The Talking Machine Forum — For All Antique Phonographs & Recordings

The first orange regular series Blue Amberol boxes state the price in the patents section as 60 cents each, but the last box lists the price on the front as 35 cents.
Does anyone know in what year the price was reduced, and if they went straight from 60 to 35, or was there a smaller reduction inbetween?

Also, in what year were the BA Concert series cylinders discontinued?

Shane,

The 28000 Concert series was discontinued in November 1918, according to this document (Mainspring Press).

According to Phil O.’s site, the price drop probably happened in 1923...but I am not certain of this.

Phil O. wrote:1923

To encourage sales, Edison dropped cylinder record and phonograph prices and cut dealer margins. Edison began loosing dealers in droves and was eventually forced to sell direct to the public via mail order.

— MordEth

Thanks David for pointing this out and for calling attention to this site. I did not know about it before. Lot's of good stuff here!

Thanks for that David.
I'm actually working on something a little more indepth than what's on Phil's site, and attempting to correct a couple things.
The Mainpress document was very helpful, although they are a little off with the Grand Opera series information, but only because there were quite a few Grand Opera titles included in the 28,000 series before the introduction of Royal Purple cylinders (and never made it to Royal Purples)

I'd post what I've done so far, but I'd hate to be accused of littering the web with inaccurate information

Shane,

Sadly, that’s one of the drawbacks of being as uninformed as I am of these things—I can find information out there to cite, but the question is really how accurate that information is. Obviously, just because it is on a website does not make it right, or I could create quite a lot of ridiculous ‘facts’.

Did you know that Thomas Edison initially planned to replace the wax cylinders with a recording process in 1903 that used ivory master to which electricity was applied? He was far ahead of the curve with electric recordings, but could not get it to work properly, and later developed the 4M Amberols instead.

(Hopefully that has enough emoticons that no-one believes me.)

— MordEth

That's very true. Even the experts appear to get things wrong on rare occasions, or new information is found that contradicts what was previously believed to be true.
I guess that's why boards like this (ideally) can be so important.

The original Grand Opera series (2900) on BA was released in Oct. 1913 and had only 5 titles. These were later re-released as the 1st 5 in the Royal Purple series. None of these recordings exist in the Concert Series (28101-28292) in the U.S. It's too bad that they didn't concentrate on the higher end opera when the Royal Purple line was introduced.

Amberola 1-A wrote:The original Grand Opera series (2900) on BA was released in Oct. 1913 and had only 5 titles. These were later re-released as the 1st 5 in the Royal Purple series. None of these recordings exist in the Concert Series (28101-28292) in the U.S. It's too bad that they didn't concentrate on the higher end opera when the Royal Purple line was introduced.

There are quite a few Grand Opera's in the 28101-28292 range.
So far I've seen 28123, 28125, 28126, 28137, 28144, 28150, 28151, & 28161.
The boxes are the same as the Concert series, but the word "Concert" on the lid is replaced with "Grand Opera".
Are these not Grand Opera records?

Does anyone know which number standard/popular series blue amberol was the last to have the paper pamphlet included in the box? (like the one pictured above)
The last one I have is 2137.

gramophoneshane wrote: There are quite a few Grand Opera's in the 28101-28292 range.
So far I've seen 28123, 28125, 28126, 28137, 28144, 28150, 28151, & 28161.
The boxes are the same as the Concert series, but the word "Concert" on the lid is replaced with "Grand Opera".
Are these not Grand Opera records?

Yes, there are Grand Opera titled records in the 28000 series ( I own several and posted Constantino's Aida on Youtube recently), which is is called "Concert Series" in reference books for what ever reason. I don't know if this is author error, but several reference these as such. Ron Dethlefson and Allan Sutton to name a few.
If you read my above post, I simply stated that a "Grand Opera Series" title was given to 5 BAs in 1913 and that they were later the first 5 in the Royal Purple Series.