Longest LP side

[verismissimo]

Just playing Olaf Bar with Geoffrey Parsons singing Brahms songs, recorded 1988 - so one of the latest LPs, I guess. Terrific stuff.

Side 1 is 37' 33".

Is that the longest?

[Norfolk Born]

Probably, but I would imagine that some of the, let's stay more stately, renditions of 'Der Abschied', the last song in 'Das Lied von der Erde', come in at well over half an hour, and the same may be true of some movements of Mahler's symphonies.

[Bryn]

Not the longest, by a few minutes. I recall a LaMonte Young LP with one side lasing a few seconds over 40 minutes. It was very quiet music though. I have it, up in the loft, but it was very badly warped in a house fire, and is effectively unplayable now. I also recall an Everest LP with the whole of a live Mahler 8 (Mitropoulos) split over its 2 sides.

Here it is an a later CD issue on Orfeo:

http://www.musicweb-international.com/classrev/2000/apr00/mahler8.htm

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

Other examples of long sides are Beethoven 9 with the 3rd & 4th movements on side 2 (Solti & Klemperer) around 38 minutes each) and the same work under Munch with movements 1-3 on side 1 (also 38 min.).
A Klemperer/Vox recording of Beethoven's Missa Solemnis also had sides around the 38 minute mark.
Then there was a Furtwangler Ring cycle boasting up to 43 minutes per side.

A few 16 r.p.m. vinyl discs were issued. I wonder how long these lasted for?

[mathias broucek]

Anything Direct Metal Mastered (DMM) could go to 40 mins even in stereo

I have the Solti Ring pressed by Teldec on just 14 LPs (can't check exact lengths as I'm in the office). And some late EMI disks had very long sides of up to 40 mins.

[makropulos]

16 r.p.m. discs were mostly 7-inch records and seem to have been used almost entirely for audio books and background music. There's a three-part history of them starting here that's rather intriguing:

http://www.capsnews.org/apn2010-2.htm

Has anyone heard one of these things? (I imagine the sound quality was grim).

[umslopogaas]

Post 4, Ein Alp, I remember back in the 1960s that my parents had a Dansette gramophone with a speed setting for 16 rpm, but neither then nor in subsequent decades of assiduous vinyl collecting have I ever seen a 16 rpm disc. I imagine they died out for sonic reasons, speed fluctuations on mass produced gramophones back then were painful enough at 33 rpm, at 16 the wow on your top and flutter on your bottom (thanks Michael Flanders) would have been unbearable. Does anyone know any details of their fate?

[makropulos]

umslopogaas: see the link in my previous post - there are three sections which tell the story of these strange records.

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

I do remember a Gramophone review of a "Talking Book" 16 r.p.m. 12" vinyl disc with sides of more than 45 minutes. My uncle ssid he had a "16" which he said was OK for speech.

[verismissimo]

Certainly the longest LP sides in my collection are on the Furtwangler Ring from La Scala (1950) from Murray Hill. Well over 40 minutes.

[MrGongGong]

Not the longest, by a few minutes. I recall a LaMonte Young LP with one side lasing a few seconds over 40 minutes. It was very quiet music though. I have it, up in the loft, but it was very badly warped in a house fire, and is effectively unplayable now. I also recall an Everest LP with the whole of a live Mahler 8 (Mitropoulos) split over its 2 sides.

Here it is an a later CD issue on Orfeo:

http://www.musicweb-international.co...00/mahler8.htm

aaah the legendary "Black album"
which if it was playable would be one of the rarest Lps around (i have an mp3 of it somewhere that i was always planning to burn to CD )

[gradus]

Long sides usually meant inner groove distortion on loud passages or sharp transients spoiling the music even with the best pressings, due to the impossible tracking/tracing demands made on stylus and cartridge - not of course a problem with CD.

[Ferretfancy]

gradus,
You probably know that RCA came up with Dynagroove to try to reduce tracing distortion and allow longer sides as a by product. The idea was that when the disc was mastered the cutter head was fed with an additional signal which was the opposite of the waveform of predicted tracing distortion, so that when played it would be cancelled out. It did work, but it required the playback stylus to have the right elliptical dimensions, and unfortunately at the time there were numerous styli available and no accepted standard for them.
Some of the research for this spilled over into the design of cartridges for RCA's CD4 quadraphonic system, which used a very high frequency carrier signal superimposed on the groove to provide the difference information for the rear channels. Again, this worked well, but most cartridges wore out the carrier information very quickly, and all the quad systems were soon abandoned. However, the design of moving coil cartridges benefited a great deal from this research.
Looking back, it's interesting that the main reason given for the failure to market quad was that people did not want to fill their rooms with extra speakers, but nowadays we are happy to do so.

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

You probably know that RCA came up with Dynagroove to try to reduce tracing distortion and allow longer sides as a by product. The idea was that when the disc was mastered the cutter head was fed with an additional signal which was the opposite of the waveform of predicted tracing distortion, so that when played it would be cancelled out. It did work, but it required the playback stylus to have the right elliptical dimensions, and unfortunately at the time there were numerous styli available and no accepted standard for them.

I was under the impression that the Dynagroove recordings were unique in preferring a spherical stylus, whereas more conventional pressings benefitted from eliptical styli. But I could be wrong. All I can be sure of is that all the Dynagroove recordings I ever bought were very good.

[barber olly]

I was under the impression that the Dynagroove recordings were unique in preferring a spherical stylus, whereas more conventional pressings benefitted from eliptical styli. But I could be wrong. All I can be sure of is that all the Dynagroove recordings I ever bought were very good.

Don't know if it employed Dynagroove technology but an 'early' long side, around 36-37 minutes was Munch's Beethoven 9.