Edison discards?

[luke68]

Found 4 of these Edison discs at a recent estate sale. Unfortunately, I don't have a machine to play them outside of a regular turntable. Does anyone know anything about these discards or can you point me in the right direction? Couldn't find anything on the internet...

[OrthoSean]

Factory "rejects". I have a number of these with both finished and unfinished edges on them. Most of mine are pressings of things that were issued commercially, though. I have a couple with unissued matrices as well as couplings that weren't issued together. I've never really been able to tell why they would get "discarded", though, since mine all seem to be good quality pressings when played electrically.

Sean

[52089]

The Collector's Guide to Edison Records discusses these briefly (p.40). According to the authors, employees were allowed to take home defective pressings, provided they were maked as "Discarded". The authors state that the usual defects were with the labels, not the music itself.

[Valecnik]

The Collector's Guide to Edison Records discusses these briefly (p.40). According to the authors, employees were allowed to take home defective pressings, provided they were maked as "Discarded". The authors state that the usual defects were with the labels, not the music itself.

Those rules must have been practiced very inconsistently. I've also got DD records where a new label was just glued over an old one, presumably the title of the underlying label being incorrect. Still that seems like a better solution than discarding the record entirely.

[larryh]

I too have a number of discarded records of the black label vintage. Most are classical and have some rather nice music which played fine. I wondered if they perhaps had too small a disc as the outside run in area was so shallow on some you can hardly set the diamond down. Some also seem unusually thin.. Maybe none of those were why they were marked that way though..

Larry