Cook Records - Recording Techniques

Recording Techniques

In addition to Sounds of Our Times, under Cook Laboratories, Cook Records also released "Road Recordings," a "White Label" series, Test, and Binaural recordings.

Cook is sometimes said to have intended only to show the quality of his recording and molding process at an audio fair, with the added, unique feature of binaural (i.e., sterophonic) sound as attention-catching gimmick, and the response was so overwhelming that he decided to start producing and selling his equipment, together with the production of a tremendous number of stereo recordings. There was a somewhat similar unexpected result of his Microfusion process of record pressing. The process required the filling of each mold individually (he had a production-line at which a dozen or so individuals filled them simultaneously at his small factory, each mold-filler than handing the filled mold to an individual operating a nearby record press. The presses, which accepted one mold at a time, were much smaller than the presses used in the standard, hot-liquid-biscuit, process: the Cook presses were each not much bigger than a refrigerator. At some point it occurred to Emory Cook that it might make more sense for some record shops to press the records themselves, as customers requested them, rather than to pay shipping and stocking costs. The result was that by 1958 there were record shops on Caribbean islands from Puerto Rico to Trinidad that had a Cook record-press in the back of the store. Some of the owners of these small shops, or their associates, began recording local music themselves. They shipped the master tape recording of an album up to Cook, and (for about $100) he made a metal mold of it, which was shipped back to the record store, which, when asked for a copy of the record, would pull the mold for that record from the shelf, fill it with the powdered vinyl (which was sprayed from a device resembling an old-fashioned hair dryer and was covered the mold exactly), and then popped it in the oven-cum-high-pressure press. (See the history of Reggae music for an idea of the impact this innovation had.)