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| With The Beatles Matrices; Why so many matrix numbers? | |
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| Tweet Topic Started: Mar 4 2010, 12:30 PM (3,295 Views) | |
| warmbuddy | Jan 12 2013, 03:12 PM Post #31 |
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Level 2
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Frank...just for your info, mine is as follows: XEX 447-4N 2 O XEX 448-3N 1 T The labels are corrected - " Got A ", "Dominion Belinda" KT tax code on Side 1 label With EJ Day sleeve (darker variation) with incorrect spelling - "Gotta" |
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| admiral halsey | Jan 12 2013, 05:26 PM Post #32 |
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Level 4
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Not sure I've grasped the Mother/stamper concept fully.......but here goes WTB 4N/3N Side 1= 4N , Mother 3, Stamper O Side 2 3N , Mother 1, stamper T So where does this figure in the general number of pressings? AH (Sorry, just realized that mine is almost identical to the one above) |
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| namralos | Jan 12 2013, 08:37 PM Post #33 |
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Level 5
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Single-digit stampers are very early. Each stamper would normally be used for approximately 5000 copies -- or until they wore out, whichever came later. O = 5 T = 9 So that's probably one of the first 50,000 copies (at least, off of those masters). The order for WTB is really strange, though. Stampers on the 1st set of masters go ridiculously high -- and were obviously used later on, too. So it looks like they had multiple masters in use at the same time. That would be really weird, but WTB was the fastest selling album of all time in Great Britain, so it wouldn't surprise me that they had chaos for almost a year. |
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| Jae | Aug 9 2013, 12:04 PM Post #34 |
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Here's the article I refer to on page 1... Posted Image |
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| AurelianDE | Aug 10 2013, 10:59 PM Post #35 |
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I've read all this a couple of times and I must confess that I still don't get the joke about the 'faulty master'. Either I'm exceptionally daft or my sense of logic is deficient or my technical understanding is even more limited than I thought it was or all three of them. I'm still trying to understand, so I'm going to take this step by step. Kindly correct me where my assumptions go wrong. I'm afraid this is going to take some time, sorry for this. We have the story that copies were recalled because of a 'faulty master' or rather 'one out of 40 of them' (from the articles Jae provided). In addition there's the story that the stylus jumped out of the groove and that that was due to excessive bass on 'Roll Over Beethoven'. As Frank pointed out, 40 masters is rididulous, so the assumption is that mothers or even stampers were the culprits. But that doesn't make sense either. 1. Trying to sort out he technical side of it. (People who know all that may skip this first paragraph, but don't jump out of the groove!) If you cut nothing but silence into the lacquer, you'll get a perfect spiral groove. Let's call this the zero line of the groove. If you record sound, the cutting head moves out to the left and to the right of the zero line (there is only horizontal movement in mono recordings). If you cut a bass note of say 20 Hz, the cutting head will cross the zero line from left to right or from right to left 20 times per second. If you cut the sound of a voice, say 2000 Hz, it will cross the line 2000 times per second. It won't have time to get very far from the zero line because it is forced to return to it very often within one second, so it only produces small wiggles of the groove. For the bass note, however, it swings out much wider because it has much more time to cover until it is 'due back' for the next crossing and is not allowed to stand still in the meantime. So, while the width of the groove is determined by the stylus, the space that the groove needs on the record surface is determined by the distance it meanders away to the left and to the right of the ideal zero line. The second determining factor is volume. At any pitch, more volume means greater deviation from the zero line and consequently more space on the record surface. That is why bass at high volumes is particularly dangerous during the cutting stage (remember that at a later stage they did numerous tests because engineers thought that the bass on 'Paperback Writer' could not be pressed on a record). The cutting engineer cannot influence the 'groove feed', which is determined by the rotational speed of the turntable. In the outer reaches of an LP, one second of music will take up approx. 17 inches of groove. He can only to some degree influence the amount of right-left movement of the cutting head by adjusting volume or reducing bass frequencies (that's where dynamic compression and EQ come in). What he can influence is the speed at which the cutting head moves inward on the lacquer. If the grooves need more space (more distance from each other), he will increase that speed, whereas for silent passages he will lower it, thereby 'packing' the grooves more densely on the surface in order to save space and, with it, playing time. This process was initially carried out by hand and is now done half-automatically. The cutting lathe 'listens' to a few seconds of music ahead before it is cut and adjusts groove distance accordingly, but the operator can give it an extra boost to be on the safe side. So this is how bass tracking mistakes happen: Either the machine or the engineer misses the proper moment for widening the groove distance. As a result, the cutting head swings out widely as the bass arrives and damages the wall to the part of the groove that has just been cut on the previous turn. And on the next turn, the cutting herad may not keep a safe distance to the part with the wide wiggles and may cut right into them. As a result, the stylus on your record player, due to its inertia and maybe also lack of compliance, will be unable to follow the bend and crosses the wall to the adjacent groove. The consequence of this boring piece of technicality (if I got it right in the first place) is that a mistake such as a stylus not being able to track a sound that contains sharp attack bass notes at high volune (such as the bass drum on Roll Over Beethoven) is due to incorrect mastering. 2. If a cutting mistake is contained in the lacquer, it will be there in the master. The lacquer could actually be played and checked but isn't for obvious reasons. Any playing would damage the soft groove walls. The lacquer (or soft master) is lost during the making of the (metal) master. The master, being a reverse image of the record, cannot be played. Any mothers are made by electroplating the master and will therefore contain any mistakes that have survived into the master. The mother can be played and is checked. Any impurities caused by the manufacuring process such as a spec of dust in the metal will be removed before the stampers are made. Several things may go wrong during the process of electroplating, and especially stampers (3rd or 4th generation copies, depending on whether you count the lacquer) can be faulty and will ideally be discarded, but bass tracking mistakes can not be introduced at that stage. They can become more prominent, though, as the groove walls of the master wear out when many mothers are taken from it, and the groove walls of mothers wear out as successive stampers are made. So the only explanation I have is that the master (probably -1) was a borderline case and some mothers were found to be just within a tolerated range and others weren't and were just a tiny bit on the risky side. 3. There's another aspect of the WTB multiple masters-high number of stampers phenomenon that puzzles me. If indeed 40 mothers were used to press 550,000 copies, as the first article seems to indicate, that would make around 13,500 copies from one mother (as Frank has said above). As demand was so high, parallel masters may have been used at the same time, and there were mothers from the -1N master, the -2N master etc. in use at the same time. And maybe several mothers were discarded. That might just about fit. But why the high number of stampers? If around 5,000 copies is indeed the number of records pressed with one stamper, 100 stampers would be sufficient for pressing half a million records. But we have high two-digit and even several three-digit numbers of stampers for several mothers (see Frank's entry of Jan. 10). How can that be? Even if every second stamper was unusable (which is a ridiculous assumption), the numbers don't work out. If, on the other hand, we read '40 masters' as '40 stampers' in the article, that would mean that each stamper was used to press 13,500 records (which is amazing in itself), but it would also mean that only very few stampers were created from one mother. And we know that several mothers were created from the -1N master alone. That doesn't make sense at all. So either the number of records pressed from one stamper is considerably lower or there are mysteries in Parlophone's counting system which remain to be solved. Or both. Where's my mistake? Sorry for taking up so much of your time and patience. Any of you still interested in solving that puzzle? Cheers, Sebastian (aka Aurelian) |
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| jimboo | Aug 10 2013, 11:57 PM Post #36 |
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To put it simply my 1N first mothers jump like #### when played on my retro lightweight player which the wife allows in the living room but plays ok with my weighted Garrod arm. All the other masters play great. So logic decides that the fault is with 1N first mothers and the Dansette - Alba - Murphy type players were not compatible with this issue. As for the 3 o'clock stampers I ignore anything that is not a single letter. Reason I ignore them is they are meaningless. I have a 1st mother that jumps on ROB, the stampers are 1 T which I will accept as a 9th stamper. I do not accept my GDO 1st mother that jumps as the 105th stamper and what has probably happened is that it was a 1G, then a D added then an O added without the removal of the original stamper letter. ( Just realised that I am a With the Beatles Collector and not a Beatles collector) :D |
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| socorro | Aug 11 2013, 02:05 AM Post #37 |
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Thanks for that analysis, Sebastian. Very informative and thought-provoking. |
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| servi | Aug 11 2013, 08:39 AM Post #38 |
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Sorry, I don't understand the discrepancy completely. I doubt the higher stamper numbers (283 being the highest in Frank's list) account for the 550,000 records. These are more likely for every '60s pressing of WTB. Taking the 5000 number this would mean roughly 1,5 M WTB records, which seems a realistic amount. The highest stamper for 1N is 83, which is very near to the number 100 you mention as being sufficient to press the initial 550,000 (stamper 205 in the list is from mother 1_2, a submaster from the first mother, possibly used after 1963). Jimbo has stamper 105. Or is my conclusion incorrect ? I have been keeping stamper/mother numbers for SPLHCB mono pressings for some time and below is an example of the pattern that you see (table shows mother side1 stamper1 mother side2 stamper 2; can post the whole list of 150 mono LPs if someone is interested). Stampers were numbered sequentially in order produced, there was no separate numbering for each mother or each master. Also it seems as if there never has been any logic at Hayes with regard to the use of mothers. These were NOT used sequentially, the only consistency being 1G/1G copies (aka as "G copies" in the Hayes factory). 2 359 / 2 322 1 361 / 0 317 6 363 / 7 328 2 367 / 2 370 4 373 / 7 328 Stamper numbers of side 1 and 2 do not correlate and sometimes there may be quite a gap (e.g. one side behind on the other, or returning to a lower stamper number ?). EMI had strict testing criteria and a huge test listening facility. The number of records pressed per stamper was highly dependent on stamper quality. The importantance was that a stamper could unequivocally be identified and monitored for performace in the stamping process. IMO we should give limited value to the number of 40 mentioned in the newspaper cutting, either pointing to masters, mothers or stampers. Possibly this was a number given by EMI at a certain timepoint, e.g. the number of stampers used in a certain time period. |
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| billstiggins | Aug 11 2013, 09:32 AM Post #39 |
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Just for info, this technique was not used for early LPs like WTB; all groove separations are the same. I'll have to fish out my LPs to check, but I don't think it was common practice until the late 60s. :) |
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| AurelianDE | Aug 13 2013, 04:02 PM Post #40 |
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Coming back to this as it is anything but clear (to me at least). There are two issues: the bass tracking mistake and the number of mothers/stampers involved. I'll do that separately. As I said above, the bass volume is in the master, and several people have confirmed it is the -1N master that skips occasionally (if the rare -2 wasn't even worse!). EMI didn't recall all -1N records, so unless my guess is correct that the mistake became more prominent on specific mothers or stampers, due to wear during duplication, they probably didn't detect the problem during testing and only reacted when people complained. They may have found that not too many people complained and returned records, so they simply didn't bother. And it is highly improbable that they told retailers to look for a specific mother/stamper combination in the small print, so to speak, that usually nobody paid attention to. Remember that it is assumed that they recalled or immediately replaced the Rubber Soul -1/-1 when in fact those masters were used with a considerable number of stampers and crossover copies of -2/-1 and -1/-2 are frequent. I should have added to my previous post that if the groove walls were actually damaged by excessive bass volume (the grooves cut into each other), the complete master would have been useless and any record pressed from it would have been unplayable. That was not the case, obviously. Therefore master -1N must have been borderline and made only certain tonearms jump (as Jimboo said, testing records on two players, and testing his wife's patience :), weighted Garrod works, lightweight system jumps). @billstiggins: I didn't think of that, and you may well be right. The 'adjustable radial feed' system (I don't know how you properly call it) was invented during the forties. I always thought that the EP depended on that principle (because it extended the playing time of a 45). But that may not be true. It's quite possible that the N cutting lathe (no idea which make that was, any information in Recording the Beatles?) may not have had that feature. That lathe cut 'normal' microgrooves only (no vertical movement), hence the N suffix on mono records. If that's correct, they simply had to recut the record with slightly less bass volume and everybody was happy. Maybe -2N was cut with the same parameters as -1N, so they wisely stopped using it? Comment on numbering to follow. |
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| TheItalianFab4 | Aug 13 2013, 05:22 PM Post #41 |
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But -2N matrix doesn't exist on WTB mono copies, does it? |
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| AurelianDE | Aug 13 2013, 05:56 PM Post #42 |
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That's very interesting, thank you. This mother/stamper thing has been vexing me ever since I became aware of the lettercode EMI used. I always thought that the number of stampers was counted per mother or at least, per master. Apparently, I'm not alone with this. On Jan. 12, Frank said that one digit stampers indicate one of the first 50,000 records pressed, and added 'at least off those masters'! Surely, mothers must have been counted per master, otherwise there would be much higher mother codes and higher masters (such as the -7N) could never have mothers lower than 7.
That makes sense, and it seems to work for the SPLHCB mono pattern you provide (they all refer to master -1?). It seems very complicated in practice, though. Stampers were made from different mothers (some of those from different masters) simultaneously, in several galvanic units. Each mother had the master information already in it (XEX 448-1, for instance) and a mother code must have been added when the mother was made. The stampers took both codes from the mother they were made from. The Hayes people would then have to make sure that stamper numbers weren't duplicated when several stampers were made at the same time, and the stamper number as such said nothing but when the stamper had been made in the course of production. It didn't say -- collectors, take note! -- how 'fresh' it was. Stamper 300 could be the first stamper produced from the first mother of the 7th master. But nobody knows. If I understand correctly what you're saying, a particular stamper (say 105) will never be found in combination with different mothers or masters. It was made from a particular mother and it has a unique number. But quite obviously, you didn't produce 300 stampers unless you knew you were pressing 1.5 million records. Therefore, new mothers and stampers must have been made when they were needed. The same is true for masters. One master would generate mothers and stampers for a long time. (PPM, as mentioned in the original query, and others.) You didn't recut the record unless the original master wore out. In the case of WTB, we have seven masters at virtually the same time, even if -7 was cut later than -1. But when were those uniquely numbered stampers used? Stamper 100 was made later than stamper 5, and master -7 later than master -3. At the end of 1963 WTB had sold more than 550,000 records, and at the end of 1965 more than a million (including stereo copies, mind you). But the latest master used (-7) was already used in 1963. And very early stampers were produced from -7 earlier than higher stampers from -1 (if indeed the stamper number reflects time of production). As you say, the highest number in Frank's list -1N is 83. Enough for about the 400.000th record (again accepting the estimate of 5.000/stamper). Advance orders had been around 250.000. So why make the 83rd stamper from a master that was probably faulty? And why was stamper 15, a very early one, made from a -7 master, a very late one that still must have existed before even the 16th stamper was made from the first master? (My EJ Day WTB, corrected label, corrected sleeve is -5N 3 RD (20) and -7N 2 GO (15).) I'm not going into submasters, I'm dizzy already. What is it I don't understand? |
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| AurelianDE | Aug 13 2013, 06:00 PM Post #43 |
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I haven't seen it. But Frank says (on Jan 10): '-1N/-2N seen, with stampers 1 5ROG = 251 and 2 G = 1'. |
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| muffmasterh | Aug 13 2013, 07:23 PM Post #44 |
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don't forget emi play tested records so how the " faulty " master got through quality control is surprising.... if you even see a 1n1n with the red E sticker on the sleeve in theory that will be a play tested copy ( thats what i was told anyway ) |
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| pks1985 | Aug 13 2013, 07:31 PM Post #45 |
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Arrgh. Henry, why do I only know this now. Remember me saying I sold a fourth proof pepper for a steal a year or so ago? Well, that had a red sticker on it. Worse still, I removed it before I sold it. I'd never known of that play test sticker |
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