It was a dark and stormy night…

Actually it was a drizzly afternoon around 3 o’clock, when Karla was digging through yet another box of old stuff of her mother’s and ran across dozens of pieces of sheet music, some going back to 1910. It was very interesting looking at how it was presented — some of the covers had pictures of singers or pianists and words describing the music as something they had performed, as if when you were playing or singing, you might sound like those performers. Also came stern warnings; should you ever dare reproduce the music you’d be in violation of copyright law. Reminds me of the FBI warnings at the start of every movie DVD. The price of sheet music was surprisingly high — 50¢ in the 1930s would buy ten cups of coffee or an entire lunch, not cheap!

The ad on the back of one issue of Etude, “The Journal of the Musical Home Everywhere,” presented the Victor Micro-Synchronous Radio, which achieves “acoustic symmetry” and is the “climax of thirty years of unchallenged leadership in acoustical reproduction — the supreme product of the most painstaking and specialized craftsmanship!” Not cheap, either. The price in 1929 “Only $155* for the Victor-Radio Console; only $275* for the Victor-Radio-Electrola.”

*Less Radiotrons

And what are Radiotrons? Vacuum tubes! You had to pay extra for the critical parts that made this marvelous radio work! That’s like selling an engineless car! If you click on the link above, you’ll see an ad for RCA Radiotrons where they suggest that you pull and replace all of them in your radio once a year.

In a 1940 issue of Etude, Philco “brings you a new kind of Radio-Phonograph!” You never have to change needles, because there aren’t any! The “Philco Photo-Electric Radio-Phonograph [has] a rounded jewel [that] floats over the records and reflects the music on a beam of light from a tiny mirror to a photo-electric cell.” Sounds to me like the precursor to the Compact Disk. So what else is new?