Is the sound quality a bad recording or is this how it sounded when you all crowded around the RCA in the fifties?
In this era, it could be either. Some of the recordings that we have from old time radio were recorded in studio on glass or aluminum records. (Glass records were used in WWII when aluminum was required for aircraft construction. That’s why so many shows from the war years are lost.) Other recordings were made at home with limited technology. Even those that were of good quality the day they were recorded have a tendency to degrade. The less popular the show, the worse the average recording quality.
This isn’t even counting the shows that were never recorded at all. There are some series that lasted over a decade and not a single episode survives.
Is the sound quality a bad recording or is this how it sounded when you all crowded around the RCA in the fifties?
In this era, it could be either. Some of the recordings that we have from old time radio were recorded in studio on glass or aluminum records. (Glass records were used in WWII when aluminum was required for aircraft construction. That’s why so many shows from the war years are lost.) Other recordings were made at home with limited technology. Even those that were of good quality the day they were recorded have a tendency to degrade. The less popular the show, the worse the average recording quality.
This isn’t even counting the shows that were never recorded at all. There are some series that lasted over a decade and not a single episode survives.