Transcription Mystery Disc # 45

This Wilcox-Gay Recordio has a very promising label. The words "test" and "radio" suggests it's a test recording from an early amplified loudspeaker. The home test recordings are often strange experiments and practice runs. The results range from comic flubs to amateurish narration to inexplicable noises. This one is no disappointment.

Test Melody Off Radio


This one has an outer edge start and spins at 78 rpm as you'd expect from the given date of 11/03/1942. The recording engineer does a radio band scan from wherever they were at the moment. The audio starts out with a pretty bland parlor music, around the one minute mark a crooner kicks in and he's bland too. At 1:07 he flips it to a comedy of some kind. at 1:19 it flips to a news broadcast about the republican nomination for a primary out of Baltimore, then at 1:39 he punches back to the crooner.

The audio is a mixed bag, I applied both a high pass filter and a low pass filter which normally I'd consider a gratuitous no-no, but I needed to remove both surface noise and enough of the indigenous radio static to make the verbiage intelligible. the rest is pretty good.  If I knew Baltimore politics better, I might be able to corroborate the date or guess a location.