Hello Randy - I used to have some discs which were audio to accompany a slide film presentation for automobile sales promotion for Plymouth in about 1938. The bell was used to indicate when to advance the film to the next frame. The content of this indicate possibly some sort of sales training. The Jingle Bells intro presents a Christmas theme. Some of the lines could be used as suggestions for a sales pitch. There was some mention of spending money to be more comfortable etc. Just my 2 cents-Mickey -----Original Message----- From: Randy A. Riddle Sent: Friday, January 25, 2019 6:39 PM To: [log in to unmask] Subject: [ARSCLIST] An Odd Radio Transcription In a few weeks on my blog, I'm going to be posting a rather odd transcription disc I ran into a few months ago. At least I think it's a transcription disc. It's a ten inch laminated Columbia pressing from Sollie & MacGregor. It's "Coleman Cox", program 11 on one side and program 12 on the other. The matrix numbers are MS-1311 and 1312. The matrix also includes the show title and number and the notations "Time 4:50" and "Time 4:51". Cox was an author from California who published some books in the 1920s. I found him in some radio listings from the NY Times and the LA Times from around 1935 where he's described as a "Philosopher". The shows are odd, in that early to mid-30s kind of way, with Cox just saying some kind of pithy proverbs with a bell sounding after each one. The theme song of the show is "Jingle Bells", oddly enough. Each show runs about five minutes with a proper intro and outro. Sounds normal for a 30's transcription so far, right? Well, here's the weird part - the disc runs at about 32 rpm. If you play it at 33 1/3, it sounds like Mickey Mouse and obviously isn't the right speed. I manually adjusted the speed when I transferred the disc so it sounded right and checked the actual speed with the RPM app on my iPhone. Anyone hear of an odd speed being used on purpose like this in the 30s for transcriptions? Was this some kind of production/mastering error? If this was intentional, perhaps to save on syndicating a five minute show on a ten inch rather than twelve-inch disc, I can't see an odd speed disc like this going over well with station engineers. When I first got the disc and previewed it, noticing I had to really dial down the speed, I thought it might have been mastered at the British Talking Book speed used about that time, but that was 24 rpm, which is much slower than what we have here. Any ideas on this oddity? I've owned a lot of transcriptions over various time periods and never run into an off-speed disc like this. Here's a link to label scans and mp3s of the content if you want to puzzle over it for a bit. https://duke.box.com/s/ioohdj1uiqifk8yfagshphqzesu1o0qy Thanks! Randy -- Randy A. Riddle Mebane, NC Cool Cat Daddy Productions www.coolcatdaddy.com [log in to unmask]