording, also called open-reel recording, is magnetic tape audio recording in which the recording tape is spooled between reels. To prepare for use, the supply reel containing the tape is placed on a spindle or hub. The end of the tape is manually pulled from the reel, threaded through mechanical guides and over a tape head assembly, and attached by friction to the hub of the second, initially empty takeup reel. Reel-to-reel systems use tape that is 1⁄4, 1⁄2, 1, or 2 inches wide, which normally moves at 3+3⁄4, 7+1⁄2, 15 or 30 inches per second. Domestic consumer machines almost always used 1⁄4 inch (6.35 mm) or narrower tape and many offered slower speeds such as 1+7⁄8 inches per second (4.762 cm/s). All standard tape speeds are derived as a binary submultiple of 30 inches per second.
Vitaphone was a sound film system used for feature films and nearly 1,000 short subjects made by Warner Bros. and its sister studio First National from 1926 to 1931. Vitaphone is the last major analog sound-on-disc system and the only one that was widely used and commercially successful. The soundtrack is not printed on the film, but issued separately on phonograph records. The discs, recorded at 33+1⁄3 rpm and typically 16 inches (41 cm) in diameter, are played on a turntable physically coupled to the projector motor while the film is projected. Its frequency response is 4300 Hz. Many early talkies, such as The Jazz Singer (1927), used the Vitaphone system. The name "Vitaphone" derived from the Latin and Greek words, respectively, for "living" and "sound".
An acetate disc is a type of phonograph record generally used from the 1930s to the late 1950s for recording and broadcast purposes and sees limited use as of 2009. Despite their name, "acetate" discs do not contain any acetate.
Stereophonic sound, or more commonly stereo, is a method of sound reproduction that recreates a multi-directional, 3-dimensional audible perspective. This is usually achieved by using two independent audio channels through a configuration of two loudspeakers in such a way as to create the impression of sound heard from various directions, as in natural hearing.
Sound recording and reproduction is the electrical, mechanical, electronic, or digital inscription and re-creation of sound waves, such as spoken voice, singing, instrumental music, or sound effects. The two main classes of sound recording technology are analog recording and digital recording.
Georg Neumann GmbH is a manufacturer of professional recording microphones. It was founded in by Georg Neumann in 1928 and is based in Berlin, Germany. Their best-known products are condenser microphones for recording, broadcast, and live music production purposes. For several decades Neumann was also a leading manufacturer of cutting lathes for phonograph disks, and even ventured into the field of mixing desks. Today Neumann also manufactures preamplifiers, studio monitors, headphones, and audio interfaces.
The history of sound recording - which has progressed in waves, driven by the invention and commercial introduction of new technologies — can be roughly divided into four main periods:
The LP is an analog sound storage medium, a phonograph record format characterized by: a speed of 33+1⁄3 rpm; a 12- or 10-inch diameter; use of the "microgroove" groove specification; and a vinyl composition disk. Introduced by Columbia Records in 1948, it was soon adopted as a new standard by the entire US record industry. Apart from a few relatively minor refinements and the important later addition of stereophonic sound in 1957, it remained the standard format for record albums, during a period in popular music known as the album era. Beginning in the late 1970s, LP sales began to decline because of the increasing popularity of Compact Cassettes, then in the 1980s of compact discs. By 1988, the latter format began to outsell LPs.
Multitrack recording of sound is the process in which sound and other electro-acoustic signals are captured on a recording medium such as magnetic tape, which is divided into two or more audio tracks that run parallel with each other. Because they are carried on the same medium, the tracks stay in perfect synchronization, while allowing multiple sound sources to be recorded at different times.
Universal Recording Corporation was a recording studio in Chicago founded by Bill Putnam, Sr. for the purpose of investigating new recording techniques and the development of specialized recording equipment.
Flamingo is the second studio album by the rock band the Flamin' Groovies. It was released in 1970. Following the group's departure from the Epic record label, it was the first of their two albums for Kama Sutra Records.
Electric music technology refers to musical instruments and recording devices that use electrical circuits, which are often combined with mechanical technologies. Examples of electric musical instruments include the electro-mechanical electric piano, the electric guitar, the electro-mechanical Hammond organ and the electric bass. All of these electric instruments do not produce a sound that is audible by the performer or audience in a performance setting unless they are connected to instrument amplifiers and loudspeaker cabinets, which made them sound loud enough for performers and the audience to hear. Amplifiers and loudspeakers are separate from the instrument in the case of the electric guitar, electric bass and some electric organs and most electric pianos. Some electric organs and electric pianos include the amplifier and speaker cabinet within the main housing for the instrument.
A disc cutting lathe is a device used to transfer an audio signal to the modulated spiral groove of a blank master disc for the production of phonograph records. Disc cutting lathes were also used to produce broadcast transcription discs and for direct-to-disc recording.