[78-L] Lost Recordings

[Elizabeth McLeod]

on 3/2/09 8:58 PM Michael Biel wrote:

>Have these been made available to the OTR collectors yet?  (Is this Amos 
>'n' Andy recording the one that Elizabeth discusses?)  I wrote 
>extensively about this recording system in my dissertation, but by that 
>time (1977) practically nothing of value had turned up on these beyond a 
>1932 Cotton Club broadcast.  The Federal Radio Commission used this type 
>of disc to record evidence in 1931 and 32 against some famous radio 
>quacks and preachers.  When I found an article from that time with a 
>picture of the machine I alerted the National Archives about them.  They 
>couldn't find them.  But they finally turned up many years later in the 
>file folders with the paperwork of these legal cases. 

Tom was good enough to make me copies of his Victor recordings years ago, 
and they really are fascinating stuff -- the A&A segment, from February 
1933, is over seven minutes long -- and is the most substantial recording 
of the program known to survive between 1933 and 1936! 

I myself found a few A&A excerpts from 1930 and 1931 on 6-inch Victor 
Home Recording discs a few years back, along with various other bits of 
radio miscellany. The *best* Victor Home Recording stuff I've found, 
though, was a series of four complete "Lucky Strike Dance Hour" 
broadcasts from December 1932, recorded at 33 1/3 rpm on ten-inch blanks. 
What's especially interesting about these is that they aren't airchecks 
-- they appear to have been recorded directly off the NBC line, probably 
by the ad agency since they were found in a carefully labeled binder. 

Victor Home Recording discs are capable of producing very decent sound 
with the right stylus. Most people try to get by with 4.0, which will 
produce mediocre results most of the time. 5.0 will give *much* better 
results -- the Lucky Strike discs compare favorably in quality to any 
radio material I've heard from that era. (And I've heard a lot.)


Elizabeth