Electrical transcription

Electrical transcriptions are special phonograph recordings made exclusively for radio broadcasting, which were widely used during the "Golden Age of Radio". They provided material—from station-identification jingles and commercials to full-length programs—for use by local stations, which were affiliates of one of the radio networks. Physically, electrical transcriptions look much like long-playing records that were popular for decades. They differ from consumer-oriented recordings, in two major capacities A) they are more often than not larger than across, often so that they would not fit on consumer playback equipment and B) that they were recorded in a hill-and-dale or vertical recording format so that they would not play on the lateral playback systems in consumer homes. being non-commercial recordings also meant that they were "distributed only to radio stations for the purpose of broadcast, and not for sale to the public. The ET had higher quality audio than was available on consumer records" largely because they had less surface noise than commercial recordings. two of which being that they were often pressed on vinylite instead of the more common shellac and the fact that the vertical recordings eliminated rumble and other noises from the playback systems of the day. Electrical transcriptions were made practical by the development of electrical recording, which superseded Thomas Edison's original purely mechanical recording method in the mid-1920s. Marsh Laboratories in Chicago began issuing electrical recordings on its obscure Autograph label in 1924, but it was Western Electric's superior technology, adopted by the leading labels Victor and Columbia in 1925, which launched the then-new microphone-based method into general use in the recording industry. Electrical transcriptions were often used for recording programs of genres which would come to be known later as old-time radio. Although the earliest transcriptions ran at 78.