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On an Overgrown Pathé

Edisonic vs. Orthophonic

An Early Electric Era Shootout

[Italian version here]

Product names: Edisonic Schubert Diamond Disc Phonograph, Victor Credenza Orthophonic Victrola
Manufacturers: Thomas A. Edison, Inc.; Victor Talking Machine Co. - USA (both defunct)
Author: David Hoehl - TNT USA
Published: January, 2024

Everybody likes a good equipment shootout, right? Indeed, this very magazine just offered you a shootout between no fewer than eight different types of turntable mat. Such comparative exercises are nothing new. For instance, in 1924 The Gramophone magazine sponsored a big one between 15 competing disk players before a jury and a voting audience of 400, and there certainly were plenty of others, formal and informal, before that; Edison even made available to its dealers a large turntable-based device to facilitate offering potential customers a direct comparison between its phonographs and those of other makers. Today, in a companion video, I invite you to step back in time and assess two phonographs only three years or so newer than, but technologically a world away from, the ones that competed in the 1924 shootout: the Edison “Edisonic Schubert” diamond disc phonograph and the Victor “Credenza” Orthophonic Victrola (fanciful photos left and right, respectively; not to scale). The machines in the 1924 event were in the last flowering of the acoustic era, designed for horn-and-diaphragm acoustic recordings and as often as not acoustically compromised for cabinet aesthetics. Those featured in the video, by contrast, represent the first generation of home music reproducing machines after the great watershed in analogue recording history, the introduction of electronic recording in 1925, when scientific principles developed by theoretical research began to play a greater role.

Ordinarily, directly comparing the machines here would be impossible, as they are designed for incompatible formats. The Edison machine plays diamond discs, quarter-inch thick vertical cut recordings spinning at 80 RPM, requiring a precision-ground diamond stylus and a mechanical feed system, whereas the Orthophonic Victrola plays lateral cut shellac records at more or less 78 RPM (depending on the label and the whims of its engineering staff on a given day) with single-play replaceable steel needles, relying on the record groove to propel the reproducer across the record. Victor never released a record in the Edison format. In the last year of its existence, however, Edison did release a few electrical recordings as both vertical cut diamond discs and conventional lateral cut shellac 78s, splitting the signal from the microphone to make simultaneous masters in both formats. The video presents one such instance: the exact same recording, playable on both the lateral-only Orthophonic Victrola and the vertical-only Edison Edisonic Diamond Disc Phonograph, offering us the rare opportunity to hear for ourselves why consumers of a century ago might have preferred one brand of equipment to the other on sonic grounds.

The Commercial Landscape

Today we like to talk about “disruptive technologies” as if they are something unique to our time, but in fact advances qualifying as such go back millenia--consider, for instance, the metallurgical progression from copper to bronze to iron to steel, the war chariot, gunpowder and firearms, the printing press with moveable type, the steam engine, the railroad. All great for the progress of civilization but not necessarily for the individual ox cart driver, manuscript illuminator, or soldier carrying a bow and flint-tipped arrow. The phonograph industry has undergone more than one encounter of its own with disruptive technology, beginning long before file sharing and streaming put the pinch on sales of physical media. The first occurred in the early to mid-1920s, when commericial radio bumped sound recording from its perch as the exciting new home entertainment technology. Until maybe 1921, record and phonograph sales, at least in the United States, had been on a relatively uninterrupted ascent ever since the turn of the new century, but with the advent of radio, they took a sharp nosedive, albeit not as sharp as the one that awaited the industry a few years later when the Great Depression essentially wiped out the market. At Victor, things were looking bleak, with unsold Victrolas piling up in warehouses and at jobbers' establishments everywhere, record sales sharply declining, and with them profits drying up. Columbia, Edison, Brunswick--all were experiencing much the same.

Then, in 1925, the cavalry arrived: Western Electric introduced the first successful electronic recording system. Initially, it offered the system exclusively to Victor, the industry leader, but the company hesitated, and Columbia got in on the action as well. At this remove, one might wonder why Victor didn't jump at the opportunity at once, but remember, at the time electric recording was an unproven, cutting-edge technology, and Western Electric's terms were frighteningly dear: recording companies could only lease the equipment, not buy it; I've heard it said that the up-front license fee alone was equal to Victor's full profit from the previous year. Western Electric further required payment of a hefty royalty for each record sold. Ultimately, however, Victor and Columbia both placed the daring bet, and it paid off. Other companies, of course, would follow suit eventually, although not all fell in line at once. In particular, Brunswick in the United States and Polydor in Europe for a time adopted a different system developed by General Electric, the “light ray process,” derived from a system for sound film recording, which relied on a light source, a mirror vibrated by sound waves collected through a horn, and a photocell; it was prone to peaks and resonances, and to this day, when playing light ray records, obtaining sound even roughly comparable to that produced by the Western Electric process is notoriously difficult. Edison, as we shall see, stayed with acoustic recording for another two years or so, but eventually it, too, fell into line, obtaining access by purchasing another company that already held a license. By 1930, the established decades-old acoustic recording process was a dead letter.

The Machines

The two competing machines here are both part of my own collection. The Victor was a good seller when new and is not uncommon today, although up until the Great Recession years of the early 2010s this model was in sufficient demand from collectors to carry quite the price premium. Today, with the general decline in the market for old phonographs, prices for these have become much more modest. The Edison machine, by contrast, is fairly scarce; by the time of its release, the company's market share had withered, and only two years remained before Edison floated out of the phonograph business on a river of red ink. Accordingly, although also affected by the general decline in phonograph values, the Edison machine retains more of a collectors' premium than its Victor counterpart. The reproducers of both machines were serviced within the past few months by a recognized specialist in the field and perform at a level comparable to what they would have achieved when new.

Victor Credenza Orthophonic Victrola. With its adoption of the new Western Electric technology, Victor did not just start making records in a new way. To show the resultant disks in their best light, wow potential customers, and revive the buzz around records and phonographs--thereby getting the biggest commercial bang for its astronomical invested bucks--it also radically revamped its line of machines on which to play them.

Up to that point, the company's floor model machines for 18 years had mostly embodied a characteristic corporate style like that seen in the photo, right:^[1] a vertical cabinet topped with a rear-hinged, domed lid to cover the record playing mechanism; two small doors just below to cover the horn opening; two larger ones below them to cover the record storage cupboard; and some curvy trim, with at least a bit of carved decoration, running down the corners to form stubby legs at the bottom. The cabinet size varied some with price, and the highest end deluxe models might have curved cabinet sides and gilded trim or whatnot, but the general silhouette was very similar. Table models, except for the lidless ones at the very bottom of the line, largely resembled floor models cut off just below the horn cover doors. Famously, even when the public developed a taste for horizontal consoles, Victor stuck to its stylistic guns: its first such models maintained the domed lid, set between sloped shoulders, a design a dismissive public quickly disparaged as “the humpback.” You can see a depiction of one in the topmost illustration of my most recent article for this august publication. Ultimately recognizing the error of its ways, Victor did later release console Victrolas with flat tops, but while more successful, these did not suffice to turn around the declining market for Victrolas or other talking machines of the existing type. By 1925, cabinet players for lateral disks tended to look very much alike and, to a radio-crazed public, very much like last year's news.

Aside from similar silhouettes and, frequently, names (one website lists 182 phonograph brands that copied Victor's “-ola” suffix in naming their machines, from Abrola through Claxtonola, Columbia Grafonola, Symphonola, and Vitanola to Yanola), most upright internal horn machines for lateral disks, including the Victrolas, had another thing in common: their cabinets dictated their acoustic design, to its detriment. Frequently assembled by furniture or piano companies sourcing the “works” from stock parts suppliers (rebadged OEM gear is nothing new!), they typically relied on reproducers with mica diaphragms at one end and short, squared off tapered or somewhat flared chambers serving as horns at the other.^[2] Acoustically, these horn types, with their designs dictated by the imperatives and constraints of fitting inside the conventional upright phonograph cabinet designed first and foremost as attractive furniture, were inferior to the better horns that had been available on open-horn machines. They also were woefully inadequate to deal with the demands of electric recordings, with their greatly increased dynamics and frequency response, particularly their bass extension. An electric recording played on such a machine would likely sound strident, blasty, and harsh.

Recognizing this reality, and having already bet the farm on Western Electric's recording system, Victor proceeded to slaughter all its old livestock to make way for new, improved breeds. Over the course of several months, the company directed its dealers to sell off all their existing stocks of machines of whatever model at half price, and the public response was immense: in short order the company and its extensive dealer network, albeit at a pronounced loss, had cleared the decks for a radically new type of phonograph, still acoustic in operation but optimized for reproducing electric recordings. In styling, these machines were a complete break with their predecessors: gone were the old Victrola lid, the two-over-two door design, the general outline intended to mark the Victrola as a “musical instrument” but now the hallmark of a product grown stale. In their place were cabinets designed in keeping with the up-to-date furniture trends of the mid-1920s.

More importantly, unlike the old Victrolas, these new Orthophonic Victrola models embodied “the theory of matched impedence” as worked out by the same Bell Labs engineers who were behind the Western Electric recording system. It aimed to optimize acoustic performance by relying on mechanical analogues to the electronics in the recording gear. Thus, where an old Victrola had a small, constricted horn chamber designed for conformity to a cabinet's visual aesthetics, the new machines reversed those priorities: their cabinets were designed as stylish containers for exponentially expanding horns optimized for their acoustic performance. Victor's celebrated tapered tonearm of the old models, straight with a strictly tubular pivoted gooseneck for the reproducer, gave way to a sweeping, articulated S-shaped configuration matching the horn's exponential design. Likewise gone were the old Victrola reproducers--the venerable “Exhibition,” dating back all the way to 1904, standard equipment on most machines until the early 1920s, and its successor, the larger “Victrola no. 2” model--each with a flat mica diaphragm actuated at a single point by a needle bar attached in the center and secured to its pivots with tensioning springs. In their place was a new design featuring a large but delicate corrugated aluminum diaphragm connected to a ball bearing-pivoted needle bar by a “spider” of discrete arms welded to its surface. This Orthophonic reproducer became standard equipment on all but the least expensive Victor machines with acoustic playback. For those wishing to play the new records on older machines or machines at the bottom of the new range, which lacked the acoustic refinements of the more expensive models, Victor did offer an updated variant of the old-style reproducer for a few years beginning in 1926. Known as the “Victrola No. 4,” it differed from its earlier counterparts primarily in having a larger diaphragm and redesigned stylus bar pivots, and although it bettered their performance with electrical recordings, it could not match the Orthophonic reproducer. Worth noting is that both these new models preserved one unfortunate feature of their prececessors: they relied on single-use steel needles rather than permanent jeweled styli. In that regard, Victor continued to lag behind Edison and Pathe. (Photo of the various common Victor reproducers appears below.)

Victor introduced its new line of machines and acknowledged its adoption of electric recording on November 2, 1925, in a heavily promoted nationwide event called “Victor Day.” It was a success beyond all expectations. The Orthophonic Credenza model in the video was Victor's top-end, flagship model, the largest, most expensive, best-performing machine and the one that Victor directed its dealers to feature in demonstrating the new records. It was fitted with Victor's most powerful wind-up motor, having four springs, or for a premium it could be had with an electric motor instead. The reproducer, of course, was the new Orthophonic model. At first, two very wide doors covered not only the horn opening but also the two narrow record storage compartments either side of it; Victor subsequently rethought that design, and later-produced machines, including mine in the video, substituted two narrow doors covering the record storage straddling two wider ones over the horn opening. In another cosmetic departure for Victor, a grille and grillecloth, not open slats, covered the horn opening when the doors were open.

That horn (1926 cutaway view, image left) was the key component of these imposing machines, the single new feature that most set them apart from anything that had come before. Effectively six feet long, the largest Victor ever offered in a machine for the home, it was ingeniously folded into itself in such a way that it could be housed in a cabinet only around 20 inches deep. (For our metric-using friends, that works out to a horn of a little less than 2 meters in a cabinet around 50 centimeters deep.) The mouth of the horn extended the entire height of the cabinet, meaning the mouth of the horn was some 34 inches (not quite a meter) tall, albeit only about half that wide. The Orthophonic horn was an instant success story, so widely admired for its sound quality that accessories were marketed to enable radio sets to play through it, either by turning a valve or by replacing the record reproducer with a speaker driver connected by external wires to the radio. The photograph at right shows front, rear, and detail views of one such device, manufactured by RCA and sold by Victor as an official accessory. Upon removal of the machine's reproducer, the round opening of the adapter would fit over the end of the tonearm; the small pin visible inside engaged an L shaped slot to lock the unit in place when rotated toward the rear of the Victrola. The adapter is large and heavy; for scale, by itself the circular protrusion shown in the rear and detail views is about the same size as an Orthophonic reproducer. Need for such devices quickly diminished as Victor in succeeding years released a series of machines with space to add a radio receiver or even built-in RCA radio receivers at various price levels.

The Orthophonic Credenza was a commercial success and together with the rest of the new line restored the company's fortunes. Nonetheless, the machine's life on the market was not especially long. In 1928, Victor retired it in favor of a model that, although still acoustic, was styled more to resemble an all-electric phonograph, and that model in turn was gone after another year, as true electric phonographs had fallen in price by enough to supplant it. Not long thereafter, the Great Depression would decimate the entire industry, but that story is for another day.

Edison Edisonic Schubert Diamond Disc Phonograph. Whether for reasons of the ruinous associated expense to license Western Electric's recording process, failure to recognize disruptive technological change, a case of “not invented here,” or simple bureaucratic inertia, Edison was a late adopter of electrical recording. The company issued its first electrically recorded discs in October 1927, two years after industry leaders Victor and Columbia had embraced the new technology. By then, the Edison concern was reeling on the ropes. Not profitable for several years even before introduction of electrical recording, it saw sales of its line of old-style Diamond Disc phonographs dry up to practically nothing and a sharp decline in its record sales thereafter. An initiative to turn the tide with an innovative long-playing record, years ahead of its time but hobbled by the limits of spring-driven acoustic playback gear, had failed, as had the corresponding line of dedicated console phonographs. Drastic measures were clearly necessary, and the company proceeded, somewhat haltingly, to take them. First, abandoning its long-held position that its acoustic records played on its top-end acoustic machines yielded perfect recreations indistinguishable from live performers, which implied electrical recording could in no way improve on them, it finally yielded to the new market reality and arranged to begin electrical recording. To prepare for the transition and offer models competing with such more modern machines as Victor's Orthophonic Victrolas, Edison radically reconfigured its line: with the exception of its cheapest model, the so-called “London Upright,” which remained in the catalogue for a few more months, it discontinued all existing Diamond Disc phonographs in August 1927, and in September of that year it replaced them with two new phonographs, the smaller being known as the Edisonic Schubert and the larger, and accordingly more expensive, as the Edisonic Beethoven. Each came with the company's recently released “New Standard” reproducer, subsequently rechristened the Edisonic reproducer. New process recordings, entirely new equipment released at the same time--doubtless the company intended the public to perceive them as a new system specifically designed to work together and move forward into the new era, just as the original Diamond Disc phonographs and records had been when they made their debut 15 years earlier and as Victor's lineup had been on “Victor Day.”

Reality was a little bit different. The Edisonics were in some respects stopgap offerings, machines intended to keep Edison in the market until it could develop and release a projected line of all-electrical radio phonographs. Unlike Victor's Orthophonic Victrolas, which really were a complete design departure in cabinetry and acoustics, the Edisonics were more like tweaked reissues of the company's earlier line. The major difference was in cabinetry, which abandoned the wide array of mostly more or less period-influenced designs dating to the years after World War I, when historical furniture styles were in fashion, in favor of something more in keeping with contemporary taste in furniture. Among other changes, the new cabinets featured large doors over their horn openings instead of exposed grilles, an approach formerly foreclosed by Victor's now-expired patents. The Schubert, in particular, had a top-to-bottom grille over the horn aperture, secured by screws rather than freely resting in retaining slots as in the older machines, giving the impression of a large-mouthed horn like that of Victor's Orthophonic Victrola.

Otherwise, however, very little was new about the Edisonics; indeed, there is some reason to think the Schubert's cabinet was repurposed from a “Consolette” originally intended but never released as the bottom-end offering in the ill-fated line of machines produced specifically for the long-playing discs. The Edisonics had the same motor and mechanical feed mechanism as their predecessors, and their horn design was a slightly enlarged version of the one in the largest of the older machines, yielding marginally better bass but not representing a major design departure. In the Schubert, at least, those screws securing the grille were probably there for a reason: they prevented the buyer from easily removing the grille and discovering that it was a bit of a subterfuge, as the horn was of conventional design, not an exponential re-entrant type as in the Orthophonic Credenza, and its mouth was only about half as large as the grille-covered cabinet opening. The New Standard/Edisonic reproducer also was a modification of the previous standard diamond disc reproducer, not an entirely new design, differing only in spring-loading the stylus bar (a variation of a feature already incorporated into the accessory Edison Dance Reproducer a year before) and enlarging the floating weight to achieve greater volume and ensure proper tracking of the more dynamically recorded electrical discs. As far as differences between the two Edisonic models were concerned, paying $90 to move up from the Schubert to the Beethoven gave the buyer a larger cabinet with more record storage and a second spring in the motor; acoustically, they were identical. Accordingly, although the video features the smaller Schubert model, for purposes of aural comparison it isn't “the second best” Edison had to offer to the would-be buyer of a disk machine, it's all Edison had to offer.

The Artists

The ensemble heard in the video is the Roth String Quartet, formed by Czech-born, Budapest-educated Feri Roth. It plays the last movement of Haydn's String Quartet in C Major, op. 33 no. 3, which has the popular nickname “The Bird.” In its first form, the Roth Quartet toured widely in Europe and Africa, but Feri Roth revised its lineup before coming to the United States in early 1928. It made this recording for Edison on October 21 of that year. With the rise of fascism in Europe, the quartet chose to settle in the United States, where it would continue touring and recording, albeit not for Edison, which went out of business about a year after this recording was made. In 1935, the Roth Quartet made a new recording of the same work for US Columbia, issued as Masterworks Set 257. In later years, Feri Roth was associated with Princeton University and then the University of California at Los Angeles; the Roth Quartet as heard in this recording disbanded during that period, and Roth formed yet another with entirely different personnel in California.

The Procedure

All Edison lateral records are rarities, and the lateral record here, as part of the only multi-disk lateral set Edison issued, is particularly so--and priced accordingly on the collector's market, if you can find it. Moreover, for all that they are rarities, originally marketed for a matter of a few weeks before the company ceased operations, Edison lateral pressings were not in the best, sturdiest of shellac from the outset. Hence, I didn't want to inflict a heavy-tracking steel needle on this record more than once (the reproducer alone, without the metal tubular tonearm segment attached to it, weighs around 150 grams). Getting a good take on the first try, with careful setup and thorough planning in advance, was the name of the game.

Both machines sit in the same large room, facing each other from opposite walls at a slight diagonal. I suppose ideally I might have moved them to sit next to each other, but, trust me, no Edison machine is a lightweight, and you do not want to try moving an Orthophonic Credenza. When I brought that machine into my house, a friend and I were barely able to lift it; no way could I do that by myself. Instead, I took pains to ensure the microphones of my Zoom H1n recorder would capture each at comparable level. I measured the distance between them and set up the Zoom on a tripod as close to exactly halfway as I could manage (I don't guarantee that I wasn't off by an inch or two, but it was very close). My video camera was mounted to a second tripod. To start, I turned the Zoom and set up the video recorder to focus on the Edisonic. I then proceeded to prepare each machine for immediate play--both motors fully wound, fresh steel needle in the Orthophonic reproducer, the Credenza's speed adjusted to ensure pitch would match that of the diamond disc player (which lacks easy pitch control), horn-covering doors fully open for each machine.

With these preliminaries completed, I undertook to record both machines in a single take. I started the audio recorder and video camera and first played the diamond disc side. At the end, I stopped the Edisonic and, letting both electronic devices continue running, I moved the video camera on its tripod and rotated the recorder to face the Credenza and then played the lateral record. Only after stopping the Credenza at the end of that record did I turn off the electronics. As a result, I had all the audio in one stereo file, maintaining relative volume of the two machines at the point where I had set the audio recorder midway between them, and I maintained that arrangement until all editing--trimming of extraneous material, fade-ins, fade-outs, and normalizing; I applied no noise reduction--was complete. The final step was to break each record's audio into a separate file and marry it to the corresponding video, discarding the distorted, level-limited sound track captured by the video recorder's internal microphone.

The Video

With preliminaries out of the way, it's showdown time. Edison is widely, albeit not universally, regarded as having offered the best sound, the closest to what we today consider “high fidelity,” in the acoustic era. Did the company retain that distinction going into the electric era? Or did Victor steal Edison's thunder? Or was it a draw? Have a listen to the video, and you be the judge!

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© Copyright 2024 David Hoehl - drh@tnt-audio.com - www.tnt-audio.com

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