Before LP's there were 78's and one of the men charged with replacing the 78's with a long playing record was Howard H Scott. He has died at age 92 from cancer.
The top secret project initiated by Columbia records in 1940 was nearly completed when engineers required someone with an ability to read orchestral scores in order to transfer recordings from 78s to the new vinyl discs which played at 331/3 r.p.m. and could hold about 22 minutes of music per side.
Enter Howard Scott who would be responsible before the use of magnetic tape for lining up overlapping segments of music on 78s. With the snap of his finger in coordination he and his colleagues switched the audio signal at just the right moment from one turntable to the other so that the vinyl long player would take the longer sessions from the overlapped 78's on one side.
Mr. Scott worked on hundreds of recordings along with the major orchestras of the United States. He left Columbia in 1961 to work with a variety of other record and publishing labels as a producer and won a Grammy in 1966 for his production of the classical album of that year: Charles Ives's Symphony No. 1, performed by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
From 1986 until his retirement in 1993, Mr. Scott worked for Sony, as a producer, once again transferring old albums to the newest format at the time, CD's. This may be so, however Mr Scott was always a big fan of vinyl, stating in an interview in 1988 "They lived from 1948 to 1978, when the CD came in. Now they're coming back. Small companies are issuing them. I'm still an LP fan."
