Date:Tue, 15 Aug 2006 06:26:00 -0400
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From:Tom Fine <[log in to unmask]>
Subject:Re: How many 78's--was: National Recording Preservation Board
(NRPB) Study
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Hi Steven:
OK, even though this is an old thread, I gotta ask a followup. Given your statement about your own
holdings, the number and "pre-catalog" state -- are you still accumulating? If so, how can you ever
figure out what you have given the finite lifespan of a person?
Also, on a different topic. You seem very expert on the 78 era. Is it myth or fact that RCA buried a
bunch of metal parts and masters when they tore down their Camden NJ plant? And I guess more
importantly, did they bury anything important/valuable vs. obscure one-disk wonders?
-- Tom Fine
----- Original Message -----
From: "steven c" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Tuesday, August 15, 2006 1:17 AM
Subject: [ARSCLIST] How many 78's--was: National Recording Preservation Board (NRPB) Study
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Tom Fine" <[log in to unmask]>
> To: <[log in to unmask]>
> Sent: Monday, May 15, 2006 5:00 PM
>> I honestly didn't know there were 80,000 unique 78 sides recorded! What is
> the material?
>>
>> Steven, do you think you have more disks than Joe Bussard? Did I
> understand you correctly that you
>> have 40 THOUSAND unique 78's (ie no repeats)? Or, how much of that is
> overlap?
>>
> My educated guess is that there were probably somewhere between
> two and three million different 78rpm discs issued between
> Berlier's 1889 efforts and the last music-library 78's (pressed
> in the UK but extensively used in North America).
>
> Victor alone used over 104,000 matrix numbers between 1900 and
> 1942 (assume 10% to 20% weren't issued, or the numbers were never
> used...that is still 80 to 90 thousand sides!)...Columbia used
> about 40,000 before 1934, and the Plaza/ARC/CBS series ran from
> 5001 to somewhere in the 60,000's not counting non-NYC matrices.
>
> As far as my own holdings...I won't know until I finish my "pre-
> catalog" project. However, I'd estimate about 2,000 duplicate
> phonorecords max, if that...and there will be a number of cases
> where I have the same side on more than one disc, usually with
> a different pairing. However, I already have almost 20,000
> 78's "pre-catalogued" and as near as I can tell I haven't
> been through half of my milk boxes yet...so the question
> is whether my number of duplicates will be somewhere close
> to my final count's excess over 40,000.
>
> ...stevenc
> http://users.interlinks.net/stevenc/
