[78-L] Lost Recordings

[David Lennick]

I've been ahead of you guys for decades..Tom sent me dubs of those transfers 
about 20 years ago for possible use on my CBC program.

A couple of years ago, I bought a basement full of old records, mainly to get 
at the 400 or so Victor Home Recordings in the stash (in fact I finally gave 
away all the other 78s, which were all "good music" i.e. Gilbert and Sullivan 
medleys and the like). I still need to get a wide tip stylus. The few discs I 
checked out are of airchecks of radio programs in the early 40s..the system was 
still in use as late as 1944 and the blanks cost $1.29 apiece (price is still 
on the sleeves). I even saw the machine they were recorded on, which was a 
modified transcription table with 4 arms.

dl

Elizabeth McLeod wrote:
> 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