45 vs LP - The 1949 format war

I have a record (I think it is a 7-inch 33 1/3) which I think came as sold (in the Netherlands maybe?) with the big hole and a spider in it. For as long as I can remember we have had a solid, cylindrical adapter for records with the large centre hole. This is in Sweden.

Excellent! You truly are the master of telling these kind of tech stories. Now we're all awaiting the truth behind that mysterious 16 RPM label found on some turntables.

I was hoping someone would eventually make this video, and I'm especially glad it was you. I knew you'd do it justice.

Just saw this. A man with the largest 8 Track collection in the world, BUT, also shows an in car 45 player with stacked disks (just briefly). This guy even has a LearJet 8 Track Player. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/this-illinois-man-has-the-largest-8-track-collection-in-the-world/ar-BBWHCqm

Love these updates, especially derail from topics and rants about all morons commenting on YouTube. Thanks doing the DAP, I love to see more of those. As music lover and from time to time guitar player I want to find something to use in studio to play along with, without the phone screen going off, unlock it, also turning off if get a call or a message

Outstanding video Mat! I'm "only" 51 :-) so I wasn't born in the early vinyl days, however in Italy, where I live, it has always been a kind of "statement" the idea that 7" record had to have a large hole whereas 12"s had to have a small hole, regardless of the playing speed. Most of the record players were compatible with all record speeds and sizes and all came with an adaptor for the central hole so that you never had to bother regarding the type of record you wanted to play.

This was one of your best videos yet. I love the deep dive and thats why I support you. You are also probably one of the most engaged creators ever and seem to be able to answer everyone’s comments on every platform you put your content on. I do have a couple of questions for you regarding this time in format history. Firstly, why was there 16 rpm disc? Is it a result of an earlier format war between 78 and 16? Also I’m quite a bit younger than you and came to vinyl collecting in the early 2000s through buying loads of UK 70-80s punk vinyls on ebay. Most of them had the small hole of course and it wasn’t really till I started getting more American 45s that I had to get a 45 adaptor but for some reason I never figured out there was an actual localization difference, so thank you for that. I also had the understanding that a single was a 45 with one track on each side, the A side and B side, whilst the EP, the Extended Play was 3-5 songs on a 45. You seem to use single and EP kinda of interchangeable and didn’t point out a difference I don’t think. Are EPs just an arbitrary naming convention?

Another Techmoan classic! With this format war occuring after WWII, are we really to believe it is merely a coincidence that the Third Reich was in existence between 33 and 45...? 🤔 *X-Files theme music plays* Getting back to being serious for a moment: In Swedish parlance the terms "LP" and "album" are interchangeable to the point that I've even heard CD albums being referred to as "an LP". This (mis)use is rare, though. The explanation for the thicker inner ring of 45s was indeed a revelation! It's been quite a while since I've handled any vinylite (!) records, but I certainly remember noticing the extra material towards the center of a 45, and wondering about the reasoning behind it. Today I am a firm proponent of the Nyquist theorem, and have no intention of getting into old record formats. Therefore I especially enjoy these videos where you present odd facts such as the colouring scheme of the original 45 system! Perhaps with the exception of having won the lottery and being able to afford one of those hyped, yet much maligned, ELP laser pickup players. My intended use of such an abomination would be for archival purposes only, while obtaining rare records that still lack a decent digital mastering. Meaning that after a good thorough scrub, the rare record would then be spun in the ELP whilst sending its grooves to be digitally sampled on an ADC. Afterwards, the record would go back into cold storage, never to be played again - I'd have an indestructible digital copy! Well, it's a dream anyway. 🙄

Don’t have much to add that hasn’t been mentioned already but I just wanted to say how much I enjoyed this video. I grew up with LPs and 45’s and I didn’t know half of the history presented here. Very informative! My slightly odd music tastes extend to groups including Autechre and Boards of Canada, both of whom have produced EPs which are designed to be played at 33 *or* 45, depending on the listener’s preference. (Or perhaps that should be “not designed to play at any particular speed at all”.) I always enjoyed this unique quirk that could not be accomplished on any other audio format. Autechre also produced a minidisc-only album which was designed to be played on shuffle, because Minidisc was the only format which could shuffle tracks with no gap between them.

There is what in essence a German clone of the RCA 45 player: The Harting Pico, released in 1958 or 1959. Wilhelm Harting released a jukebox in 1954, and produced the RCA 45-players in license for Europe. When RCA dropped the 45 player, Harting created the Pico under his own brand. It was sold in the Netherlands as well, according to a post I found on a Dutch record forum. There's also the Harting Prinzeß, a suitcase model. https://www.radiomuseum.org/r/harting_pico.html http://www.grammofoon.com/Harting/harting_pico.htm

On another topic, there are a few recent double albums that consist of 2 x 12" 45s (I only have one of these in my collection just far, being "It's Album Time" by Todd Terje). I'm guessing it's because these albums run for longer than 45 minutes but less than an hour, and the sound quality might be a little better?

Excellent video. I’d always wondered why that copy of Starship’s “Nothing’s Gonna Stop us Now” I picked up in France had a big hole in it. Luckily, Ourprice in Chester gave me an adaptor for free!

Matt, that was fascinating, I ran my own disco in the 70's & 80's, have owned thousands of singles & LPs and I still learned a lot from watching this video.. Keep up the good work :-)

Here's a book that gives some history about recorded sound in the US: America on Record: A History of Recorded Sound that might be interesting to you and fellow Techmoan followers. https://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/0521542812/ref=dp_olp_used?ie=UTF8&condition=used

Thank you for all of your effort in putting this excellent video together! Loved it! Fascinating to learn about the behind the scenes decisions and outside forces that go into the development of one format/technology over another. Is there perhaps a similar history behind the development of Stereo? My guess is there's quite a lot that went on behind the scenes there as well!

One of your best videos yet, Mat. If last week's video was a cheese sandwich, this is a four-course banquet with an open bar. FWIW the small hole 45 format was adopted in Australia and NZ. I know this probably isn't the case, but I wonder if the large hole/small hole thing with 45s is a bit like left-hand drive vs right-hand drive cars, with the latter seemingly related to Commonwealth countries (with the RHD non-Commonwealth Japan and LHD Commonwealth Canada being notable exceptions). Could small hole 45s be a vaguely Commonwealth-related thing?

Brilliant Matt - thanks so much for doing this excellent video! The 45 history is fascinating.

Superb video, Matt - first time I've ever seen an accurate history of the competition between RCA and Columbia. One minor error: Columbia DID make playback hardware a/k/a record changers. These had pressed steel turntables with glued-on felts, similar steel tone arms, and cartridges with funky names, my favorite being the "Ronette". The tone arms and top of the changer were usually finished in hammertone enamel. These were sold during the 1950s, and were often promoted with line drawings and sales talk on the inner sleeves of Columbia's LPs. (I remember much of this format battle, having been born about the same time as Columbia launched the LP!)

So much great information. Plus the RCA unit looks great. Thanks

Thanks for the video, Matt. It brightens the day. In the Netherlands I personally never saw a single (45rpm disk) with a small hole. Always thought a big hole was better: you know that when you hold a 12” in one hand...

Really interesting video, Mat! I knew that there was a competition of some sort because of the RCA 45, but I didn’t know Columbia introduced the LP. I have an RCA console that has a TV, radio and two record changers. One is the little 45 machine and the other plays 33/78. I imagine this had to be from around ‘49. The style looks just like the consoles in the ads you included. I recently bought a Bing Crosby 45 box, having never seen one before. It’s titled “Bing!,” and has the be the predecessor of the box sets of today. BTW, Kraftwerk’s “Autobahn” never worked on a 45. I guess it was the radio edit but the 22(?) minute version is so much better.

Great video Mat :) I ever knew the history of this so it was great to learn all about it. Saying that, even though I was born in 1970, I can't say I ever loved vinyl. Before I had a CD player I used to buy Albums on Vinyl and play them once to get them on to cassette because the quality was always better than a pre-recorded cassette. So I have a stack of them in near enough mint condition.

I remember in the 60's our family record player had a pop-up large hole adaptor in the centre of the turntable. It was spring loaded and after a couple of years the retention clip got tired and it would occasionally pop up during play and eject the disc and the tone arm!

I personally think the influence of classical music on the needed length for LPs should not be underestimated. The 3 movement concerto, 4 movement symphony, and probably most importantly for modern music, 5-7 movement Orchestral Suite are so ingrained in western musical culture it would be hard to move away from such a format for composition. Compare something like BWV 1067 to a 70s concept album and you might be surprised at how similar of an idea they are in both structure and flow, as well of the ironic legacy of having only one memorable track to most people. So I'd suspect that it could be even worse than proposed, and that the lack of the right medium to express a well proven structure may have doomed the artists. It would be like telling a novelist they could only write in the format of comic books.

The opposite to your observation about "Dark Side of the Moon" adapting well to 45's, if there wasn't the 45 would we have the concepts of "singles" and "A Side" and "B Side" songs. Also consider that longer albums were the thing in the 70's (double and triple albums) that the "new" maximum length would be 20 sides of 45s since you could stack 10 discs.

Oh man.. I'm curious as to the stack of ten records you put on the RCA Victor player - 21:10 in the video sounds like Wilf Carter (aka Montana Slim)... At least to my ears it does :P Still watching the video though and enjoying it quite a lot :)

Great video. I love learning the history of these old formats since I never grew up with them. Heck, I didn't even know what a 45 was until the gag in the Austin Powers movie...

As a kid I had some 16 (and whatever fraction it was) records that were yellow vinyl. I did not realize that the yellow color meant anything. We also had a colored vinyl record but it had been bought to make an ashtray. This was in the 60's and you would put the record on top of some sort of object and put it in the oven and melt the record over the form to make an ash tray. No one smoke in my home growing up so it was an art project that was never pursued.

You schooled me, learned so much in such a short time, swear you could've gone on for hour's, thanks Techmoan, i loved it.

Wow! - You DID educate me on the space between the 45's when stacked, and I should have known this, growing up in the U.S. in the 1960's and 70's - And you wouldn't believe the size of the smile on my face when you featured my favorite album of all time - Wish You Were Here - I tip my hat to your exquisite musical taste, my good Sir!

Excellent work, Mat! Glad to see that all the time you put into this ended up in quality output in the end. Like many of the people who commented here, I never questioned or knew why there were different sizes and speeds. Very informative, and lots of interesting history too!

A solid gold Techmoan show, Mat. Thanks.

I saw a 16 speed on the one record player. I had one as a kid that played at that speed, too. Never saw a 16 rpm record in person. Google says it could play your Seeburg 1000 records though

Wonderful video, Mat. I do really enjoy your deep dives into old formats and I learned a lot about vinyl records in this one. I’d never even realised that RCA released “albums” as a series of 45rpm 7-inch discs, made me think of the recent 25th anniversary rerelease of Notorious BIG’s Ready To Die as a boxset of nine 7” singles. Thank you for such a fascinating video!

You know there was a lp jukebox to (which soundlesiure have redone as well) https://youtu.be/aaCrUkQn2Ek

Mat your best video yet and I wished it was longer. As an avid vinyl (lite) collector and growing up with records I learnt a lot. Can you still buy the RCA Victor machines from the guy on eBay? I recently broke one of my favourite 45 they are definitely not unbreakable. I still get blamed for ruining my father's extensive collection of Elvis 45s due to mistreatment of them when I was younger. Thanks for an great video

Thank you for this one! I thoroughly enjoyed watching this.

Interesting! Lots of history that I didn't know about. It gets a little long-winded in the middle where there's a lot of interesting history but not a lot of pictures, but it picks up the pace right on time and makes it worth the watch. This was obviously a lot of work. Thanks for posting!

I wonder what process RCA went through selecting the colours for different genres of single such that 'Blues' didn't come out blue.

Great video, didn't feel like 30+ minutes at all. (And I hate the current trend of YouTubers cutting out interesting stuff so the video isn't too long...) Maybe you could do a follow up video about all the different equalizations on mono records? I don't really know the details but I've heard if you really want to get into vinyl mono records you have to get different sizes of styluses and a preamp with a switch for the different equalizations because almost every record label used a different one. A different kind of format war. Thankfully they all got together with the introduction of the stereo records and agreed on the same equalization (RIAA). Also funny you mention Pink Floyd and iTunes. I remember in the beginning of iTunes albums like Wish you were here had the long tracks cut up into shorter tracks because an album cost $10 and a song cost $1. With albums like WYWH it would have been cheaper to buy the individual tracks. To prevent that they were cut into pieces. It took a while for some artists to complain about that so Apple changed it.

Incompatible formats? You blew my mind for the day :)

Great, great, great one! I love these “history lessons”.

Indeed a truly marvelous video. Personally I grew up with the CD and never dealt much with records. So I just accepted the 33 1/3 and 45 formats without questioning where they originated from. Needless to say I really enjoyed this history lesson very much. Thanks.

By the way, some singles had a serrated raised section around the edge of the label, so they meshed with the disc below and didn't slip when stacked on a changer.

Well worth the obvious amount of effort you put into it, Mat. I knew very little of that. One fact made me sit up and take notice - the date of the first 33rpm LP - June 1948. That makes 4 notable events I now know of in that month. The other three being the first transistor was demonstrated, a computer ran the first ever program stored electronically (in RAM, so to speak) and the final event being that I was born! :-) I now have another notable event that I can claim happened at the time of my birth. THANKS! :)

Thanks for the very nice video! I'd have to go back and check, but I believe I have a couple of LPs with a raised label like in the 45s.

Not too talky at all, don't worry. Ever since subscribing to this channel and watching hours and hours of records info and stories, I'm still amazed at how much can be told about this medium. You'd think about now everything has been told, but no, you've managed to delivered yet another very interesting story, thanks!

Thank you for this instructive video! I grew up with 45 and 33s, and I can't remember having seen a 7" with a small hole in it. Small centre holes are unique to countries that drive on the left-hand side! ;-) Sorry I couldn't resist.

Excellent video and great information, had no clue about the format war and thought the thicker center on singles had to do with production techniques.

Brilliant! Although a couple of others here have already said that, it was the first word that came to mind for me as well. Your question regarding concept albums at the end is quite a puzzler, but there were other new recording technologies arriving in the 1950s such as tape multi-track recording, stereo and hi-fi that probably were key to producing those concept albums as well. Could we have Dark Side of the Moon on Tefifon?

In NL, we also have (or had) the larger hole for 45rpm 'singles'. From what I can find, the reason was purely for jukebox use. I've come across several 'convertable style' singles back at my auntes place in the 80's; she had a lot of them, all kinds, but not the UK ones with only a small center hole. BTW, thanks for this great mini-documentary. You should sell these to Discovery Channel or History Channel!

Would singles really have a theoretically better sound quality than LPs, at least within the "quality zone?" 45 • 7 = 315 inches/second, while 33⅓ • 12 = 400 inches/second

Wow Mat, brilliant - the 33 vs 45 format war is one of my favourite topics and you covered it perfectly! Only things I can add are that although some claim that the 45rpm speed was selected as a result of some technical calculations, I can't help wondering if it is just the difference between 78 and 33! The origin of the 78 rpm speed is also rather mysterious - the earliest discs didn't carry any indication of the playback speed at all. Some reports say that 78rpm was the speed you got by marrying commonly available motors and gears together - but that sounds rather unlikely to me. Final comment is that the very first 45s made in the UK were large hole versions - I have a Parlophone 45 by Johnny Dankworth from 1953 which was manufactured with a large hole. Great work, Mat - fantastic research to make a very enjoyable and informative video. PS, I think you may have mentioned in a previous video about auto-changers, that later 45s (especially in the UK) had ridges moulded around the label to reduce discs spinning against each other when a non-rotating one dropped from the stack on top of one already rotating on the turntable. PPS In the section on Shellac near the start, the red insect you show is actually a Red Lily Beetle - a common garden pest in the UK.

Brilliant - thank you! Whiners will whine about the length but this may end up with high numbers!

Ahh, the perfect lunch break from today's editing binge. Already very much enjoying just a few minutes in. Another story that I'd never considered might've been a thing at one point, I've always just taken the formats for granted!

Thanks man. 38+ mins of video and not a wasted second. Very intersting! Wow!

That was one of your best videos yet. I know my stuff when it comes to records and I learned a thing or two from this. I really enjoyed watching that.

Best video ever, and your standard is high and hard to beat 👍🏻

Cultural history and entertainment, all in one half hour video. Excellent. I actually knew about the shoulders on 45’s and the mighty dinker as we used to have a neighbour who repaired juke boxes. He would occasionally present me with a handful of 45’s he’d taken out of machines but anything popular was generally worn out on the ‘a’ side. I had an unexpected knowledge of ‘b’ sides of last month’s hits in those days...

Absolutely fascinating film, I learned so much that was new to me. Top work as always!

Something that you didn't mention was that many vinyl records had a bit of a serrated ring on the outer edge of the label which I always assumed was to deter the stack of discs from slipping when played in an autochanger. Great video anyway. Lots of stuff in there new to me.

Thank you so much! Fantastic video, very informative. It brought back many memories. I still have some 33 LP's and 45 Singles from the 70/80's but my biggest regret is the loss of my parents' shellac 78's - they broke too easily as you say. I recall listening to the "Wedding of the Little Painted Doll" on 78 many times.

In The Netherlands we call them LP's it is also written as elpee. Never knew that LP was a trademark name.

I tremendously satisfying, delicious meal of a video. Thank you. Oh, to have been a Professional Dinker.

Would be interesting who had the idea of a 45rpm 12” record 🤔

I'm unsure about the reason for the large center holes, my collection of 45s is mostly from my mother and comes from the Netherlands, I got all the variants: large hole, small hole, the punch-out system, the spider... But as a kid already, I knew that (usually a solid) adapter was a part of a record player, usually there was a special place in the record player's case to store it, or it was even built-in the platter and you could pop it out easily. Also my current Pro-Ject player came with an adapter. Now I'm wondering: are those missing in record players for the UK market?

This was really interesting. I learned a lot of things from this that I didn't know!

Wow, awesome video. Very informative. I had no idea the UK had a different spindle size for those 45s! Looking forward to a Cheese Sandwich video about that DINKER!

Well researched. I learned a heckuva lot over the last 30 mins or so. Curious if the RCA "diatribe" is available via a public link? Would love to take time to read the whole passive-aggressive list.

Absolutely fascinating stuff as always, after a bit of a stressful few days this is just what I needed!

Awesome vid! The only thing I might have wanted to see would be a "dinker" in action.

Over 30 minutes? Sweeeeeeeeeeet.

Looking forward to watching this after work, been a topic of interest for me