Battle of the Speeds: LPs, 45s, and the
Decline of the 78
(1939 – 1950)

 

By Allan Sutton

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As early as 1939, Columbia Records president Edward Wallerstein had authorized research into a long-playing disc, with the backing of CBS executives. He had assembled a first-rate research and development group that reported to Peter Goldmark, who attributed his early interest in longer-playing discs to a “sincere hatred” of the phonograph as it then existed. Goldmark’s team included Columbia Records’ Jim Hunter (who had been involved in the development RCA’s long-playing Program Transcriptions a decade earlier), Ike Rodman, Vin Liebler, Bill Savory, CBS’s Rene Snepvangers (who was charged with developing a suitable lightweight pickup), and William S. (Bill) Bachman (who was recruited from General Electric).

Read Bill Bachman’s recollections of the LP’s development

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Peter Goldmark and Rene Snepvangers, 1948. Goldmark was quick to take credit for the LP, although he “didn’t actually do any of the work,” according to Edward Wallerstein. (CBS Photo Archive)

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Although Peter Goldmark is often credited as the inventor of the microgroove LP, Wallerstein later claimed that Goldmark “didn’t actually do any of the work”:

I want to emphasize that the project was all a team effort. No one man can be said to have “invented” the LP, which in any case was not, strictly speaking, an invention, but a development. The team of Liebler, Bachman, Savory, Hunter, and Rodman was responsible for it. If one man is to be singled out, it would have to be Bachman, whose work on the heated stylus, automatic variable pitch control, and most especially the variable reluctance pickup was a starting point for a great deal of what was to come. [1]

The new records were to employ a 0.001” (1-mil) “microgroove,” which Wallerstein had seen tested at RCA during his tenure there. The decision to press in vinyl came from Jim Hunter, who determined that its use would not require major modifications to the existing plating and pressing equipment at Columbia’s Bridgeport plant. [2]

Exhibiting remarkable foresight, in 1939 Wallerstein ordered that Columbia’s new studios be equipped to record simultaneously on standard 78-rpm masters and 16″ acetate blanks. The latter were to be held in reserve, in an air-conditioned vault, as a stockpile of masters from which the long-playing discs could be dubbed when the time came. [3] A decade later, Wallerstein’s forward-looking decision, along with Columbia’s early adoption of tape mastering after the war, would hand the company a distinct advantage over RCA Victor in the conversion to long-playing records.

Development of the long-playing microgroove disc was well under way when the United States’ entry into World War II forced Columbia to put the project on hold. Work did not resume in earnest until 1946. By then, the once-moribund Columbia label had reclaimed its place as one of the leading names in the American record market. “The time was ripe,” Wallerstein recalled, “for the introduction of something new into the industry.” [4]

Late in the year, Columbia engineers demonstrated a long-playing record that unfortunately fell far short of Wallerstein’s expectations. As costs mounted, CBS president William Paley became increasingly impatient for a launch and ordered Wallerstein, Hunter, and members of the engineering team to meet with him every two months. Every detail had to be carefully researched, from cutting angles to heated cutting styli, in the seemingly contradictory quest for higher fidelity and longer playing time. After considerable experimentation, which at one point involved recording gunfire in the studio, the American-made microphones were retired in favor of a superior condenser model captured from the Germans.

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Fritz Reiner, Edward Wallerstein, Goddard Lieberson, and George Szell examine the new LP.

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Columbia took another step closer to LP conversion in mid-1947, when it began mastering on magnetic tape, although tape would not be employed to any great extent for several more years. [5] In the meantime, the engineers had produced a seventeen-minute 33 ¹/3-rpm prototype disc, now being referred to internally as simply “LP” (the first documented use of that term). Although the prototype appeared promising, it was rejected by CBS management in the fall of 1947, with orders given to extend the playing time to at least twenty minutes. [6]

The timing problem was soon solved, but the LP was facing a more serious impediment in its journey to market — there were not yet any consumer-grade phonographs capable of playing the records, nor any any way of modifying existing phonographs to handle them. Although the recording technology had been largely perfected by the end of 1947, the development of affordable players had lagged — the same problem that had plagued RCA’s long-playing Program Transcriptions in the early 1930s. In addition to a 33 ¹/3-rpm turntable, a high-quality permanent stylus and lightweight tone-arm would be required.

After concluding that Columbia’s engineers had neither the skills nor time to create such a device, Wallerstein contracted with radio manufacturer Philco to develop and manufacture the first models. [7] Working closely with the CBS team, Philco’s engineers quickly delivered an inexpensive, single-speed player turntable that could be attached to an owner’s existing radio or electrical phonograph.

In January 1948, Wallerstein was elected chairman of the board of Columbia Records, and CBS vice-president Frank K. White assumed the presidency that Wallerstein had vacated. By then, the microgroove LP was fast approaching its final form, with playing time now extended to twenty-two minutes on a twelve-inch side. After having kept the project under wraps for so long, Paley and Wallerstein began quietly demonstrating the new records to select industry insiders in an attempt to garner licensing deals. Wallerstein demonstrated the LP to RCA president David Sarnoff in April 1948, in a meeting that reportedly did not go well. He fared better in England, where he recalled that officials of Decca Ltd. and Electric and Musical Industries, were impressed, although not in a position to take the plunge. [8]

With a tremendous archive of recordings in transcription form, little consideration was given to making new LP recordings for the moment. Instead, a team comprising Bill Savory, Paul Gordon, and Howard Scott, under Bill Bachman’s supervision, was handed the arduous task of transferring selected 16” acetate transcriptions to new microgroove LP masters. A clean segue between sides was required for extended classical works, a touchy process that did not always go well, as Ward Botsford recounted in a 1976 High Fidelity article:

Even if the first segue was right, the second or third or fourth or fifth might blow, and the three men would say impolite words and go right back to the beginning. To say that all of this required a certain knack is to say the least… When the team was about a third of the way through the project, Bachman broke the news that they had been inadvertently cutting with the wrong size stylus. And so, three months already shot, they had to start from scratch. Things got serious then, and Scott brought in a mattress. [9]

At the end of May 1948, Billboard magazine reported that CBS executives were still “maintaining complete silence on the entire project,” apparently unaware that Wallerstein was already demonstrating the LP to other producers. As far as the public was concerned, that silence was finally broken on June 18, when Columbia hosted a preview of the new records and player for recording-industry executives, during which the technical details were openly disclosed for the first time.

Two days later, member of the press were given their first glimpse of the LP when Wallerstein demonstrated it to fifty reporters at New York’s Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. In a dramatic visual demonstration, he posed next to an eight-foot high tower of 78-rpm albums, holding an armful of new LPs, and announced, “Gentlemen,what I hold in my hands represents the same amount of music contained in that giant stack of 78s.” The demonstration would be repeated elsewhere by Peter Goldmark and other Columbia and CBS executives.

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Peter Goldmark demonstrates the LP’s compactness.

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The initial LP catalog was released on the same day. Beginning with Mendelssohn’s Concerto in E Minor by Nathan Milstein and the New York Philharmonic conducted by Bruno Walter (ML 4001), it consisted of 101 mostly classical records. Columbia then took its show on the road, demonstrating the new records to dealers on a nationwide tour that wrapped-up in Utah a month later. [10] The records and players were on sale to the general public by early September. Cover art was sacrificed In the rush to get the records to market. Several generic boilerplate designs (of which the the “tombstone” cover for Masterworks releases saw the most use) would suffice for most releases into the early 1950s.

 

Cover art suffered in Columbia’s rush to get the LP to market. 

 

Most of Columbia’s early LPs were simply cobbled together from recordings that had previously been issued as 78s. The records were pressed in ten- and twelve-inch formats (the latter reserved primarily for classical works), with retail prices ranging from $2.85 for standard ten-inch releases to $4.85 for the twelve-inch Masterworks series. In a case of unfortunate timing, a seven-inch LP, retailing for 60¢ and devoted largely to pop material, was introduced in January 1949 — just a few months ahead of RCA’s 45-rpm disc, which catered to the same market and would prove far more popular.

In April 1949, Columbia reduced the retail prices of its standard 78s to 60¢ from the industry-standard 75¢. By late 1948, distributors were reporting a marked increase in sales of Columbia LPs, with a corresponding drop in sales of 78s despite the recent price cut.

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Despite the “Beethoven to Blues” claim (top), Columbia’s early LP output was heavily skewed toward classical material. The seven-inch LP (bottom) was aimed primarily at the pop market. 

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Realizing that there was little patentable about the LP, and that it could succeed commercially only if the format was universally adopted, CBS executives rethought their original licensing plan. In June 1948, the company made the microgroove LP format freely available to other companies, some of whom returned the favor by giving Columbia their LP pressing business, at least until they were able to retool their own plants. The result was an explosion of interest in the new format by major and minor labels alike. Legal, financial, and logistical issues would crop up, including the need to recalculate artists’ royalty rates (requiring negotiations with the notoriously uncooperative American Federation of Musicians’ James Caesar Petrillo), a demand by Standard Transcription that Columbia pay double recording rates for material transferred from its masters, and the need to quickly supply radio stations with microgroove-capable equipment) but they did little to impede development. [11]

The conversion to plastic LP pressings would be a fairly straightforward process. A wartime shellac shortage had forced producers to experiment with synthetic pressing materials, including various vinyl- and styrene-based formulations, so by 1948 many pressing plants already had several years’ experience working with those materials. The conversion to high-fidelity microgroove recording appeared to be more daunting, but Audio Record magazine assured its readers (consisting mainly of independent studio owners and engineers) that the transition “is an easy one from the equipment point of view.” C. J. LeBel outlined the basic steps for nervous recording engineers:

The most important [step] is provision for cutting at micro pitch — in the range of 224 to 260 lines per inch. Probably 224 to 240 lines is the most desirable for most applications. Some equipment already made has provisions for this without change… In other apparatus some change is necessary. An overhead feed mechanism relies on a change of lead-screw for change of pitch. To make this shift, then, it is only necessary to purchase and insert a new lead-screw.

The electrical characteristics are even simpler to achieve… we would use normal transcription recording characteristics. This would be either the NAB standard 16-db boost at 10,000 cycles, or the standard 10-db boost which many studios have found to be their usable limit. Columbia microgroove characteristic is the same as NAB, except that the response is slightly higher below 100 cycles. A simple equalizer will take care of this. For a great deal of the work the difference is negligible, and standard transcription equalization can be used. [12]

As eager as many companies were to adopt the new format, few were ready to forsake the 78 entirely. The London label (which added LPs to its line-up in 1949, and 45s in January 1950) took a step back in April 1950 with its “Shellac Is Not Dead” campaign. To prove its point, London announced it was issuing twelve new 78-rpm album sets and twenty new 78-rpm singles, but only two 45s and one LP, during the campaign, which was soon scuttled. [13]

Some dealers actively opposed the transition, seeing it as a form of price-cutting and fearing they would be left with a glut of unsalable 78s. Among them was David Krantz. president of the Philadelphia Retail Record Dealers’ Association, and producer of the minuscule Krantz Records label. In early 1949 he launched a crusade against the LP that succeeded only in losing business for his store and antagonizing some Columbia sales executives. Krantz’s campaign ended abruptly in June 1950, when he and seven other Philadelphia record-store owners were arrested and charged by the Justice Department with conspiracy to fix record prices. [14]

Krantz and his kindred spirits were the exception. Despite some initial trepidation, the LP format was soon being embraced by record companies and dealers alike, in no small part because of its potential for wringing additional profits from recordings that had already run their course, as far as sales, in 78 form. The redundancy apparently did not bother consumers, who rushed to replace their old shellac pressings with the new quieter, trendier long-playing editions.

Announcements of companies’ impending LP launches were appearing regularly in the trade papers by late 1948. Some were premature, and there were a few false starts. Savoy announced its first LP release in December 1948, dubbed from previously released Errol Garner 78s, then but retreated; the company would not begin issuing LPs on a regular basis until March 1950. The Bihari brothers announced that Modern Records was about to launch LPs in the summer of 1949, but the first releases did not begin to appear until October 1950. [15] Some record companies undertook the conversion piecemeal, often testing the waters with the less-lucrative segments of their catalogs before committing to large-scale LP output. Allegro, which Paul Puner had launched after leaving Musicraft, began by test-marketing children’s LPs; Dial, which was predominantly a jazz label, began with a small group of LP classical albums using leased foreign masters.

Atlantic, Mercury, and M-G-M took the LP plunge in early 1949, followed by Tempo in May, Decca in August (nearly a year before its British counterpart did so), and a host of smaller labels as the year came to a close. The independent classical labels, in particular, were quick to embrace the microgroove LP. Among the earliest to do so was Vox, which began releasing LPs in early May 1949. [16] The albums were produced in two series, retailing for $4.85 for domestic recordings, or $5.85 for foreign recordings licensed from Polydor, its various affiliates, and Discophile Francais. Billboard reported that Columbia Records was giving Vox its full cooperation in making the conversion (Columbia was not being entirely altruistic, having gained Vox’s pressing business in the process). In November, Vox announced that it was abandoning 78-rpm production entirely. [17] Cetra-Soria, based in Italy, soon followed suit for its American releases. The prestigious Concert Hall Society began with a single “experimental” LP in January 1949, [18] and by the early 1950s it had followed Vox’s lead to become an LP-only line. Several new entrants in the classical field during 1949–1951, including Period and Renaissance, went directly to LP production without having produced 78s.

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Cetra-Soria and Renaissance were among the independent classical labels availing themselves of Columbia’s microgroove LP technology and pressing services in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

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In response to all of this activity, independent manufacturers began turning out multi-speed phonographs as fast as they could retool their production lines. A February 1949 Billboard article listed dozens of new changers that could play both 78s and 33s. At the entry level were turntable attachments like Philco’s. For consumers flush with post-war cash, there were multi-speed automatic changers with built-in AM-FM radios, and Westinghouse even offered changer-radio-television combinations that retailed from $625 to $725. [19]

RCA officials offered no public comment on the microgroove LP until early 1949, when they countered with what they hinted would be a revolutionary new format. RCA made much of the project’s top-secret status, which it code-named “Madame X,” while leaking just enough information to keep the public intrigued. By late January the basic facts were already known: “Madame X” was to be a small-diameter, fine-groove 45-rpm disc with matching changer. [20] In February, Audio Record magazine reported,

No technical information has yet been released, but we have collected the available data… X is a thin 7” pressing of pure vinyl. The center hole is large — about 1½ inches in diameter. Maximum playing time is 5½ minutes. Fine grooves are employed, and the playback stylus is 1 mil… So far as we can tell, the recording characteristic is the same as that used on standard Victor records…

The point which has aroused the widest controversy is the speed: 45 rpm. It is rumored that 33 ¹/3 rpm was tried and discarded… A moment’s consideration will show that for a given diameter, 45 rpm will give 35% higher linear groove velocity than will 33 ¹/3 rpm. It would be possible to get the same linear groove velocity at 33 ¹/3 rpm by increasing the outside diameter to 9½ inches, which would increase the vinyl cost 82% over the 7 inch size. [21]

A month later, in the same publication, RCA engineer D. D. Cole came forth with a detailed description of the new records and matching player, along with his company’s rationale for introducing them. [22] RCA’s contention was that the myriad problems inherent in recorded-sound reproduction could be solved only with a fully integrated system, so considerable effort was expended in developing the compact changers that would be required to play the new records. Recalling the old premium-scheme phonographs of the early 1900s, [23] they were designed to foil the use of any record other than the 45, although Cole promised that multi-format changers were in development. The new record-and-changer combination was touted as the “first in history of the industry to be designed specifically to complement each other” — conveniently overlooking Columbia’s new LP player as well as RCA’s own Program Transcription disc-and-player combination of the early 1930s. [24]

RCA’s new records and players were introduced to the general public with considerable fanfare in April 1949. Cole assured customers that 78-rpm records were in no imminent danger of disappearing, but his wording provided a subtle hint that they were already becoming an after-thought: “RCA Victor,” Cole declared, “will continue to serve the standard market by making all selections recorded for the 45-rpm system also available on 78-rpm records.” [25] He announced a novel plan to allocate different colors of vinyl to each series: red for Red Seals, black for standard popular, green for country-and-western, yellow for children’s, cerise for rhythm-and-blues, light blue for international, and dark blue for what he termed “popular classics.” Advertising was undertaken on an international scale. Even before the records were placed on sale, RCA Victor sales manager Frank McCall was dispatched to Cuba on the first leg of a seven-week trip to promote the new format to Latin American distributors.

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An early 1950s advertisement for RCA Victor’s 45, showing the color-coded transparent vinyl pressings, and the player attached to a radio unit.

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RCA executives had predicted that other record manufacturers would rush to produce 45s, as they had with Columbia’s LP, which proved not to be the case. Unlike the LP, the 45 embodied some patented features, for which RCA initially demanded a licensing fee. The unusually thin pressings, thick raised label areas, and oversized spindle holes required that new presses be purchased or existing ones retooled. Both issues served to discourage adoption by companies that were already heavily invested in the conversion to LPs. Consumers were slow to warm to the 45 as well, citing the shortage of selections arising from other companies’ refusal to sign-on with RCA. Many who might otherwise have embraced the new format had already purchased LP players, which could not yet handle 45s.

With consumer resistance showing little sign of abating, RCA ultimately was forced to follow Columbia’s lead, dropping its licensing requirement and offering support to other producers in the form of technical advice and pressing services. Nevertheless, adoption of the 45 continued to lag. Capitol Records was the only major label to immediately test the new format. [26] By turning the pressing over to RCA, Capitol managed to get a small selection of 45s to market by April 1949. [27] M-G-M followed several months later, but smaller producers remained aloof. One of the few to attempt the conversion in 1949 was Gabor Szabo, who had managed RCA Victor’s foreign-record division until 1941, and had since maintained an on-again off-again relationship with the company. In the summer of 1949, he briefly test-marketed an inexpensive 45-rpm disc, pressed in inferior “Websterlite” plastic, then shelved  the project. Thus, Chicago-based Rondo Records became the first small producer to reach the market with 45s, barely nudging out the even more minuscule Discovery Records for the honor in January 1950. [28]

In December 1949, Billboard reported a “major metamorphosis” in RCA’s approach to the 45 that hinted of sour grapes:

The company is now distinctly cool to the idea or necessity of persuading other diskeries to adopt 45. The reason for the attitude is two-fold. Firstly, RCA has had to go it alone; secondly, the company now figures it has carved out a sizable market for itself in 45, and any diskery venturing into this market would mean a lessening of RCA’s profit therein. [29]

In the same story, it was reported that Decca executives had begun “gauging and checking” the 45-rpm market. Columbia was planning to launch 45s as well. Edward Wallerstein, despite his openly expressed disdain for the little records, gave the go-ahead for Columbia to start producing them in late 1949, assuring dealers that his company would make “any record the public wanted.” [30]  The London label began offering 45s in January 1950, along with the tiny Goldband and Folkstar lines. When Decca joined the fray in July, apparently having completed its “gauging and checking,” the 45 finally began to gain some traction in the marketplace.

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With demand increasing for 45s, RCA issued this notice in an attempt to standardize labels among its four pressing plants.

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By the mid-1950s, the 45 would become the preferred format for pop singles. Classical enthusiasts, however, were decidedly cool toward yet another format that required side-changes every five minutes. Columbia executive Edward Wallerstein recalled,

RCA especially spent huge sums of advertising money trying unsuccessfully to convince the public that the 45 was really a good thing for classics. Our policy for advertising was not to compare the products. We were pushing LPs, and there was no comparison… Actually the introduction of 45s didn’t touch the sales of LPs at all. Columbia quickly began to issue single pops records on 45s, which were and indeed still are, the accepted medium for singles. I was amazed when I learned that during the period in which RCA held out against the LP — that is, from June 1948 to January 1950, it lost $4.5 million. [31]

Trade-paper reports of the period confirm that Columbia’s classical Masterworks LPs were outselling RCA’s 45-rpm Red Seal sets by a substantial margin. Sales of the 45-rpm Red Seal sets, already hobbled by consumer resistance, were further undermined by RCA’s ill-conceived decision, in June 1949, to place portions of its 78-rpm catalog on “clearance sale,” with discounts ranging from forty to fifty percent. The result, dealers reported, was huge sales of the discounted 78-rpm Red Seal album sets that undercut demand for the more expensive (and for RCA, more profitable) 45-rpm versions.

After taking a loss on record sales in 1949, RCA finally capitulated and began preparations to produce its own LPs, becoming the last major producer to do so. The impending arrival of a three-speed RCA player was announced in early December 1949. On January 4, 1950, the company announced that it was making its classical library available in LP format; pop LPs followed several months later. RCA was at a technical disadvantage at first, having to rely largely on dubbings from 78-rpm pressings for most of its early releases. However, the records were pressed in better material than the Columbia LPs and featured attractive album-cover artwork, unlike Columbia’s generic, boilerplate designs. They were an immediate hit with dealers and customers alike.

 

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Arthur Fiedler plugging the RCA 45. Columbia’s Edward Wallerstein recalled that RCA “spent huge sums of advertising money trying unsuccessfully to convince the public that the 45 was really a good thing for classics.”

 

The proliferation of new formats and adoption of the microgroove standard had been unsettling for many small producers. With standard 78s still selling in large numbers, and no clear winner yet in battle between LPs and 45s, prevailing wisdom held that it was essential to release recordings in all three formats — an expense that many smaller producers were unwilling or unable to take on. As early as November 1948, Allegro president Paul Puner had requested that the Department of Commerce intervene in the increasingly chaotic situation. His request for standardization was flatly denied by Assistant Secretary Thomas Blaidesell, who advised, “We can appreciate the present difficulties facing your industry, but do not feel, operating under a free economy as we do, that this department could intervene in situations of this kind unless directed to so do by law.” [32]

The same uncertainty plagued the jukebox industry. Seeburg’s vice-president, after conducting an extensive study of the situation, complained,

“The Battle of the Speeds,” a highly controversial subject with the public, has, apparently, been equally confusing to the record manufacturers themselves and it, therefore, becomes a very delicate and speculative issue for those of us who are on the outside observing the internal turmoil within the record industry.” [33]

He concluded that the LP was not suitable for jukebox use, but he was enthusiastic about the 45, praising its quality as “so far superior [to 78s] that it is really amazing.” He particularly liked the longer playing time, thinking it would encourage  jukebox operators to stock short classical pieces — a market he foresaw (quite incorrectly) as potentially lucrative. Nevertheless, Seeburg announced that it had no immediate plans to introduce a 45-rpm machine.

Others in the jukebox industry shared Seeburg’s wait-and-see attitude. At the end of 1949, executives at Wurlitzer, AMI, and other jukebox manufacturers were still expressing concerns over whether the format would be widely enough adopted by other companies to assure a wide selection of titles. Lester C. Rieck, sales manager of H. C. Evans & Company (the manufacturer of Constellation jukeboxes) told Billboard,

If this record is universally accepted by the record-playing public, then without a doubt a large library of selections will be made available. When this time comes, and only then, will the 45-rpm record prove to be a money-maker for music-machine operators… It is going to take time, possibly years, to completely outmode the playing of 78-rpm record. [34]

A Rock-Ola executive cited technical problems in adapting its mechanisms to the new discs. “We have run into so many difficulties in adapting them to our phonograph,” he reported, “that we have just about shelved the idea for the present.” An Aereon official, although enthusiastic about 45s and their potential, admitted that his company was not actively engaged in designing a machine to play them. [35]

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Williams Manufacturing was one of several small companies that introduced 45-rpm jukeboxes while the major manufacturers hesitated. This ad for its Music Mite, with RCA changer mechanism, appeared in December 1950.

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While the major manufacturers stalled and made excuses, some smaller companies moved to fill the vacuum, in some cases assisted by RCA which supplied them with changer mechanisms. Finally spurred to action, the larger manufacturers were soon flooding the market with new models, and conversion kits for 78-rpm machines. In November 1950, Cash Box (the jukebox industry’s trade magazine) began listing 45s in its sales charts, noting, “There is no longer any doubt of the growing interest in the 45s.” [36]

Jukebox operators proved to be heavy consumers and promoters of the little records, and demand them soared at the expense of the 78. By the early 1950s all of the major labels, and a rapidly growing number of smaller ones, were offering pop releases in both 45- and 78-rpm form, with sales of the latter dropping steadily as the decade progressed. As the 1960s dawned, the 78 was all but extinct in the U.S.

 

Notes

[1] Wallerstein, Edward (as told to Ward Botsford). “Creating the LP Record.” High Fidelity (Apr 1976), pp. 56–58, 60–61.

[2] Hunter had been part of the RCA team that developed Victrolac pressings in the early 1930s, which originally were intended as movie soundtrack discs. RCA engineer F. C. Barton first publicly disclosed the details at the spring 1931 meeting of the Society of Motion Picture Editors. As was disclosed in a 1935 RCA advertisement to the transcription trade, Victrolac was a form of vinyl manufactured by Union Carbide.

[3] Botsford, Ward. “From Transcription Disc to LP.” High Fidelity (Apr 1976), p. 59.

[4] Wallerstein, op. cit.

[5] Ibid. Wallerstein recalled having initially ordered EMI and Ampex recorders. However, as Ward Botsford points out in a footnote to Wallerstein’s article, Ampex did not introduce its first recorder until April 1948.

[6] CBS trademarked the LP name but failed to aggressively protect it. Eventually, it was determined that the term had slipped into generic usage, and CBS lost claim to it.

[7] Wallerstein, op. cit.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Botsford, Ward. “From Transcription Disc to LP.” High Fidelity (Apr 1976), p. 59.

[10] “Firm Sets Exhibit of New Records.” Salt Lake Tribune (Jul 11, 1948), p. 10.

[11] “Standard Yelps When Col. Cuts LPs from Ordinary Disks Sans Double Rate.” Billboard (Oct 9, 1948), p. 19.

[12] LeBel, C. J. “Microgroove in Your Studio. Part 2, Equipment Requirements.” Audio Record (Feb 1949), p. 3. Le Bel was vice-president of Audio Devices, Inc., a major supplier of blank recording discs and magnetic tape.

[13] “London Insists Shellac Is Live.” Billboard (May 6, 1950), p. 22.

[14] “U.S. Dragnet Snares Eight Philly Firms.” Billboard (Jun 10, 1950), p. 11.

[15] “Modern Adds 33 to LP Disk Line.” Billboard (Oct 28, 1950), p. 16.

 

[16] “Vox Waxery Hits LPs Heavy Next Mo.; 8–10 Disk Starter.” Billboard (Ap 30, 1949), p. 18.

[17] “Vox to Drop 78s, Use LP Exclusively.” Billboard (Nov 12, 1949), p. 18.

[18] “Concert Hall 1st Indie with LP.” Billboard (Jan 8, 1949), p. 14.

[19] “Mfrs. Hustle to Produce Combos Handling Different Speeds; Much Blueprinting.” Billboard (Feb 26, 1949), pp. 18, 115.

[20] “RCA’s New Phono System.” Billboard (Jan 3, 1949), p. 13.

[21] “Report on ‘Madame X,’ RCA Victor’s New 45 RPM Record.” Audio Record (Feb 4, 1949), p. 4.

[22] Cole, D. D. “The How and Why of RCA Victor’s New Record Player.” Audio Record (Mar 1949), pp. 1–3. Cole was chief engineer of the RCA Victor Home Instrument Department.

[23] These were phonographs that were equipped with special features (such as oversized spindles or a raised lug on the turntable) that prevented their use with standard records. Dealers sold them very cheaply, or even gave them away, knowing they would make their profit on the matching records. Details of these operations came be found in the author’s A Phonograph in Every Home (Mainspring Press).

[24] Program Transcriptions were the first 33 ¹/3-rpm discs made for the consumer market and could be played only on specially designed (and quite expensive) RCA phonographs. One of Edward Wallerstein’s first orders, upon his arrival at RCA, was that these money-losing products be discontinued.

[25] Cole, op. cit.

[26] “Capitol Records Out with 45 R.P.M. Music System in April.” Cash Box (Feb 19, 1949), p. 4.

[27] Capitol’s initial 45-rpm offerings were classical, using material licensed from Telefunken in Germany. Pop 45s were added later in the year, making Capitol the first company to offer the same material in all three speeds.

[28] “45’s for Rondo, Discovery Firm.” Billboard (Jan 7, 1950), pp. 11, 35.

[29] “RCA Sets 3-Speed Plans.” Billboard (Dec 10, 1949), pp. 14, 41.

[30] Ibid., p. 41.

[31] Wallerstein, op. cit.

[32] “Commerce Dept. Passes Buck on LP Plea to FTC.” Billboard (Dec 4, 1948), p. 23.

[33] “Seeburg Analyzes ‘45’ Disks — Believes Subject Vital to Industry’s Future.” Billboard (Dec 10, 1949), p. 15.

[34] Weiser, Norm. “Juke Makers Eye ‘45’ Wax; Availability Is Chief Factor.” Billboard (Dec 17, 1949), p. 17.

[35] Ibid.

[36] “All Tunes Appearing in ‘The Cash Box’ Charts to Show 45 RPM As Well As 78 RPM Disks as Juke Box B12 Swings Over to More and More 45 RPM Play.” Cash Box (Nov 25, 1950), p. 13.

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Copyright 2024 by Allan R. Sutton. All rights are reserved.