| Posted by Steve L. | November 14, 2022 - 07:57 am |
| Hi Hal, I too have been impressed with the quality of the Reader's Digest record sets, inherited from my parents. There are six sets in this collection, including Joyous Music for Christmastime, which is the one that eventually sparked the Dynagroove article. I had decided to digitize that set to make a copy for my brother. Alas, the set had been well-used over the years and had some scratches and surface noise. I did some research on it and discovered a detailed article about the set by a Canadian theater reviewer. He mentioned that all of the cuts on the set were eventually released on seven CDs and CD sets but never en masse on CD. I was able to get them all with eBay magic and recreated the vinyl collection from those. It let me compare the Dynagroove recording to the CD versions and that is what led to this article. Now your posting has drawn my attention to the other five Reader's Digest record sets and I hope to sample those in the near future. Many are also fine, Dynagroove recordings. Thank you for your note. |
| Posted by Hal | November 13, 2022 - 11:26 pm |
| My parents in the 1960’s and early 1970’s bought a ton of Reader’s Digest record sets. Later after Dad died, my Mom gave all six boxes of them to me. After moving a few times, I got tired of moving them. That was like 28 record sets. I decided I only want about 7 of the sets. I tried selling them or giving to family, but no use. Too bad. I moved again and gave the rest away to a good thrift shop. Several of the record sets I kept are marked Dynagroove on them. Either way, the record sets were all of very good quality. Dynragroove or not, they all sound good and are good quality made LPs. Hal. |
| Posted by Steve L. | July 29, 2022 - 12:50 pm |
| Hi Adrian, Interesting questions. I've also wondered when they stopped using DSC, as well as DSE, fearing that the organization might have informally cast parts of it aside over the years following its introduction. But I don't have real information about that. You could tag the "quietly stopped using" statement with a citation-needed flag. In any case, I'm interested in what you may find. Thank you for calling my attention back to the Wikipedia article, because it contains a number of attributions for historical negative comments about the technique, which I don't recall seeing before. (Perhaps they were added after the Tronola article was written in 2010.) |
| Posted by Adrian | July 29, 2022 - 12:47 pm |
| Do you have any information on when RCA stopped using the Dynamic Styli Correlator? I've done some searching but haven't been able to find anything specific or reliable. I've seen lots of comments such as "it was eventually phased out," "they quietly stopped using it," "discontinued with little fanfare," etc., but none of those comments give any clues to what year that happened. Wikipedia states that the increasing availability of elliptical styli "...made tracing compensation obsolete by about 1970, and RCA quietly stopped using the technique." In rereading that sentence a few times, I'm unsure whether the writer meant that RCA stopped using the DSC in 1970, or if 1970 was the year that a majority of customers had elliptical styli* and therefore RCA stopped using the DSC at some point after 1970. Either way, the wiki article does not provide a source for that statement, so it's hard to know whether that's even factual or just hearsay. Part of the reason why I'm very interested in nailing down a date for RCA's discontinuance of the DSC is because many of my Dynagroove records were pressed in 1969 and 1970, and I can't tell by looking at them whether they were made with the DSC or not. |
| Posted by Steve L. | July 11, 2022 - 09:58 am |
| Hi BMRR, I received your email and look forward to posting the audio samples. Thank you! |
| Posted by BMRR | July 11, 2022 - 07:37 am |
| Thanks so much for sharing this information and history about Dynagroove. Most helpful! Regarding your request for audio samples, I sent you an email. :) |