1940's Dialog Sound/Microphone - What is it?

This forum said The Misfits used the RCA KU-3A.

Came out in 1948, specifically made for Hollywood boom use. Later popular in TV too. It was RCA's most expensive and rarest ribbon mic, fewer than 600 made.
 
graywolf said:
Not real experienced with records are you? No problem dropping the tonearm on the track you want to hear, and lifting it when that track is done. Disk jockeys do it all the time. With two playback and one recording table, editing is easy including over dubbing. And as soon as a track is cut it can be played back, no waiting.
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Well I have a few thousand so not totally unfamiliar. "Forced" was too strong a word. I was referring to casual at home listening. Yes if you hoover over the phonograph look at the side list and count in the right number of tracks you can hit an individual song. But practically, the way records were played is you play the side. If you really hate some song you could go over and pick up the needle and skip it. And you probably also had a changer so you played a series of sides from different albums.

In a lot of ways I like that better than current norm of playing in a semi random way.

I had a number of record players over the years but never had a record lathe so it was always a playback method not a recording one.
 
I once had a "semi-automatic" turntable with an optical sensor on the head. You could directly select which track to play and it would find the track optically. Actually rather more direct than the way optical disk players locate "tracks" (more-or-less by "brute force" sampling the data until they find the right data block.)
 
If you want to reproduce the 1940s sound you might read some of the articles floating around about "The good German". Steven used period mikes,cameras and techniques to try and achieve a similar style. No use trying to reinvent the wheel when someone relatively recently laid out a modern workable approach (assuming the end result is what you have in mind).
 
I looked up Experiment Perilous and To Have and Have Not. Both are credited with using the RCA sound system. So perhaps it was the RCA 44 as has been suggested.
 
Possibly. But I think the "sound system" relates to the optical playback system. Until stereo came in in a big way there were competing optical systems, variable density and variable area. In mono they were cross compatible but not in stereo, variable area won.
 
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