Historic Recordings

This section contains a small selection of historic recordings for download. These are in MP3 format for convenience and are made available for reference purposes only. To listen to the files you can either right click and choose "save as" from the menu or by clicking directly over the button. Depending on how your individual computer is set up will determine which player will pop up etc.

The first file is an extract from the experimental session using the Magnetophon K2 recorder. The session used a single Neumann bottle microphone. The quality is surprisingly good. The session dates from November 1936, with Sir Thomas Beecham conducting the London Philharmonic at BASF’s concert hall near its manufacturing plant in Ludwigshaven. (Mozart's symphony No 39) Other improvements followed, such as BASF’s ferric-oxide tape in 1939 and Walter Weber’s rediscovery and application of high-frequency AC biasing, which had been known since the 1920s, giving the later 1941 Magnetophons a bandwidth of 10 kHz. The original recording contains a number of minor faults which have deliberately not been edited out.

Pictures taken at the historic recording session at the BASF concert hall in 1936.	The Neumann "bottle mike" can just be seen in the right hand picture.

An extract from the 6th May 1933 EMI disk recording of the Queen of Sheba. Again, with Thomas Beecham conducting . This historic recording was one of the first to use the Bluimlein/Hallman  moving coil recording chain with at the time, an unheard of  frequency response of some 13Khz. This was (and still is) a highly acclaimed recording.

Alan Dower Blumlien	Isaac Schoenberg

A Blumlien experimental recording in binaural sound. This rare recording was only one of two  recorded to disk in 1933, and features the voice of Alan Blumlien and  assistant conducting experiments in this early form of stereo. Blumlien abandoned further work in these areas  to pursue electronic television under the direction of Isaac Schoenberg. These early sound experiments demonstrate how advanced his research was, hampered by only by the limitations in the pressing processes of the day limiting the research to the laboratory only. Unfortunately much of the original  ground breaking equipment was junked by EMI and the recordings made, consigned to the vaults leaving it to others years later in the 1950s to perfect stereo on disk as we have come to know it know it today. The extract is taken from the original master disk and with the advances made in the years since the original technique was perfected, modern processes can now extract the original binaural effect .