When I was doing my E&C at night I had a classmate who worked in the record mastering area at EMI. Late '60s.
He took me for a tour one night after we finished.
He said that sometimes the standard of master tapes they received was poor.
He played one Frank Zappa master from the US that was hitting +20dB on the VUs. Very loud, but without the distortion you would expect. No-one knew how this particular studio managed to do it.

The dynamic range of an acetate can be pretty amazing. He deliberately cut a test disc 50dB down and played it back (through the cutter amp, driving some very expensive monitor speakers) with the playback gain advanced accordingly. No crackle, no noise!

The fidelity of this system was impressive. Back in the days when I could actually hear 20kHz!

There you go. that’s interesting. I always felt AU pressings compared to US were far superior through this period.

I always felt AU pressings compared to US were far superior through this period.

Back in the day, I was a member of the Australian Record Club. In my experience, recording and pressing quality varied widely depending on label.

CBS label discs were often poor, with the worst having tape hiss and divots in the vinyl surface causing clicks and pops.

IIRC, those discs were pressed in Sydney.

BTW: Sandy's Records in Dee Why NSW is still operating: https://www.recordstoreday.com.au/business-directory/1154/sandys-music/

The two I remember were Festival Records in Ultimo and HMV/Thorn EMI at Homebush.

A few years back, well, more than a few, I did a walk around Sydney and photographed many of the former radio factories and parts suppliers and there is a thread here somewhere on that subject. I should do another on record production facilities. It will take some researching though.

Sadly, the part of the HMV factory at Homebush that didn't become a Kennards Storage place was mowed down before the virus hit and a block of flats sits on the site.

History of the Australian Record Club here. I had forgotten that CBS took it over. As above, I don't have fond memories of the quality of CBS local pressings.

http://www.milesago.com/industry/arc.htm

I am planning to give a talk at the supported living village I now call home, on old time radio programs, and playing some records on the Scharnberg Strauss tablegram I have kept.

The records include a few 16 inch, inside start discs with a couple of episodes on each side. I also have some 12 inch 33 1/3 discs with program episodes and these are the ones I will be playing.

The records were all produced locally by Grace Gibson Radio Productions.

Harold

Your pick-up stylus should be tilted at 22-degrees Vertical-Tracking-Angle (VTA) for minimal distortion, but few playback setups achieve this:
The reason for this is 'springback' of lacquer after mastering lathe cuts modulation. But this is not a problem with later Direct-Metal-Mastering (DMM) cutters. So you can reduce the VTA to zero by raising the height of tonearm pivot for DMM sourced records:
They found the DENON-DL103 Moving-Coil cartridge had the correct 22 degrees (I used to own a DL103 as they were used by radio-NHK in Japan)

https://www.hi-fiworld.co.uk/index.php/vinyl-lp/70-tests/103-cartridge-tests.html?start=5

The wiki piece on Direct Metal Mastering is quite enlightening: solving some problems, creating new ones..

Here are some gems:

* "there is no need to rush the finalised master disc directly into a refrigerator for groove preservation"

* "early DMM discs revealed..a high frequency..caused by the vibration (squeal) of the cutter head"

* "Teldec [Germany] attempted to sell its DMM technology back to RCA, however RCA was not interested"

* " Europadisk's DMM lathe was sold at auction on 20-SEP-05 to the Church of Scientology for US $72,500"

Here's another Gem on DMM:

"..improved transient response, as well as the more linear phase response of DMM improve the overall stability and depth-of-field in the stereo image"

So it's admitted that the electromechanical nightmare that is the vinyl LP also messed up phase: Add this to the phase shifting of stereo analogue master tapes (due to tapehead azimuth errors) and we come to analogue's third weakness: (after noise and distortion) phase instability...militating against aural reconstruction of 3D sound.

Analogue's great strength is Distortion.

Nice, warm, even harmonic distortion.

Yes, there’s not a good music recording in history that has not benefited from some form of distortion from the microphone to the playback medium. Now they have developed digital algorithms and sophisticated software plugins that replicate analogue distortion from preamps, channel strips, compressors and tape saturation simulators. They are good but not as good as the real thing.

While 20th century hi-fi record/replay systems were far from linear time-invariant (LTI), people still claimed to perceive a stereo-image:

A horn speaker enthusiast I knew was taken aback when a critic charged "horn speakers don't image". Why is this? Any theories?

Apart from the well known LTI issues of analogue record/play signal chains, there is criticism of horn speakers (used for monitoring in most 20th century recording.) Was their problem with horns themselves or their compression drivers? Speaking of the latter, wiki on "Phase Plug" has this to say: ".. only half the wave energy, at best, travels directly from the diaphragm through the phase plug slots and out to the listener. The other half (or more) causes cancellations within the space between the diaphragm and the phase plug, or causes temporal anomalies (time smear).."

...that problem with compression drivers in recording studios, where only 'half or less' the energy transitions the phasing-plug, sounds similar the the dilemma of Shadow Mask picture tubes that block most the electron beam energy exciting the phosphors, and giving you unwanted X-rays as a by-product!