Path: utzoo!telecom-request Date: Tue, 28 May 91 08:55:45 EDT From: Scott Dorsey Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom Subject: Re: Did Western Electric Also Produce Sound Recordings? Message-ID: Organization: NASA Langley Research Center Sender: Telecom@eecs.nwu.edu Approved: Telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-Submissions-To: telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-Administrivia-To: telecom-request@eecs.nwu.edu X-Telecom-Digest: Volume 11, Issue 405, Message 2 of 7 Lines: 77 In article TELECOM Moderator writes: > It is still sort of a thrill to watch an old motion picture from the > 1930-40 era and see a notation in the credits saying 'sound by Western > Electric'... when did they get out of the motion picture sound > business? The late forties. They still licensed their "light valve" technology for many years to the film industry. A number of theatres in this area are still using old WE soundheads. > But of more interest to me now was Western Electric's involvement in > phonograph records. It must have been very minimal and limited to the > early days of sound recordings. > Going through my *very old* (1948-49) phonograph records and tapes I > came across "Bach on the Biggest", a recording made of the organ at > the Atlantic City (NJ) Auditorium. It was a 'complimentary/radio > station copy' provided to a station here for promotional purposes, and > the advertising material with it said it was produced "using the > latest and most modern 'sound-capture' techniques of the Western > Electric Company ..." The first 33 rpm records began appearing late in > 1948 as I recall. 33 rpm was originally used for transcription disks in the 1930's, and was quite common for professional use. The transcription disks would use 2.7 mil styli or so, like the 78 rpm recordings. Microgroove 33 rpm records didn't come out until 1949 or so. WE made a number of demo recordings, as well as some live recordings at the 1939 World's Fair which were distributed to radio stations. I am told that they did some recordings at later fairs but have never seen any. > An accompanying tape was a 'modern reproduction' of a wire recording > (anybody out there remember wire recorders? Of course! I knew some of > you would!) made many years earlier by Western Electric apparently for > promotional purposes. The wire-recording converted to 'modern magnetic > tape media' (1949, har har!) was of Henry LeMare, municipal organist > for the City of Atlantic City during the 1920's era. Don't knock 1949 magnetic tape media. I have a pair of 1950 Ampex machines that are in daily use at WCWM, and sound a hell of a lot better than any cassette deck made. Wire recording, granted, is pretty poor overall, primarily because of the lack of AC bias. > Western Electric worked with all the major movie studios back in those > days, but I didn't realize they also worked on phonograph records and > wire recordings ... or did they? Are these antiques just special > things they did for promotions, etc? Any ideas? They are probably promo recordings, but WE made a lot of promos in those days. From time to time you'll even find Vitaphone disks, which are just standard 16-inch transcription disks, wide groove, start in center records that are intended for synchronization to a film. Transcription recording started in the early thirties and every station in the thirties through the fifties had a 16" turntable to play transcriptions with, so a lot of the promo records and stuff designed for radio distribution only was made at 33 rpm. Make sure you use the right stylus to play these back; modern microgroove styli will destroy wide groove records very quickly. scott [Moderator's Note: WECo did recordings at the Century of Progess Fair in Chicago in 1933-34 also according to the late Virgil Fox in a commentary he added to one of his records. Speaking of whom, you are absolutely correct -- one hundred percent -- about the quality of the old records and tapes. A recording in my collection of Fox dates from 1946 at Columbia University: it takes the cake! It is superb, and you could never tell its age by listening to it. The giveaway is the heavy disk, and the old-fashioned way RCA Victor printed their labels. It was a 78 rpm and RCA copied it onto 33 rpm three years later. PAT]