The Talking Machine Forum — For All Antique Phonographs & Recordings

I know this looks like a little bit of shameless self-promoting, but here's my recent article about a 1928 Korean Victor recording of A-Ak (a type of Korean court music in old times), written as a guest post on Excavated Shellac webpage.

http://excavatedshellac.com/2012/08/19/ ... al-heemun/

I spent a long time of researching, compiling the documents, and so forth, and I think I did my best. Hope some people at this forum would be interested by reading this.



Here's a photo from a 1915 book by German Catholic priest named Norbert Weber, Im Lande der Morgenstill, showing a Korean man in a typical Korean traditional male outfits, trying to listen a Victor ; anyone can guess what model that might be?

Looks like a Vic "0" to me.

Excellent research! I learnt a lot while reading your article.

Did you know that it was Will Gaisberg of G&T Ltd., who visited Korea during November and December 1906 and made a number of recordings in Seoul, which were afterwards issued by Victor? The last matrix number of this session, recorded on December 3rd 1906, is 5051e, other details are unknown.

This was fascinating! The saga of the JVC company has always interested me.

Jim

It could well be a colonial model. Due to the heat and high moisture a normal cabinet could be eaten away by termites in months, so cabinets were often made of solid teak wood. All HMV gramophones made in Dumdum, India, for the East Asian market had teak enclosures. Many of those are still relatively easy to come by and at a fair price, but the shipping costs are horrendous.
I'm not talking about the crapophones of course, that are shipped by the container load.