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Tom, this brings up one item in the MLP catalog I've been curious about. One rare point where the seams show is in the finale of the Dorati/LSO Concerto for Orchestra. There are lots of edits, including after the first note. The passage with the trumpets after 3:00 gets really microscopic and they had a hell of a time with a bunch inserts there. Not all of the joins match in level (nothing they could do about that after the session), but the cuts themselves seem to bump over the heads roughly. My thought was that the 35mm editing was not as good for such short highly-exposed bits vs. regular tape. I can picture those spots flying past the heads, with the tape hardly regaining contact before the next one comes along. Even the easier joins seem noisy on that session. Was that master always trouble, or by 1990 did your mom find those edits hard to play due to deterioration? I don't have an old LP to compare. Elsewhere in the recording some disturbances don't sound like edits, but just rough spots in the tape. Maybe this was early in their experience working with 35mm? In any case, I feel their pain, as it's a blemish on an otherwise excellent production. I think it's one of Dorati's very finest recordings and the deepest realization of that score I've heard; a hard-won victory. The LSO earned every shilling that day, July 3, 1962. (I'll drink a toast to them on the 50th.) -----Original Message----- From: Association for Recorded Sound Discussion List [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Tom Fine Sent: Wednesday, April 25, 2012 3:21 PM To: [log in to unmask] Subject: Re: [ARSCLIST] EMI, opera and 35mm? Hi Peter: Regarding your last comment, about editing 35mm for classical music ... I am pretty sure that Everest used a standard Moviola editor for their 35mm. However, I think they prefered not to do note- or even few-measure inserts. So I don't think they were doing a lot of nit-picky splices. I might be wrong on that. When Mercury decided to undertake 35mm classical recording, Harold Lawrence wanted an editing setup similar to what he was used to for tape. So my father and Bob Eberenz built him a modified Ampex 300 transport with 35mm guides probably kludged off a spare dubber and a spare 3-track play head, I think it might have been custom made by John French's father or Tony Preto out in Illinois. The head was custom mounted so it worked on a 300 form-factor (this isn't trivial work but not impossible with access to a machine shop). I would guess they made sure the head was the proper impedence to interface with Harold's 300-3 electronics. Unfortunately, not photos exist. Mercury, too, was not prone to make tiny-length inserts, so Harold told me that he didn't have too many problems with reverb tails or the like. He used a standard 35mm splicing block, although I suspect there was some facility to cut on an angle through several sprockets so you don't get bumps and ticks at splices. In any case, to my ears, the splices on the Everest, Mercury and Command 35mm recordings aren't any more or less obvious than well-done 3-track tape splices. I don't know the details of Command's 35mm editing rig, but they certainly edited enough 35mm masters over the years. The larger issue with classical recording is the need for a minimum length per reel. I think the 35mm portable units in stock configuration maxed out at 15 minutes or so per reel. Fine Recording eventually modified the Westrex machines with new reel motors mounted in a "penthouse" box above the original case, to accomodate up to 30 minutes recording time. This was mainly to allow for edited LP side-length masters to be cut to disk. The modified machines were definitely in use in the late Command Classics years, but I think Mercury was done with 35mm by the time the machines got modified. The logistics of 35mm mag-film were more cumbersome vs. tape, but that wasn't what killed off the fad. Cost was the main killer, the economics of mag-film don't work in music-album recording but do work in higher-margin Hollywood. Also contributing were improved tape formulations and tape recorders in the early and mid 60's. -- Tom Fine