On 3/7/2011 8:15 PM, Bob Olhsson wrote:
> My impression is that for remotes RCA used phone lines to a local radio
> station and from there looped back to one of their recording studios in
> Camden, New York, Hollywood or Chicago.
The recording ledgers do not bear this out. Usually Victor and most
other companies in the 1920s and 30s brought recording machines to the
venue.
> There they would record to wax on a
> pair of Scully/Western Electric recording lathes along with possibly an
> additional acetate disk for immediate auditioning.
They were phasing out the use of wax and wax flow-coats by 1940, and
rarely recorded on two turntables except for important recordings that
they knew would be a hit. The masters from the second recording machine
would be suffixed A. All of this is detailed on the ledger sheets.
The Toscanini Phila Orch sessions were recorded on-site on both wax and
lacquer but the processing of all four sets was fouled up by bad plating
solutions. The most complicated recording setups I've seen in the
Victor ledgers were the San Francisco Sym O sessions in 1940 with
Monteux including his famous Scheherazade DM 920 where they not only
recorded on wax and lacquer, they also recorded on 35mm optical film.
It was dubs of the film that they eventually used, and the film might
have been via phone lines.
> The phone line feeds may
> also have been sent to a broadcast transcription service where they were
> recorded on 16" 33 1/3 as a backup.
Safeties were recorded in the studio. Columbia and Decca were mastering
on safeties by 1942, but Victor rarely used them.
Decca was using the Western Electric Wide Range Vertical Recording
system during the 1943-48 era.
Mike Biel [log in to unmask]
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