The Talking Machine Forum — For All Antique Phonographs & Recordings

I stumbled upon this site while researching another post and thought I'd pass it along for those who might be interested:

http://sounds.bl.uk/

Culling through the site, I came upon this page which lists a number of early record catalogs in PDF format, "produced by record companies for the British market during the acoustic era from 1898 to 1926" --

http://sounds.bl.uk/Sound-recording-his ... catalogues


Joe

Many thanks for posting these links! I went to the English dialects page and found the contents absolutely fascinating (http://sounds.bl.uk/Accents-and-dialect ... h-dialects). One begins to understand why word spelling and pronunciation in English are so inconsistent and quirky when you listen to these speakers; some of them seem to be pronouncing words exactly as they are spelled, e.g., the Welwick, Yorkshire lady describing how to bake bread says something like "floh-ur," compared to the way we in the US pronounce it just like "flower." And some of the speakers are incomprehensible at first, but if you listen carefully you can get the gist of it. Great ear-training possibilities here---wonderful!

Thanks for the link. Excellent site and the PDF's catalogues are worth a visit.

There's some amazing stuff on there.

Frustratingly some of the oral history about the audio industry is only available to academic institutions.

I love the stereo recordings from 1933 though.

Cheers,
David.