Telamon wrote:
In article ,
D Peter Maus wrote:

Telamon wrote:
In article ,
"David Eduardo" wrote:

"dave" wrote in message
...
Why not just record the station as proof you received it?
EKKO stamps ended after The War, and until the 60's, recording was
impractical. In fact, even in the 60's it was not a good idea... most
tapes
made in that era deteriorated rapidly. Most of my prized audio IDs did not
make it into a more advanced media as the tape flaked... some nice ones
like
HCRE1 855 and CX28 were lost that way, although verified by letter or
card.
There were wire recorders. Very durable. You could also record on vinyl
records.

I have a pair of Webster wire recorders. One, I bought at a local
junk shop and spent a year restoring. The other, I got from my
grandfather. Along with a rack of wire spools. Some dating as far back
as the Truman inauguration with some very cool recordings of shows like
the Sealtest Variety Theatre, Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar, Have Gun Will
Travel, and the Stan Freberg Show. I still find spools of wire at
antique shows, flea markets and junk shops. Always a bit of an adventure
to hear the audio.

Print-through is less of an issue, and the wire definitely doesn't
slough off magnetic material. But they are susceptible to elevated noise
from stray magnetic fields. So, storage environment is as important as
it is with tape.

I've also got a couple of disc recorders. And an armload of home-made
records. As well as some made in drug store recording kiosks. They're
not quite as archivally stable as they may seem. Many are not vinyl, but
acetate on an aluminum substrate. The acetate breaks down, becomes
brittle, often lifts from the substrate, or shrinks. And the low quality
vinyl used also tends to be less stable over time than that used more
recently.

I've spent a lot of hours recovering audio from wire and disc
recordings, for friends and colleagues. Sometimes, all you get is one
pass before there is too much damage to continue with the discs. And
magnetically contaminated wire will often develop a whining noise mixed
with the audio as it passes through the head. So a very great deal of
care is required when handling these recordings.

By far, the wire recordings are a lot easier to handle without damage.

Both may be more durable than tape, but they're not for casual
listening after long spans of time.

One careless pass, and the recording may be irretrievably lost.

Before the vinyl disk there were the cylinder recorders and players. I
had a neighbor with one of those.

There were very inexpensive tape players in the 60's. They were just
fine for voice. They were little reel to reel type. The reels were only
a few inches in diameter and the tape was thick. The head was offset so
you could record on the other side by turning the reel over. I had one
as a kid. Other kids in the neighborhood had them. Then the high
performance audiophile units were developed with the big reels. The
main problem with tape was the high end audio was weak and the
amplifiers had to be biased for more gain at the high end.

The problem with these over many years is the tape formulation kept
changing to improve the high end so you needed to have amplifiers with
selection switches depending on the tape formulation. Some even required
different heads (gap) depending on the ferro grain size in the tape.

And then to make matters more complicated there was dolby noise
reduction for tape hiss so you equalized for the tape formulation and
noise reduction. That's were I first learned to hate hiss. Now I can
listen to hiss from IBOC to get ****ed off or just read an Eduardo post
as it has the same effect.

The 7" Akais started appearing in the early '60s; before that there
were the consumer Webcors and the semipro Wollensaks. Norelco made a 3"
portable which evolved into the cassette around the end of 1964. I had
a 5" Aiwa TP-104 that I bought in the summer of 1965 to use for
airchecks. The really cheap decks had no capstan and were unsuitable
for anything but note taking.