Dave Vincent writes this about errors in Play-Rite's style 125 band
organ recuts:

> Another problem is slippage of the original during the remastering
> process.  One 125 roll comes to mind with the march 'Under the Double
> Eagle' near the end.  The master slipped and it seems that all
> subsequent recuts have an obvious section where the music just races
> for about four measures or so, then settles back into the right
> tempo.  It seems that the master, having wound up loosely for a
> while, stopped to cinch up.  I have seen this on several of
> Play-Rite's rolls.

That would explain a _slow-down_ in the tempo of the recut, but not a
speed-up.  If the master stops moving across the reader bar while the
perforator continues to punch, the result is longer perforations, which
when played make the tempo slow down.  When there is an error in a
recut roll, one always wonders where the error originated.

Before I got deeply into these rolls, I used to think that original
Wurlitzer rolls were flawless.  I have learned that they are very good,
but not without errors.  Often when you find an error, you find that it
repeats itself further along in the tune wherever the passage which it
is in repeats.  That kind of error must therefore be embedded in the
original Wurlitzer master, not in Wurlitzer's copying process nor in
Play-Rite's re-copying process.

The one-to-one copying process can result in notes being a perforation
too long or a perforation too short, which is often more fatal.  Mike
Grant mitigates this problem, as Dave says, by tracker bar holes that
are not very tall.  Since Play-Rite's Wurlitzer perforator doesn't read
the original roll by vacuum, I'm not sure whether they could use the
same technique.

Matthew Caulfield

 [ A recut made with an asynchronous copying process incurs errors of
 [ plus-or-minus one perforator step.  Sluggish interposer solenoids at
 [ the high-speed perforator can contribute more errors.  A synchronous
 [ copying process can produce error-free copies but processing the
 [ data is more time-consuming, so most firms copying rolls use a simple
 [ asynchronous process.  -- Robbie