Rudyard Kipling and GK Chesterton?

Hi,

I restore old audio recordings (Edison Cylinders and Diamond Discs etc.) and I recently came upon one of GK Chesterton speaking and toasting Rudyard Kipling at a ceremony of some kind in Canada. The date is unknown but it seems to me to be an electronic (rather than acoustic horn) recording so it had to have been made after their advent in 1925 and before Chesterton's death in 1936. Is there a Kipling fan here that has any info on this ceremony/luncheon/dinner/awards banquet or whatever?

I'm actually glad you moved this one Emeraldcite. There are so many forums here that I really had no idea where to put this.

I'm fairly sure its electionic Blackbird because of the extreme low-end it had. (I had to dump a lot of it to bring our some presence in the voice). Back when they used acoustical horns to record with, the frequency spectrum was much narrower. Electronic (meaning recordings that used a microphone) were much louder on record too, however, I got this one from the British Library Sounc Archive as a wave file on CD, so I have no idea what the original would have sounded like on a player. So I could be wrong but with all the low-end its doubtful. Anyhow, there are 5-recordings of GKC that I'm aware of and at the moment I have all but one. There was also some silent movie footage of him and George Bernard Shaw hamming it up in a movie in bit-parts but its been lost for decades. Boy I'd like to see that!

Nah, the stuff that comes out of places like the Library of Congress and Edisonia here, or the British National Library just try to make exact copies of things. Once in a while Edisonia will run it through a Cedar Noise Reduction unit but very seldom, and they'll always send you the uneffected wave file if you request it. I've never gotten anything from The British Library that was effected in any way though. A lot of times the files are burried in hiss and pops & clicks etc. Its usually pretty obvious they haven't done anything to it.

I do wonder sometimes though about "who" is doing the copying and exactly how much he/she knows about it, what kind of condition the playback device is in and so forth. There's a company called Nimbus Records that issues Prima Voce Recordings that are transfers of opera music from old 78's, and in doing so they actually choose to use a playback horn that's several feet wide and place a microphone at various positions in front of it. They also use nothing but wooden thorns for playback needles just like the old days. Their goal is to make CD's that sound exactly like the original 78's and which will duplicate what it was like for people 90 ought years ago standing in front of a Grammophone machine.



Personally, I'd rather hear a recording as crisp and clear as I can. Some of those old records have so much surface noise that you can barely make out much of anything unless you do a lot of work on them.

I'm hoping to come out with a CD one day of spoken word recordings. I've collected quite a bit of various things from authors to scientists, political people, explorers etc. Ernest Shackleton, Einstein, Marconi, Teddy Roosevelt, Florence Nightingale, Thomas Edison, Gladstone, WB Yeats, Robert Browning, Tennyson, and so forth. I'm hoping to find a market within the school system somewhere.

Both good suggestions. Pinning down the year of the recording is easy enough. He plainly says something about "the last time I was in America and Canada 12-years ago", (paraphrased) at least I think he said 12. Anyhow I can listen to it again to get the exact number and then find out in one of the many biographies about him when he was in America. I know he came on at least two different lecture tours and that the last one I know of was in 1931. Whether he came again after that I'm not sure. It should be easy enough to find out though. But right no I'm guessing this was made in 1931. The difficulty will be in finding out the location, but that's a good idea David, and should help considerably.

And Batgirl, did you know that I've been in love with you all my life?