Stuff You Should Know - Vinyl Records: Black Magic at Work

Episode Date: October 4, 2022

Despite reading all about how vinyl records are recorded and made, it's still a bit like black magic to us. Dive in and learn all about the coolest music medium.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Munga Chauticular and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to

believe. You can find in Major League Baseball, International Banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey everybody, big special announcement. At long last, we are going back on the road to do live shows and I could not be more excited. I too am fairly excited. I could tell. It's going to be great, Chuck. We're going to be back live on stage for the first time in two, three years?

We were on stage in 2020. At the very beginning of 2020 and we're going on stage. Yeah, 23. Yeah, three years since we've trod the boards and we're about to trod them boards again, Chuck, on February 1st, 2nd, and 3rd. We're going to Seattle and Portland or Portland and Seattle and then for sure on February 3rd, we're going to wind the whole thing up in San Francisco, right? That's right. We're going back to Sketchfest, our usually January home, but early February home this year. For my money, the best comedy festival in the world and we're going to be going to Sketchfest and again, we're not sure of the order yet. We don't have ticket links yet, but we do have a little bit more information. We just couldn't wait to tell you guys. Tickets are actually going

to be on sale very soon. October 6th, there's going to be a pre-sale with the password and we will probably put those out on our social links. I'm not sure how you'll find out, but you'll find out. And then on October 7th, there'll be general sale. We'll give you more information as we get it, but again, we just couldn't wait to tell you guys because we're too excited. That's right and you know what we're doing. We've got a great working with some great new people with our social media stuff. You might have noticed that our Instagram and our Facebook have some new and exciting things happening. So that's a great place to find information about the tours. Very nice. So we'll see you guys in the Northwest Coast this February and the rest of you, who knows 2023 could be a

wild year. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of I Heart Radio. Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh. There's Chuck, Jerry's here and Jack Black's lurking around, which makes this Stuff You Should Know. We got the Fax On Wax at W-S-Y-S-K. That's pretty great. Sorry. Pretty great. You should have been a radio personality. I used to want to be. I wanted to be a DJ for a while. You came awfully close, man. I have to say. That was a pretty close to a realized dream, if you ask me. Well, and what's funny is, is the saying wax and one of our local record stores hears wax and facts, an old DJ saying wax, in this episode, you will find out why they say wax. Yeah. It's hopelessly outdated, but yeah,

it still applies to a certain extent. Let's do this. This is pretty fine. I'm excited. Do you collect vinyl, Lenny? I think you do a little bit, right? Yeah, a little bit. I don't collect it. I just buy stuff that I want, but it, you know, I'm vinyl. But I'm not just like, look, everybody check out my collection. I just have a selection of records. How about that? Yeah. My deal is, I have my records, most of my records that I had growing up, never got rid of them, moved them every time, like a dummy. Yeah. I got inherited while still alive, my stepfather's record collection. He didn't pass away, but he just said, here, I'm done with these. I'm so sick of music, it's ridiculous. But that's where I got all that good. Like he has all the, all that prog rock

from the 70s. He was way into that stuff. Sweet. And then I started buying just sort of classic favorites of mine, basically kind of filling out newer classic favorites from when I stopped buying records up to this point. So I'm kind of running out of room on my little three-banger shelf. So I'm slowing down the rate of purchase, but it's, it's good. And through the miracle of modern technology, I can play a record through a Bluetooth set of Bluetooth speakers. That is amazing, but it's also a tragedy. Well, yeah, I wish I had a plugged in hi-fi system. I've got, I've got some like just Rockford or Rockfile or whatever shelf speakers. Yeah. That are plugged into an, I guess a post amp or a pre-amp, I don't know, one of the amps,

but it's not part of the record player. And the record players plugged into that. And it seems kluji enough that I'm like, okay, this seems pretty authentic. Yeah. I mean, you can tell we're experts here with our use of Rockford files and pre-amp, post-amp. Right. So I, I mean, still you don't have to be a total expert to talk about vinyl, although there will certainly be record store guys, the music equivalent of comic book guy who will write in and tell us how, how much we just totally suck forever and like just got every single thing wrong. But this is not for those people. It's for everybody else who just wants to know how vinyl records work. How about that? I think that's great. And I think a few of these stats

before we dive into the history here in order, thanks to Dave Ruse who pointed out that obviously in the 50s, 60s, 70s and into the 80s, some certainly into the 80s, vinyl records were sort of the thing. And their peak in the 70s, there were more than 15, sorry, 15, 530 million records bought each year. Each year. Which is about 60% with eight track and making up for the rest, because of course, you had to play something in your conversion van. Right. You couldn't really, most, most cars weren't outfitted with record players. That's right. But then the cassette came along and the CD and all but killed vinyl. They accounted for 0.1% of music sales at some point in the 90s, which is a pretty big drop,

I would say, but then made a comeback in the 2000s because of nostalgia and because of hipsters and audio files and certain movies and record store day and other reasons. Yes, but if you could rewind back to 1997 and you ask somebody if they would ever see vinyl albums again, they would just laugh in your face. They were done. They were goneers. And so the idea that it came back is pretty remarkable as far as comebacks go. And then in 2020, I believe, vinyl records outsold CDs for the first time since 1986. That's a heck of a comeback. And that's not even to say that CDs were doing that poorly. CDs actually had increased in sales over the past few years as well. So it wasn't like CDs were just tumbling downward while vinyl was slowly creeping up, where they were both

creeping up and vinyl just overtook CDs. I think in 2020, the year that vinyl overtook CDs, 27 and a half million vinyl records were sold around the world. In 2021, it jumped up to 41.7 million. Yeah, baby. So yeah, vinyl is definitely back. And there's a lot of reasons why it's back. And I say we start with the history of the whole thing to maybe explain why people like vinyl. I think that's where you kind of find the birth of the whole thing. Totally. Some other good news, by the way, just to drag that out a bit is that cool video I sent you from How It's Made. They went to that music record, that record pressing plant in Nashville, which is I think still one of the biggest ones. And they had to re-expand. They were like, Hey, everybody,

remember when we shut down almost? Well, we have to open up a bigger place now, which is awesome. And it's a great comeback story. Yeah. And I would guess the people who were buying the 0.1% of music sales as vinyl in the 80s and 90s, they had to just be exclusively DJs, right? Oh, no. I mean, they were always vinyl collectors. They were just not nearly as many for a while. That wasn't exclusively DJs because the DJs, they didn't even use records anymore, did they? I mean, that's a pretty recent phenomenon. They were using vinyl throughout the 80s and 90s, for sure. I guess we should look into that when they switched to the carts. I would say in the 10s, maybe. Really? I'm just guessing, but if it gets a response like that

out of you, I'll guess every time. I don't think so. I think they've had the carts for a while. So the 2000 aughts? I mean, I think before that, someone will know and tell us. Oh, whatever. I mean, we do work for a major radio company. We should just ask somebody. We'll ask somebody. We'll get them on the phone. We'll call in. We'll be the 99th caller. I love it. So we're talking the history now, Chuck, I'd say. And we're talking vinyl records, but you can't really talk about vinyl records without the beginning of records or recorded sound in general. And most people say who came up with recorded and played back sound, Thomas Edison, of course. It was the last quarter of the 19th century, I think. And you're right.

Like, yes, Thomas Edison definitely gave us what we kind of understand as recorded and played back sound. But there was a guy who came a good 20 years before him, although apparently Edison wasn't aware of his work. But he was a guy from France, Edward Leon Scott de Martinville. Great name. Yes. And I've seen him referred to as Scott. Apparently that's his last name. And I guess he's from Martinville, France. Okay. Oh, that would make sense. So Scott was tinkering around with something called a phone autograph. And if you look into it, and we'll talk about how vinyl records are made later, but like he basically said, here's how we're going to make records from here on out. Here's at least the rough contours of the

whole thing. Yeah. And it's very rudimentary. But as you will see when we describe it compared to what they did later on, it's sort of the same idea, which is, and we'll get into how he did it, but which is basically using a vibrating tool to cut, and it vibrates because of sound. And it makes a vibrating representation of whatever sound you're making and cuts that into something. Yeah. What's astounding? This is the most astounding thing that I've learned in a really long time is what is captured on record is a natural language of sound that humans stumbled upon. And one of the first people, possibly the first person to stumble upon it is Edward Leon Scott de Martinville. And like this is always existed. We just never tried to capture it. It just didn't

occur to us. But when you look at a record, you are holding in your hands a captured encoded representation of a sound that was made at some point in time. And Scott was the first person to figure out how to capture this. Yeah. And it's funny, even after having learned this, watched all the videos, being able to regurgitate how it's done, it's still a bit like black magic to me. Sure. How you say something into a microphone, and it ends up being cut into a vinyl record and a needle can bring that sound back out. It's still just sort of mind blowing to me. Yeah, there is like definitely a certain amount of black magic to it. And it's pretty cool. Like it's the cool kind, you know what I'm saying? It's not the kind where like somebody

breaks a leg because of it. All right. So should we talk about the phon autograph? Yeah. So what Scott did was he took a, and I'm not quite sure what inspired him to do this, but he took an acoustic trumpet, you know, like the old gramophone, the crank record players that had like the big horn coming out of it. Yeah. Like what did you say, Sonny? Exactly. That's an acoustic trumpet. And he put a little membrane over the small and the narrow end of it. And he attached a boar's hair, one single boar's hair to that membrane. And then the boar's hair was touching a glass plate, I think. And on the glass plate, he had put something called a lamp black, which is like soot basically, just put a nice coating of it. And then he spoke into the large

end of that acoustic trumpet and that black magic started. That's right. And so what happened is that boar's hair, bristle would wiggle and vibrate along, you know, to match whatever sound he was making. Right. And it drew basically what Dave refers to, I think astutely as a sonic fingerprint through that soot. It drew sort of the visual representation of sound for the first time. At the time, I think he called it a natural stenography is what Scott called it. But at the time he was like, so great. I promise that this thing, maybe one day we'll be able to make a sound, but we don't know how to do that. And everyone went, what are you even talking about, dude? But through the miracle of science, they actually got a computer to virtually play, virtually is in,

you know, not like virtually like it actually did, but they use a virtual digital stylus to actually be able to play these early recordings of this dude, like singing French songs and saying things. Oh, yeah, like Farajaka and all that. And wouldn't Farajaka, it was... Well, then who cares? No, I've got the song in here somewhere. But, I mean, it's kind of creepy sounding, but it is. And then some of it is just sort of hums and noises, but it is a human being, it's Eau Claire de la Lune. It is a actual human being speaking words and singing words and long before Edison did. So, yeah, it's a good 20 years before Edison. And there was one other thing that Scott figured out

that was really important and he figured it out right out of the gate is that when you are etching on that glass plate covered in lamp black with the boar's hair, the boar's hair is just kind of wiggling, right? The sound vibrations are making it wiggle. And that wiggle is transferring acoustic waves into mechanical energy that's being captured in those etchings. But since the boar's hair is just in one place, you have to move that glass plate. Yeah, very key. And you can't just move it at any rate. It has to be a specified rate. And he figured out how to move that glass plate at, I think, one meter a second, which is really fast. And that means that if you re, if you put that thing the other direction at one meter

a second, then it would play. And what he figured out was that RPM's rotations per minute, what would come to to be a huge part of record playing was essential because if you do it too fast, you have the same amount of information. It's just compressed time wise because you're moving that glass plate faster than one meter a second. So it comes out sounding like Alvin and the chip mugs. If you move it too slow, less than one meter a second, it's that same amount of information, but it takes up a longer amount of time and you come out sounding like us on, you know, half speed or something like that, which people like to do when they smoke marijuana, cigarettes out here. Although to be clear, he was not using revolutions because it wasn't spinning

yet. No, no, what came to be known as RPMs, but it has to do with adjusting like a set frequency. It's extraordinarily important that the playback and the recording are done at the same frequency and Scott figured that out out of the gate. That's right. So put a pin in that. Edison comes along and wasn't really working from Scott's work, but was a rival of Alexander Graham Bell and was working on telephone products and decided to try and record phone calls. And he had a big breakthrough when he attached a stylus to a diaphragm, a lot like Scott did. And I keep wanting to call him Martinville. I know. Scott from Martinville. And then the, you know, exactly in the same way, the vibrations of the diaphragm were etched in this case onto a sheet of paraffin wax with a needle.

And he was basically like, wait a minute, we can record, it doesn't just have to be phone calls, we can record all kinds of things. Like one day there shall be rock and roll. And he figured that out. He was like, yeah, no, forget the phone. I'm doing something else with this. So he moved from that paraffin wax sheet to metal cylinders wrapped in aluminum foil, right? Yeah. And it's almost like the, I mean, sort of in a way, it's almost like the inverse of how a music box works. Like it's a metal cylinder, but with a music box, there are little nubs that prick metal combs of different pitches. In this case, you're cutting a groove. And, you know, if you had a sheet of tinfoil at home and got a toothpick, you know, you can

drag it along and make an impression. That's essentially what he was doing. Right. So the fact that he moved over to cylinders was pretty progressive. That actually was the way that music was captured and played back for a while was on these cylinders. And Alexander Graham Bell was the one who took these cylinders and changed them from aluminum foil into wax. There you have it. Yeah. So wax cylinders were really popular. That was how you listened to music back then, how you recorded music and listened to it. And I have a little anecdote from Yumi, actually. Ooh. She found out that when she... Bring her in. I'm going to tell it on her behalf. Okay. But I'll put on a wig and try to tell it in a higher

pitch voice. Oh, I've seen that before. So she found out that there's some guy who had like the best record collection in the country, possibly the world, lived like 30 minutes away from her. So she and some friends went and visited this guy. His name is Joe Boussard. And he's still around and he still has this fantastic record collection. And most of it is pre-1950s stuff. Oh, wow. But he has original wax cylinders, like from the 19th century that he played for them. And she said they were like African-American spiritual. She's like, it was clearly people sitting on a porch singing this stuff. Yeah. And it was like these people had sung this in one take on a porch in like the 1890s or something like that.

And there she was in, you know, 2000, whatever, listening to it played back, which was pretty sweet. And she said, this is lame. I want to hear some rock and roll. That's an awesome story. We had, it made me think or remember rather that we had a hand crank phonograph growing up in my house. Wow. I guess my dad got it at some point. And it was cool. You know, we had old records and we didn't sit around and listen to them. But my brother and I would put on one of those old records and crank it up every now and then. And, you know, it's cool. It sounds kind of like a horror movie, but it's like, it's just, it's a neat experience to see sort of the early technology at work. There is something really unsettling about a 1920s record being played. There's just

something about it. It's like, for some reason, it always seems like the singer wants to harm you, but is pretending they don't. I know, even especially because they're always singing about good times and a little like warble. And you're like, no, no, no, you got a knife in your hand. Right. Exactly. Slick back hair and some crazy huge smile. All right. So Edison and Bell are both working on this stuff. Bell has got his wax cylinder going. He played it back on something called a graphophone. This was in 1887. You crank that handle. It rotates that wax cylinder and it plays it back through an acoustic trumpet, which I think we had one on ours that was just for show, but there was an actual kind of rudimentary speaker underneath.

And that's what amplified the sound. And then, of course, later on, the hand crank was replaced with a motor. And just to explain the hand crank too, you don't have to keep cranking it. You would crank it a bunch and then kind of hit go. And then it would store up that mechanical energy and rotate the player. Right. But that was still cylinder, right? That was still the wax cylinder. Obviously, at my house, we didn't have those. But yeah. But so we're working not even necessarily just wax, but we're working with cylinder. That was how you played back a recorded sound. And it was like that until a guy came along, I think in the 1890s named Emil Berliner. He was German-American. And he came up with the gramophone, which probably sounds familiar because Berliner's invention, which was

shellac records, he was the first one to say, forget these cylinders. Let's put the stuff on discs and come up with rotations per minute. And just he made all these innovations. His invention was the standard from the 1890s to 1950. That was how you listen to music was this guy's invention, the gramophone. Yeah, which, you know, the main reason why is because you could actually reproduce these on mass. You could create like thousands of copies of disc records, which was not something you could really do with the wax cylinders. It was very expensive. Took a lot of time to reproduce them. He figured out how to make these molds of a master recording and press them into records, which is it really set the stage. I mean, things have changed a

little bit, but it really set the stage for how we still do it today. Yeah. I mean, it's virtually the same. It's just, you know, a little more advanced today, but the principles are certainly the same. The big difference though is this was not vinyl that this guy was making. Like I said, it's shellac. And shellac is a natural substance that was basically, it's a natural polymer. It's like natural plastic, basically. It comes out of the lac bug, which I think is native to Southeast Asia, if I'm not mistaken. So it was expensive to produce, to shellac, enough shellac to make a record because again, this stuff's coming out of a bug. I got a question on that. What? It was from the female lac. Is that why it's called shellac? Maybe. I think it is. That's pretty great. If

it is, that's wonderful. That's a great old-timey play on words. Well, I'm going to say that's fact. Okay. Well, that's all you have to do these days, right? Just say something. Yeah. Anybody who could contradict that is long dead anyway. So it's all good. Well, I think, you know, we put a pin in this whole revolutions per minute. Should we go ahead and explain that? Yes, because Scott was the one who figured that out and it just became a, it's essential to reproducing or recording sound, right? Like you have to have it recorded at a set frequency because the frequency affects, is it the pitch where it goes really high or really low? Is that pitch? Sure. Okay. All right. I forgot yourself taught. Yeah. Okay. So it affects somehow

because again, a sound wave makes a wave and if you compress it, it's still the same amount of information. It's just over a shorter amount of time and that makes it again sound like Alvin and the chipmunks. That's right. So what the old records from kind of up into the 1950s, I think, or maybe it was later than that, when did they change, you know, from 78 to 33 and a third? Well, the first one came out in like 1948. So I'm sure they were still selling those shellac 78s into the 50s. All right. So 78 RPMs was the standard for a while. And if you're wondering how they came up with this RPMs, it's very easy. It's because the motors that they used at the time ran at 3600 revolutions per minute. If you tried to think about either manufacturing

a record or playing a record at 3600 revolutions per minute, that's pretty funny to think about. It's impossible, basically. So that's where gears, your old friend gears come in because the purpose of a gear is to step down the speed of a motor. And in this case, they had a gear with 46 teeth. So when you divide those 3600 revolutions, you step it down with a 46 tooth gear and you eventually get down to 78, technically 78.26 RPMs. Yeah, I still don't understand all that, but I accept it as real. Well, I mean, yeah, it's what we should do. No, never mind. I don't want to do how gears work because it's way more complicated than it seems on the surface. Okay. Well, that sounds like right up our alley. We can confuse everyone further with that one. But at any rate, it steps

down that motor via a gear and we just do simple division. And that's how you got the 78. So 78 is pretty fast. I mean, it's more than twice as fast as a normal LP album today spins. And it's shellac, which is pretty hard and brittle. So you can imagine if that thing flew off, it could take great Aunt Edgar's head clean off in the conservatory. Sure. Like the recording artist intended. Right. That was an abandoned clue murder weapon. Yeah. He did it with a shellac record. Right. So the RPM is really important, Chuck, for a couple of reasons. One, it was really fast in it. So it was dangerous, at least in my opinion. But more importantly, because they were spinning so fast, you had less time to get the information across. So that meant

that you had maybe, I think a 12 inch record could hold four to five minutes of music or of sound on each side. Yeah. That's only like nine songs back then. Right. So there were a lot of problems with these shellac 78s, but they were a huge advance, a huge leap forward. But when vinyl came along, it changed everything. And Chuck, we are almost 30 minutes into this episode. I say we take our first commercial break. Wowie. Wow. Let's do it. Okay. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give

me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael, um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that Michael and a different hot sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

I'm Mangesh Atikular. And to be honest, I don't believe in astrology. But from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life. In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention. Because maybe there is magic in the stars, if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, Major League Baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had a handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father.

And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, wherever you get your podcasts. All right. So we are moving into the 20th century. And finally, vinyl comes along. It is called polyvinyl chloride or PVC. So those white PVC pipes you see in the big box hardware store, it's the same thing. It's a type of plastic. And in the 1930s is when record companies started to kind of experiment with this because all the aforementioned problems with shellac being very breakable and being very brittle. And I believe Victor, which was a division of RCA, was the first producer of vinyl records in 1930.

But it did not go well because it took a little while before they had all the playback equipment sort of synced up working well together. So in this case, the pickups used to send the signal to the amplifier, sort of like a guitar pickup. They were too heavy and it cut through the vinyl because it was not shellac. It was used to shellac. So they had to sort of rejigger everything. And it wasn't till after World War II that they really put in kind of all their efforts toward making vinyl work. Yeah, because there was a shellac shortage during World War II. So everybody's like, okay, we need to figure out this vinyl stuff for a bunch of different reasons. But one of those things that came out of it was the vinyl record. And most people credit a guy

at CBS named Peter Goldmark for inventing the vinyl record that we know and love today. Okay. That's right. He basically said, he figured out how to make it stronger. He figured out how to etch the groove smaller so you could fit more stuff. So he got it down to.003 inches. I think shellac maxed out at.01 inches. So a lot more music basically per record. Yeah, because in addition to more grooves, which means more information, which means more length of time of recorded sound on one side, it also played at a slower RPM. So it had more time to play all that information too. So you could just pack I think 22 and a half minutes per side on a 33 and a third RPM

LP, which is what they're called long play albums, the basically the vinyl record that Goldmark invented. That's right. And here's a fun little tidbit that Dave found. I never realized, but album actually predates the invention of the vinyl LP because when people only had the 78s, they stored them in sleeves called albums. And I think when the LP finally came out, it held about the same amount as an album worth of 78. So they called them albums. Yeah, like one record, one vinyl record could hold probably five or six shellac records worth. Yeah. So that's kind of a boast, I guess. This one record's an album, you sucker. But now we get to basically what Dave called the war of speeds.

You mentioned the 78s finally came down to 33 and a third. So Columbia Records reduces the first LP in 1948. And RCA is who released the 45, which you know, people collect 45s too. They're the smaller ones that only have a song on each side. It's like the single. Yeah, that's just exactly what it is. So RCA Victor in Columbia had that, that war of the speeds that you mentioned to try to say, you know, the 33 LP is, RPM LP is better. No, the 45 RPM, single is better. And the public just said, peace, everyone, peace. Well, let's, let's have them all. Yeah, I mean, all you needed to do was have a machine that can vary its playback speed. And you can have both. There didn't need to be one or the other.

And they, they did realize that there are some people who, who just want the single version, like, I guess, since there's been music, there have been people that like singles. I remember my first 45. Do you remember what yours was? I didn't collect 45s. So I actually got into 45s. I was never a big time into them, but I got into them because I just wanted one single song. It was Sweet Georgia Brown because my family had gone to a Globetrotter's game and I was like, I really like that song. So my parents took me to Peaches Records and I got Sweet Georgia Brown and I must have driven my family crazy without realizing

it playing Sweet Georgia Brown over and over again. That's adorable. And then do you remember what your first LP was? Absolutely. Billy Joel's Glass Houses. Oh, that's a good one. How old were you? Well, whenever that came out, I feel like I was tinnish. Okay. But I'd have to look at the date. My brother and I adorably split the cost. So it was like five bucks and we each threw in $250 and got Glass Houses. That's awesome. My first LP was Seven and the Ragged Tiger, the Duran Duran record. Good record. I think I got it around second grade. I was always, I think I've mentioned this too. I was always a late adopter.

So I was buying records long into the cassette run. I was always like, no, I didn't want to believe it. It was like taking over and then I was buying cassettes far into CDs. And I was buying CDs. I mean, I have CDs that are four or five years old from now. I didn't even know you could get those anymore. Yeah. Well, the problem was I have a, probably older than that because my pickup truck that I will never sell is now just sort of our work in camping truck. It has a CD player in it. So I was buying CDs for that. Yeah. I can see like not giving up the ghost because number one, you're a very loyal person. So I could see you being loyal to records. And then also at the time, you didn't know you were ever going to have a choice again. So you were

fighting against the death of the LP vinyl record because that's what it seemed like when cassettes and then CDs came out. Yeah. I have no cassettes and in fact made my switch to CDs because someone stole my 100 cassette carrier out of my friend's trunk of my car in little five points when we went to a show at the Variety Playhouse where you and I performed. Yeah. And sold out if I'm not mistaken. That's right. So they stole that and I was like, all right, I guess I got to buy CDs now. So yeah, that's it for me, everybody. I'm done with cassettes. So one other thing that kind of came out of vinyl records too is because you could put more information into one, they figured out how to actually create stereo records starting in 1958. And I can't imagine what this must have

seemed like to the people back in 1958 because up to that point, everything was mono. It was one channel. So all of the sound came through one channel and you could have two speakers, five speakers, 10 speakers. It wouldn't matter because they were all playing the exact same information. And you could just sit in front of one speaker and get the same experience. With stereo, you have two different channels coming out, usually right and left. And right's going to the right speaker, left's going to the left speaker. And when you sit between them, you don't get the sensation that the sound is coming out at either speaker. It seems to be coming out of the space between the speaker in front of you and gives you this much more immersive, rich experience.

And they figured out how to do that on a vinyl record, which if you're talking about black magic to begin with, just for creating a record, creating a stereo record is even more impressive, if you ask me. Yeah, they did it. They figured out how to etch the walls of the groove. One side of the wall, the outside wall was the right channel, the inside wall was the left. And when you play it back, that needle reads both sides at once. The Beatles were one of the first, well, yeah, I could safely say one of the first bands to really experiment with stereo recording. And all of a sudden, you had like Paul in one ear, John in the other, singing harmonies. Right. And when headphones became more and more the norm,

this is when this really paid dividends. Yeah. Like Mitch Kramer listening to music in his room at the end of the night and dazed and confused. That guy, Wiley Wiggins, works in podcasts some. Oh yeah. Hey, Wiley Wiggins, how you doing? I know. I was listening to the Great Great podcast. You must remember this from Karina Longworth, the movie podcast. And at the end of one of the episodes, I actually sat through the credits and it said, additional research and transcription by Wiley Wiggins. That's awesome, man. That's super cool. I don't know if he's still doing that, but hello to both of you. So I watched, yeah, for real. Have you ever seen Waking Life? Yeah. Oh yeah. He starred in that. He did the Great Great in that, but also just in Dazed and

Confused. He's always going to be Mitch Kramer to me. But I watched Dazed and Confused the other day and I was like, this movie still holds up. And then I was like, there was no reason for Matthew McConaughey to do any other character ever again because everything he does is Watterson. Is Watterson in space for interstellar? It's Watterson as a lawyer and the Lincoln lawyer. It's just Watterson all the time. And if you go back and watch Dazed and Confused, you're like, he and Watterson are one and the same person basically. Yeah. It's Watterson selling Cadillacs or whatever that is. Which one? Is it Cadillacs or is it Lincoln that he does the commercials for? Oh yeah. Yeah. Lincoln. Where he just drives around and waxes philosophical.

Yeah, exactly. Totally. I forgot about the ad campaign. That was all right. It was all right. All right. All right. All right. Well, let's take our final break and we're going to come back and no doubt stumble through how records are actually made right after this. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing could be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously. I swear. And you won't

have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep. We know that Michael and a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody you everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikala and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology, but from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life in India. It's like smoking. You might

not smoke, but you're going to get second hand astrology. And lately I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention because maybe there is magic in the stars if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, major league baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world can crash down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart radio app,

Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, record store guys. This is the point where you can just leave us and we'll say thank you for listening up to this point. Yeah. I mean, this is going to be a little clumsy because it's a little black magic-y and it's... They're also made different ways depending on who's producing the record. It's generally the same process, but every cook has their own recipe. Yeah. So the essential process, I guess, is it's ridiculously similar to what Scott and Edison and Alexander Graham Bell were doing, which is you basically put sound or music into some sort of amplifying device, no longer an acoustic trumpet, instead some, again, amplifier that makes a little needle wiggle. And as that

needle wiggles, it's etching that transcription of that sound wave into a mechanical record of it. That's why records are called records. It's a record of that sound. And they do this with basically a turntable called a cutting lathe. And now I understand why they call it cutting a record. I had no idea until I guess yesterday why they call it that. Impressing. Yes. Impressing makes sense too, and it will in a second. But it's just like this turntable, but it looks like a turntable in an industrial turntable, and that's exactly what it is. Yeah. It's just a large machine. The one that the video I saw was the one in Nashville. I don't know if there are different chisels, but they use an actual Ruby gemstone chisel at their factory. And that vibrating Ruby

chisel cuts that groove and they still use lacquer, at least at this place. They use a lacquer disc. Right. And this is called the mother disc. It's kind of cool. In the end, you end up with, or you can end up with as much as 2,600 feet of groove lines, which is seven football fields. I don't know how many Big Macs, but if you took like the lines of an LP, and I don't know if that's both sides or one side. One. Is that just one side? That would be seven football fields long, which is pretty amazing. Okay. So no, for some reason on the shellac record, the mother record, they fit way more information in from what I saw. I saw that an LP, the average LP of like 22 minutes is like about one and a half football fields long. Oh, really? That's what I saw. But I saw what you

were talking about in that video, and I'm like, where's the distinction here? And I couldn't figure it out. So anywhere between one and a half to seven football fields, that one groove. And by the way, if you look at a record, those grooves, that's one long concentric groove that you could stretch out as a single line had never occurred to me. Did you realize that before? Yeah, sure. Because where would it end? It's a spiral. I don't know. I hadn't really thought it through, but that's a great trivia question that you could get a lot of people on. How many grooves are on the average LP record? And the answer is two, one for each side. Yeah. Although what about the little space? I didn't really look up how they did that, the little space between the songs?

That's still a groove, I guess. Yes, but it must have just a blank, there must not be any etchings in that groove. It's still a groove. They tell all the musicians, like, shut up for five seconds. Shut up. Yeah. And a one and a two. What's it called, room tone? Yeah, room tone. And by the way, this is how records are mass produced. If you go to Third Man Records in Nashville and sit in the little booth, it literally cuts the sound you make directly onto a record that you take home. Yeah. I think that guy that Yumi visited had his own. Like you could, if you have $50,000 to spend to mess around with, like you can get

yourself a cutting lathe, but so you've got that mother record that's made from shellac, you said, right? Right. And then they take that and they coat it with some sort of metal. I don't know if it's platinum, I think they said nickel was involved, but they use electrolysis and they make a negative of that record. So they get the metal in all of the grooves and when they pop the metal off of that mother shellac record, they have a mirror opposite image of it rather than grooves and etchings and valleys, it's bumps and ridges and mountains. And that's what they use to press records from, right? Yeah, that's called the master stamp. And that master stamp can make about 100,000 records. Man. I think it is nickel, or at least what they use at this one company

that I saw the largest one. Okay. And that will harden up into silver and you peel it away and then you kind of cut it and trim it up so it's actually round. And then when you go to press the actual vinyl, they dump and we'll get to why they're black in a second because that's super interesting. But you get these black polyvinyl pellets, you melt them down in a hopper basically. And what pops out is a little puck shaped, like a little biscuit basically of vinyl. You put the label on it because that helps center things apparently. And then you have, you know, the one side of the record on the top and the other side on the bottom, these silver stamps and you apply about 60 tons of pressure and it just squishes it out

and presses it into thin vinyl. If you think it might be a little messy around the edges, you are absolutely right. They trim that off with a machine. So it's perfectly round and that excess stuff is called flash and they actually just throw that back to use later on. It's recycled. Yeah, they re-melt it, right? And just use it. Yeah, which is awesome. Totally. There are, I saw, I saw people online who say that records made from that reused flashing do not sound as good as other records. I'm like, dude. Oh, really? Yes. Wow. Come on, man. You need another, a second hobby. It doesn't just have to be record collecting. And they didn't use the word actually at all, right? No, not at all. They were just

daring you to say something. So that's it. That's how one record is made and you said you can use one of those master negatives for 100,000 records. So I guess they make a few of those and they have a run and that's that. You have your whole run of records created and you mentioned something about records being black and they don't have to be black. I think I have at least one or two that are colored like red or something like that. Yeah, it is cool. It's definitely different. But black is the color of choice for a couple of reasons. One, PVC is like a natural insulator. So static electricity can build up in it, which is nay good because static electricity attracts dust and dust messes up your records. It can cause them to skip and do all sorts of terrible

stuff. It can clog up your needle. And then so they add this stuff called carbon black. I think half of a percent of your records material is carbon black and that actually makes it a little better of a conductor so it repels dust a little better. Yeah. So that'll help them. And apparently, I never thought of this either, but you just, you see dust better on a black record. So you're more apt to keep your records cleaner, probably. And I never really noticed that, but yeah, on my clear records, I can't see any dust. I have to say some of the records that I have, I got from our buddy Van Nostrand, who's always been very generous in sending records that most people would not want to hear.

Engelbert Humperdink I have, thanks to him. I've got a one about Jimmy Carter, a comedy record, the disco duck, but get this, there's no disco duck anywhere. And it's just like a kind of a jazzy upbeat covers of disco songs without the duck. I don't know where Van Nostrand found this, but it's pretty astounding where the records that he comes up with incends. So thanks, Van Nostrand. I used to listen to comedy records growing up too. As a kid, I would get George Carlin's Class Clown, and I'm still not good at impressions, but how I got interested was the Rich Little Records, The First Family Rides Again. And it was a big thing, like comedy albums. And some comedians today are getting vinyl pressed of their specials and stuff, which is kind of

cool. It is cool, because those comedians are flush with Netflix money, so all of them can afford a $50,000 cutting lay. So we kind of explained, I think in our own way, how they're made. But then there's the black magic of actually hearing these things. You can sit around and look at those grooves all day, but what you wanted is get up and dance, right? Pretty much. And that's that. And that's records. Chuck, if you could also afford not just a cutting lathe, but an electron microscope, you could do worse than putting a record underneath it, because you would see some freaky stuff going on in those grooves. That groove itself holds a bunch of different little etchings. And each sound has its own etching in this groove. And again, these grooves are

sometimes like an eighth of a millimeter thick. Like they've gotten way thinner than when Peter Goldmark first invented vinyl records. And they hold so much information that you can actually physically see. Just like Edward Leon Scott of Martinville saw himself on that glass plate. If you look really, really closely through an electron microscope, you can see the same thing. And you are literally looking at a physical encoding of sound. The sound wave has been transferred mechanically through that ruby, what'd you call it? The carving thing? Chisel. Chisel. On to a record. And now if you put your record on your turntable, play it back at the appropriate rotations per minute. Very important. And you put the arm down. What you're doing is

you are putting down a needle or a stylus that is a very sensitive, usually industrial gemstone, like sapphire, maybe ruby. I saw a diamond most frequently. And that that actually reads every single one of those little tiny squiggles in those grooves from start to finish. And it retranslates that mechanical encoding through to the cartridge, which translates that into electricity, which creates an audible sound that has to be amplified and run through speakers. And when you do all that, you're listening to a record. That's right. And I kind of compared it to a guitar pickup. Which one do we explain that in? Was that in the Les Paul Fender one? Definitely. Yeah. It had to be. But it's sort of the same idea as a guitar pickup. It uses copper wire and magnets to create

this, you know, electric current. And in this case, it's induced at the same frequency as that little needle wiggling through the grooves. Yeah. And then you have to obviously that you still won't hear anything unless you feed that through an amplifier and then eventually speakers. If you listen really closely, you can hear the faintest bit of it, but it's nothing to dance to. You're right. Dave, Dave helped us with this, right? This was Dave Jam. It was Dave. So Dave kind of drove something home for me when he talked about how the middle C on a piano is vibrates at an amplitude of 261.63 Hertz, which means that it vibrates to create that sound, that middle C on a piano. It vibrates at 261.63 vibrations per second. That's just one note on

a piano, and that is encoded in a record. When you play a middle C on a piano and you capture it on a record, that's just one thing. Now consider all of the different notes, all the different sounds, all the different instruments that are encoded onto a record. And each one is physically encoded in the right proper time, the right spot on that groove in that record playback on that particular RPM. And when you start to put all this together and realize how complicated it is, it really gives you an appreciation for what's going on with vinyl and why people love it so much. Yeah. I mean, it's sort of easy to wrap your head around someone plucking a piano string or lute rather hammering a piano string. That would be a harpsichord if

it was plucked in a middle C, like ding, ding, ding, ding, and how that might be translated. But when you think about a groove being cut that represents like guitar feedback from Jimmy Hendrix, which is a sound, but it's not like you think of a familiar note being plucked or something or the sound of distorted guitar, it's just, it's amazing. It is black magic. Yep. I'm with you. So a lot of people, Chuck, say vinyl is the only way to go. And other people say, take your vinyl and shove it because digital music is the only way to go. And there's apparently a pretty big argument about all this. Yeah. I mean, you know, your vinyl enthusiasts will say it has a warmer sound. They'll say that's as close to the original waveform as you can get because it's

directly from a master recording, and it's not digitized and compressed. I, and Dave points out, and I fully agree that part of this, you know, I'm sure there are audio files who have an ear that can really differentiate, differentiate sounds on a really minute level. I'm not one of them. So for me, part of it is the ritual of the record, album art, liner notes, holding an album and looking at it while you're playing it, like all the stuff that was lost when records shrunk to cassettes. And you could still sort of do it then. And you could kind of do it with CD cases and liner notes. But the record was really like, it was, it was a part of the whole experience, large format art. Yes. But there are people who say that, you know, like you said, that digital

gets rid of those pops and clicks that a lot of people like from records. It has a wider frequency range than vinyl does. So it can hit the highs and the lows more accurately. I mean, I like it all. I don't think you have to choose. I don't think you have to choose either. But I saw a really good description of the difference between digital recordings and analog recordings, which is what is meant to be captured on a record. There was a guy, a recording engineer named Michael Connolly, who said, let's say that you want to measure your height and you stand next to a door jam and you put a pencil along the top of your head and you mark the door jam. What you've just done is created an analog of your height that mark stands in for your height, right? Another way you could do it

is stand still and hold the measuring tape and then see what your height actually is. And then you take that measurement and you transcribe it to another medium, like you write it down in a notebook. And the thing is, is your analog is truer. It's more faithful because it's an actual representation of your actual height. But the measurement can be reproduced much more easily. You can go from notebook to notebook and just write down that same measurement every time without any loss of information. And that's not true from that door jam pencil mark. Because let's say you move, you want to take a door jam with you to remember how tall you were and you install it at your next house. It might not be at quite the same height off of the floor as it

was before. So those are those pops and clicks that get added into it when you reproduce a sound, an analog sound. Whereas with digital, yes, it's not the entire waveform of the whole thing. It's measurements of it. But it's such a mind boggling number of measurements with a mind boggling amount of information that most people say, not only can you not tell what's lost in a digital recording, some people say digital recordings are actually better. Right. But to be clear, we are talking about a digital recording as in a CD, which has about a little more than 1400 kilobits per second worth of information, which is super high. If you're talking, you know, streaming something from a streaming service, there is a difference. And you don't

have to be an audiophile to tell. It is a thinner sound. It's tinier. It is compressed down from the CD size, which is a little over 1400 to between 96 and 160 kilobits per second. So that's a lot of compression going on. And Dave points out that you, like you're probably playing that through, like in a Bluetooth speaker, maybe, or earbuds, not very good quality. If you do think records sound better, it's probably because you're at your audiophile friend's house who collects records, and he'll also place it through a really high quality amplifier instead of speakers. So, you know, the sound between the difference between that and streaming something through a Bluetooth speaker or earbuds is just night and day. Yeah. Because so the bit rate is just the number of measurements

taken, right? And measurements are not exact. It's the kind of a snapshot of the thing. It's not the whole thing. Like a record is the whole sound wave. But I ran across something, Chuck, that just kind of puts the whole argument to bed. And I noticed it in that video you sent about how records are made at that records manufacturer in Nashville. Did you notice that they started out with a digital file? Well, yeah. I mean, yeah, it was a Pro Tools file. It was. So they transferred a digital file onto a record. So the whole difference for anything that's ever been put to a record from a digital file is out the window. Your arguments just totally moot because you started out with a digital file. Yeah, but it's a huge digital file. Sure. But it's still digital, which means it's

not in precise representation of the exact same thing. But other people say, well, a record's not either. There's just too much room for error. It can't possibly be precise. But I think you said it. You don't have to choose. Yeah, I agree. You got anything else about vinyl records? Because I could keep going, man. This is fun. A little fun tidbit about my mom when she was little living in Memphis, Tennessee. My granddad took her into, I think it was called the Memphis Recording Studio. It's pretty on the nose. And recorded her playing the clarinet or something and left with a record and that later became Sun Records. So technically, my mom recorded where Elvis Presley recorded. That is pretty amazing, man. I think that's true. That's the story I got. I'm sticking to it.

I think that's a very charming story to end on, Charles. So let's go instead to Listener Mail. How about that? Yeah, this is a quickie about farting a lot after colonoscopies, which we talked about a bit. Okay. Hey, guys, I am Chuck, the gastroenterology technician, huge fan of the show. And I don't think I missed a single episode. I was regarding your different experiences after colonoscopies, because I was super farty and you don't remember being super farty, right? I was super high and don't remember it. That's right. Air is injected during the procedure to purposefully distend the colon for a better view of all the walls and easier passages to the holy land. And it makes your hands puff up like a cabbage patch kid, which everybody likes to see.

Some facilities use air, which will result in the fart party. Some facilities use the more expensive carbon dioxide, which is absorbed by your colon, breathed out your lungs and results in a more comfortable experience. This is a possible cause for the difference between your experiences. You may still get a little gassy after CO2, but I can assure you that recovery rooms in the CO2 facility are not full of farts and is a more pleasant experience for the patient in general. Did you go to Bargain Barn Hospital for yours? To colonoscopies are us. Spatula city. The colon barn. I guess so. It was pretty fun. I enjoyed the fart barn. Okay. And this is from Chuck and he says, PS, G.I. is the best department, butts and guts for the win.

Nice. Nice work, Chuck. Nice work, you too, Chuck. Thanks, man. If you want to be like Chuck, either one, well, not really the one that just wrote in, you can write it into us too. And send us an email to stuffpodcastsatihartradio.com. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeart Radio. For more podcasts, my heart radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help and a different

hot sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Munga Chauticular, and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to believe. You can find in major league baseball, international banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes, because I think your ideas are

about to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.