While the rest of you were out partying and having fun this holiday weekend, I took advantage of the brief time off to go visit record lathe gurus Len and Jacob Horowitz to get my new Grampian/Gotham mono cutting head and amplifier setup going. It’s always a treat to visit with these two guys, literally the most knowledgeable guys on the planet about these ancient record cutting machines. I’m so lucky that they live in the LA area!
There’s actually no reason at all why any of you should waste brain cells on the Grampian/Gotham cutting system. But if you’re interested, this was a cutting system developed in the mid-1950s that utilized a British-made Grampian cutting head (as used by the BBC), coupled with an American-made cutting amplifier, built to the highest standard possible, and still pretty much unequaled to this day. The amplifier was designed by the legendary audio engineer Rein Narma, who built a tube mixing console for Les Paul, designed the Fairchild 670 stereo limiter (originally designed for disc cutting, but now one of the most expensive and sought-after recording studio compressors), and had a hand in many other legendary audio designs. This was his Rolls-Royce, his Cadillac, of disc cutting systems.
Rudy Van Gelder, the famous jazz recording engineer, was one of the first to use this system for cutting records, and many famous Blue Note mono jazz albums were cut using this setup. But the real reason I wanted this setup for my own cutting lathe is because of the extremely powerful sounding albums, 45s, and 78 rpm records cut in the 1950s in 1960s with the Grampian/Gotham system. Many insanely lively sounding records on Chess, Specialty, Decca, Coral, and many other labels from the mid-1950s through the mid-1960s used this setup to get the loudest, beefiest sounding records they could get. And that’s exactly what I intend to do.
We tested the system today using a safety copy of Big Sandy’s Jake’s Barbershop EP master tapes, which Len cut the master for around 1993 or 1994… I think the first recordings with Ashley Kingman and Lee Jeffriess? Only fitting we’d use a tape with two fine British musicians to test this British cutting head.
Soon I’ll be set up for the Grampian/Gotham system for cutting mono records, and I already have the Westrex 3Dii cutting head and 1700 series amplifiers for cutting stereo records. Best of both worlds! Thanks again, Len and Jacob!
See more photos and videos at Deke’s original Facebook post!
