The Media Center Show #200 –Three Wise Men

Great show...it was great to hear about the upcoming features etc.

Great show, and congratulations on make it to #200.

Your guests were very interesting, but their history of recorded media is a bit fuzzy. Recordings started (with flat records) as 78 rpm discs and it was the running time of the disc that influenced the length of songs. The first albums were really "books" of 78 rpm disc which were played on record changers that dropped on disc after another (without breaking) on top of each other. The 33 rpm disc existed back in the 30s for radio transcriptions and later became the LP and then had multiple songs (although the original reason CBS Masterworks did it was to do symphonies without improper breaks). The 45 was just another of the many RCA innovations to replace the 78 rpm record and there were 45 albums which were multiple disc sets just like 78s.

As for tv aspect ratios, actually tv came before widescreen movies. In fact the BBC was on the air before WWII and ironically suspended broadcasting in the middle of a mickey mouse cartoon. In true british fashion, at the conclusion of the war and the restart of the BBC Television service, they picked up the cartoon right where the left off before the war!

In any even the first tv CRTs were round and the then movie frame of 1.37 was used to fit well inside that circle. It was in the 1950s when the movies were losing audiences to tv that the widescreen came into it's own with various masked versions with shorter focal length lenses and the new squeezed cinemascope widescreen process.

It's worth noting that Western Electric had stereo optical sound recording for 35mm movies in development before WWII as well, but after the war it wasn't resumed until the 1970s when it was "re-discovered" by Ray Dolby.

So the "historic" models really don't mean alot.

John