TFM technical (& not really musical)

[app_engine]

While MD's, singers, lyricists , instrumentalists & on-screen stars have been discussed in detail in the forum (as also their skills, episodes during creating music, creativity, plusses, minusses, personalities etc.), I think the topic how music is stored, copied & distributed has not been widely discussed.

Even if something superfluous has been discussed about the current happenings (like about the production of TbI etc), I don't remember reading much details about, say, how `yAradi nee mOhini' (or a song of different time periods) was "physically" recorded (and on what media) and the process it had to go through before the vinyl disk (or the on-print-sound-track) is available to the end customer...

As there are a no. of techies / sound engineers (or engg. graduates with a lot of interest in acoustic engg.) and also those with industry connection visit this website, it would be interesting to hear such technical details from each of them...(ofcourse, only related to TFM and not otherwise)

[app_engine]

Plus, may be trivial details such as which was the last film to have a LP record...where are the "master" recordings stored for films like nizhalgaL (if at all they exist) and in what format (are they big spool tapes or digital media or only LP records or some other magnetic media etc)....

[Dragun]

George Martin's book All You Need is Ears (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0312114826/103-8201809-6615825?v=glance&n=283155&s=books&v=glance) has some interesting explanations of 50s and 60s recording technology and formats. It's not extremely technical, but you get the gist of it.

I read somewhere, probably on the Hindi film music newsgroup, that EMI reused their master tapes in the past. I think they still have them from the 70s or 80s onward. But the tapes and CDs of old Tamil music are derived from 78s, which didn't have master tapes, or LPs. The LPs were sometimes made from 78s or from tape. Often the source records were from private collectors.

Echo must have kept the master tapes to the albums, since the Oriental Records remastered CDs sound quite good.

A while back I saw some late 80s and early 90s IR LPs from Echo on eBay. Some Hindi LPs from this time frame appear sometimes. I vaguely remember seeing LPs of new releases like Gentleman on a trip to India in 1994.

[Shankar]

An interesting anecdote...Not sure if this is the kind of info you wanted, app_engine...

TMS quoted an interesting event during the recording of "pudhiya vAnam" song in malarum ninaivugaL.

When MSV explained to him the situation (mgr has landed in kashmir, he looks around in awe and then we have a song etc)
So, to get the echo effect, in the recording room, tms started taking a step back after each 'vAnam' and simulated the echo effect. I wondered if they didn't even have the tech to get an echo effect those days.

[app_engine]

Thanks Dragun & Shankar for the inputs...yes, things like these provide some interesting info as well as trivia that are positive discussions...